MSNBC "The Rachel Maddow Show" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Michael Bennett

Interview

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MADDOW:  Joining us now for the interview is Michael Bennet.  He`s the senior senator from the great state of Colorado.  As of today, he`s the newest entrant in the Democratic presidential field. 
 
Senator, congratulations.  Thanks for being here. 
 
BENNET:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me.
 
MADDOW:  How has day one been? 
 
BENNET:  It`s been good.  I told my mom I was going to be 22nd or somebody had to be 22.  I`m 21st. 
 
MADDOW:  You`re 21.
 
BENNET:  I am, so I`m actually -- 
 
MADDOW:  You`re moving up in the polls. 
 
BENNET:  I thought I was.  It`s been a good day. 
 
MADDOW:  I will say I`ve been looking forward in particular to you declaring so that I could say, this year`s candidates include Beto, Bernie, Buttigieg, Booker, Biden, Bullock and Bennet. 
 
BENNET:  That`s good.
 
MADDOW:  So, Bullock is not -- he hasn`t declared, but there`s an article yesterday that said he`s going to run.
 
BENNET:  Right.
 
MADDOW:  I mean, the point there is there`s a lot of B`s, but also that there`s so many Democrats running but even alphabetical sorting doesn`t help at this point. 
 
BENNET:  Yes.
 
MADDOW:  So, how does -- how does the size of the field, the fact that there were 20 people ahead of you in the pool affect your decision about getting in? 
 
BENNET:  Well, I think in some ways, it made it possible to be honest with you because if there were two people in the field and if people said who`s this guy who`s the superintendent from Denver, it might make it hard for me to run and compete.  I think that the field is as big as it is has coalesced as little as it has creates real opportunity for all of us that are in the race and there are some great people in the race. 
 
Overall, I`m really happy that we`ve got a large diverse field in part because I think the American people don`t know what the National Democratic Party stands for and we`re going to use this process, I hope, to figure out what it does stand for so we can beat Donald Trump. 
 
MADDOW:  Because President Trump is a different kind of president and because people, I think, particularly in the Democratic side of the ledger believe that he may be a uniquely bad president or uniquely threatening president in term of American traditions, I think even more so than usual, a lot of the discussion is electability -- 
 
BENNET:  Right.
 
MADDOW:  -- who can win, and more broadly, how can this giant primary be conducted in such a way that it`s going to be putting a nominee forward who is as strong as possible, who has the best chance of winning. 
 
Do you have concrete ideas about that or do you feel like it will work itself out? 
 
BENNET:  Well, I think it will work itself out. 
 
MADDOW:  Yes.
 
BENNET:  I know a lot of these people.  I think they`re good people. 
 
There`s nothing wrong with having a competition of ideas.  We should have a competition of ideas.  We should see what Democratic voters want and want to support. 
 
I agree with you that the essential question is going to be who can beat Donald Trump.  That should be our number one question.  But we also go into the point of the fate or the state of our republic.  We have got -- it`s shambles.  And we have got to figure out how to govern this country again. 
 
I mean, one of the reasons I got in was I came to believe if you look at the last ten years of our political system which was mostly a case of tyranny by the Freedom Caucus, we got almost nothing done.  And if we have another ten years like that, my generation`s going to be the first generation of Americans to leave less opportunities, not more, for people coming after us. 
 
In other words, I don`t accept that we can continue to accept the degraded political conversation we`re having in this country and a degradation of our institutions and expect our exercise of self-government is going to actually work.  And that is not just a Trump problem.  He is a huge manifestation of that problem, but that existed long before he was there.  It existed because of the Tea Party.  It existed because of Mitch McConnell`s strategic cravenness or craven strategicness. 
 
And I think Democrats need to own up to the fact that we haven`t won every one of those battles and what are we going to do different to stop losing on judges and on climate and to be able to actually create universal health care in this country rather than just have a debate where they ignore us and ignore us and ignore us, and we don`t really make progress, I don`t think, with the American people.  That is a big task for us. 
 
MADDOW:  Do you think that -- I mean, one of the things, you wrote this manifesto today, and one of the things you described there was that the solution to that can`t be that Democrats have to win everywhere, that you have to have Democrats have uni-party (ph) rule because as long as the Republicans are there nothing will happen and once you`re in power all you have to do is roll back everything the other party did. 
 
You`re talking about an idea where there has to be, again, a sense that both parties have a role in pluralistic governing.  And I -- if I had a magic wand, I would that to be true too.  I feel like better ideas come from competition among potentially pliable and viable ideas from both sides. 
 
But because of what you`re describing there, whether it`s Mitch McConnell or the Freedom Caucus or anything else from the Republican Party, I don`t think there`s any hope at all for Republicans and Democrats to work anything out. 
 
BENNET:  First of all, let me profoundly thank you for actually reading -- 
 
(CROSSTALK)
 
MADDOW:  Oh, I read the whole thing.  I even have a quote from a part that I`m bothered by. 
 
BENNET:  Well, good.  I hope you`ll raise the part you`re bothered by. 
 
MADDOW:  I will.
 
BENNET:  And I hope will go read it because I`ve spent some time on it, and I think that it`s -- you know, I hope that it`s provocative.  I was trying to be provocative, because there are a lot of people who feel like you do. 
 
And let me be clear about this.  I do not believe the Freedom Caucus can be negotiated with.  I do not believe they can be compromised with.  I do not believe Mitch McConnell will ever do that unless -- I mean, when I think about Mitch McConnell, I think of a guy who`s completely immune to give and take unless he`s taking everything which he often does and he often has over the ten years that I`ve been in the Senate. 
 
But I represent a state that`s a third Republican, a third Democratic, and a third independent.  And I don`t think those Republicans and independents are represented by the Freedom Caucus in Washington.  I think the Freedom Caucus in Washington is supported by a few billionaires in this country and by Fox News.  And so is Donald Trump, by the way. 
 
And at a certain point, we`ve got to find a way to beat them.  We have to find a way to close over them.  And I think the way to do that is by isolating them and then by pursuing a set of policies that are popular to the broad swath of the American people. 
 
So, we`re not just talking to the coast.  We`re not just talking to people who already agree with us or are convinced by us.  But we`re actually making an effort to reach out because I do any we need to build a constituency for change in this country. 
 
It`s really easy to have a constituency to keep stuff the same that we`ve seen that for ten years.  What have we accomplished?  I mean, we were able to pass the Affordable Care Act, some of it through reconciliation, and that`s a good thing.  They were able to pass their tax bill.  That`s a bad thing.  And I suppose we could say Dodd-Frank. 
 
Other than that, we`ve really done nothing.  And so, we have to find, I think, a way in this country to reconstruct that pluralist politics and the argument -- one of the arguments I make in my piece is that everywhere in America that goes on every single day except in Congress. 
 
And the whole system is based on the idea not that we will agree with each other but we will disagree with each other.  Rachel Maddow will have her views.  Michael Bennet will have his views.  Kamala Harris, who`s coming on tomorrow, will have hers.  And Mayor Pete will have his.  And then you got the Republicans.
 
And what we have to do is figure out how to go back to a place where we don`t expect unanimity.  We don`t have a tyrant or a king to tell us what to think.  We expect to have division and disagreements. 
 
How do we fashion those disagreements into imaginative and durable solutions is the work of a democracy.  And we have completely lost it in our time. 
 
MADDOW:  Michael Bennet is the senior senator from Colorado.  You`ll stay there, I promise I`ll tell you about what bugged me in your piece. 
 
BENNET:  I want you to too. 
 
MADDOW:  Good.  I also have a question for you -- I`m going to break my rule about never talking to people about their families. 
 
BENNET:  OK.
 
MADDOW:  I have a good reason to break that rule with you.
 
BENNET:  All right. 
 
MADDOW:  We`ll be right back with Senator Michael Bennet after this. 
 
BENNET:  Thank you very much.
 
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MADDOW:  Back with us now is Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado.  He announced today that he is running to be the Democratic nominee for president. 
 
Senator, thank you for sticking around.
 
BENNET:  Thank you for letting me sit around.
 
MADDOW:  All right.  I want to ask you about your dad. 
 
BENNET:  This is just like being at home without a TV between the two of us.  I appreciate it.
 
MADDOW:  Well, sort of.  You can`t turn me off quite as easily. 
 
BENNET:  That`s true.  You can`t walk away.
 
MADDOW:  The mute button doesn`t work in person. 
 
I`m asking you about your dad which is an awkward thing. 
 
BENNET:  Yes.
 
MADDOW:  I would not do this for most candidates, but you are a special case.  You were born in India, I learned today, because your dad was working for the U.S. embassy there at the time you were born. 
 
Your father was an assistant to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.  He was staffer to Senator Thomas Eagleton.  He was staff director of the Senate Budget Committee. 
 
He was the head of USAID under President Carter.  He was an assistant secretary of state under President Clinton.  He was the president of NPR and he was the president of Wesleyan University where you ultimately got your undergrad. 
 
And I think that my dad is awesome, obviously, but that`s like the combined resume of 10 men. 
 
BENNET:  Yes.
 
MADDOW:  How has that affected you?  That`s slightly insane. 
 
BENNET:  Somebody today has said to me that they found a resume that put our two resumes together it was somebody I worked with before at the Justice Department. 
 
MADDOW:  It`s like an encyclopedia of jobs. 
 
BENNET:  I mean, look, my family, when I was in the second grade -- my brother remembers this -- when I was in the second grade, we were asking in my classroom to line up byes who family, the most recent whose family was here the longest.  And I was the answer to both questions. 
 
My mom and her parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust.  They went to Stockholm two years, in Warsaw after that, went to Stockholm, went to Mexico City, came back.  Came to New York, the only country in the world they thought they could rebuild their shattered lives and they had a business in New York and they paid for my education and my kids` education.  Because of them, I had every benefit that anybody in America could be conferred. 
 
My dad because he had all this public interest jobs couldn`t actually support us the same way that my immigrant grandparents did -- 
 
MADDOW:  Your immigrant mom did, yes.
 
BENNET:  -- but -- and his family actually went all the way back to the Mayflower.  People we don`t remember were leaving religious persecution. 
 
So, it`s an odd thing that I -- a family that I was raised in but the commitment to our country and to opportunity and the idea that we are a pluralist society, and if you come here, you are an American no matter where you came from, somebody who contribute to society, and the idea we all have a responsibility to make it better, not take it for granted, understand how meaningful the symbol is to people in the rest of the world who don`t have benefit of free press, benefit of the rule of law, benefit of an independent judiciary.  Those where is all things that my grandparents, you know, intuitively understood. 
 
And my dad`s believe was that public service was noble and I was raised believing it was noble.  I still believe it`s noble.  I -- you know, when I see what`s going on in the Justice Department today, a place where you said I worked and I did work, by and large the people in that agency are unbelievable patriots, committed to the rule of law, committed to this country. 
 
We have got to restore that.  We`ve got to restore decency in the federal government.  We`ve got to restore integrity in the federal government. 
 
The Tea Party has done an unbelievable job of separating the American government, the federal government from the people in America.  And I worry a lot about that.  That`s the stuff that when they`re saying, you know, when they shut the government down, when they do all that stuff and then they go -- Ted Cruz is my favorite on this -- they go back and say, see how terrible those guys are?  They deserve their 9 percent approval rating. 
 
But the reality is, that is the way we make decisions in America.  It`s not how they`re making in China.  It`s not how they`re made in Iran or in Russia.  That is how they`re made here. 
 
And the federal government in many ways is corrupt.  It`s bankrupt.  It`s controlled by big donors.  It -- we have all kinds of problems that we`ve got to solve. 
 
But we can`t turn away from it.  We have to fix it.  We have to solve it.  And that`s how my dad would have felt about it, and that`s how my grandparents would have felt about it and that`s how I feel about it. 
 
MADDOW:  Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, I have a million things to ask you about, and it just means you have to come back. 
 
BENNET:  I`ll come back because I want to hear the critique of what I wrote. 
 
MADDOW:  Oh, just wait.  Thank you, sir.
 
BENNET:  Thanks for having me.
 
MADDOW:  I really appreciate you being here. 
 
BENNET:  I really appreciate it.
 
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