CNN "State of the Union" - Transcript: Interview with Sen. Cory Booker

Interview

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TAPPER: Welcome back to STATE OF THE UNION. I'm Jake Tapper.

New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker just qualified to join his fellow Democrats on the debate stage this summer. And he's pitching himself not only on his record as a U.S. senator, but as the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey.

So, we went to Newark and sat down with Senator Booker in his home to talk about the city's turnaround and his White House bid.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: The jobs report came out Friday, half-a-million new jobs added.

The last time the unemployment rate was this low, I was nine months old; you were eight months old.

BOOKER: Yes.

TAPPER: 1969.

BOOKER: Yes.

TAPPER: How do you make a pitch to voters, the economy's thriving, let's get rid of the president?

BOOKER: You don't need to make a pitch. Listen to voters.

When you walk around my block, you ask people if the numbers that Donald Trump touts are really making a difference in their lives. You have people on my block -- I'm the only presidential candidate that lives in a low-income inner-city neighborhood.

Talk to folks, and they'll tell you: "I have to work two jobs just to try to keep myself in housing. And, by the way, that housing isn't reflected in any of my family."

Americans are struggling. Their wages are too low, are decades low -- for the last four decades, I don't think they've budged that much.

TAPPER: They went up -- they've gone up 3 percent, which is more than it ever went up during Obama.

BOOKER: But again, tell -- tell -- first of all, Obama -- I love that Trump is taking credit for a recovery that started under Obama.

But the substance of this -- who is this economy going to work for? And we had a tax plan that was all about giving the wealthiest people more -- more of a break.

My vision for this country is that we will target things like a massive increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit to actual workers. We've got to make sure that this is a shared recovery, because, right now, it definitely is not.

TAPPER: What do you say to somebody who says, yes, I'm not crazy about Trump, but the economy has done so much better, and Republicans keep telling me, the Democratic nominee is going to raise my taxes, and he is talking about raises taxes, so that might hurt the economy, that might hurt my bottom line?

What's the counterargument to that?

BOOKER: Look, I think that we live in a nation with far more patriotism than people are expressing. And what I mean by that is, folks want the best for their country. And they know that if your family doesn't have a great public school for your kids, if your family does not have great access to health care, then we all are suffering as a result of that, and often creating greater costs.

As the chief executive of a city, I saw that us treating addiction and mental illness with jail and hospital emergency rooms was a far more expensive way to do this.

And so I'm going to run a campaign that speaks to all of America. I don't think Democrats should be defined by just beating Republicans. We should be defined by uniting Americans. And this is a moment where, across this country, from farm towns to factory towns, from cities to suburbs, we have so much common pain, where Americans are seeing, from the cost of prescription drugs, the cost of college, that we are all hurting because we have not designed an economy that invests in each other.

TAPPER: Let's talk about education, because you just raised that.

When you were mayor of Newark, you pushed public charter schools a lot. This was a big part of your tenure here as mayor. You even worked with the DeVos family. I know you voted against her for education secretary, but you worked a lot with her.

Are you still part of the public charter school movement? Is that still part of who you are?

BOOKER: Well, first of all, I take issue with saying I worked with the DeVos family. I worked with Newark residents to design a system that worked for us, local solutions, because if you lived where I live, right down from the street from where the projects stood that I lived in to -- lived in for almost a decade, and you listen to the anguish of parents, to live in a country where it is so divided amongst educational destinies, that we have desperate parents for anything.

They often would use fake addresses in suburban neighborhoods within a mile or two from Newark borders. And those communities would have private investigators who would follow you around and remove often black and brown kids and send them back to failing schools.

[09:20:02]

The folks here, we went door to door, polling. We all agreed on a strategy that was overwhelmingly popular for solutions that worked for us. And now we are the number one school system in America for beat- the-odds schools, high poverty leading to high performance, sending kids to college.

If you were a black kid during my tenure, from 2006 until now, your chances of going to a high-performing school went up 300, 400 percent, schools that beat the suburbs.

TAPPER: Am I hearing you wrong, though? It seems like you're reluctant to say that you're part of the public charter school movement still.

BOOKER: I'm -- have always said I will fight for the kids that are too often ignored in our country.

And so you're -- you can put any way you want, Jake, but when you're a mayor of a city, as a former chief executive, you find the solutions that worked. And high-performing charter schools was part of our larger solution of getting every kid there. And I stand by that and continue to do.

But, at the end of the day, charters right now are 3 percent of all of public schools? We need to have a president who has a vision for all families, all districts, and make sure they create solutions.

By the way, I don't think the federal government should be dictating what localities have done. We tried that under Bush with No Child Left Behind.

TAPPER: Mm-hmm.

BOOKER: Highly prescriptive.

TAPPER: Can I get some clarity on an issue having to do with Medicare for all?

BOOKER: Yes.

TAPPER: Because you talked about health care, too.

You are a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all bill, which, essentially, will ultimately get rid of private health insurance for everything except for extraneous things like cosmetic surgery.

But you have said that you favor a health plan that does not do away with private insurance. So, are you supporting a bill that you don't believe in? I don't understand exactly...

BOOKER: No.

Well, look, again, as a guy who had to run a city that was in crisis when I took it over, you don't let your sort of purity of what you're looking for undermine urgent results needed right now for the people in your community.

They don't have time to wait for us to get to a point years down the road. And so I think we have the most inefficient system on the planet Earth. We spend almost 20 percent of our GDP, about 18 percent, for the worst results of the industrial nations.

We have lots of people taking profits off of this system. Remember, all that expenditures that we're doing, trillions of dollars, are not going to patient care. We have a system that's designed more towards the back end of problems, when they're more expensive, the hospital emergency room, dealing with things when they become acute, not dealing with them in the preventative care, early detection, early intervention. So, this system is broken.

TAPPER: Right, but do you support Medicare for all?

BOOKER: I stand by supporting Medicare for all, but I'm also that pragmatist that, when I'm chief executive of the country, like I was, I'm going to find the immediate things that we can do, because I'm telling you right now, we're not going to pull health insurance from 150 Americans who have private insurance who like their insurance, my union friends, brothers and sisters, who have negotiated for their health insurance.

It's going to have to be a pathway to getting there that is going to start with the commonsense things that can unite Americans.

TAPPER: With all due respect, Senator, that's not what this bill does that you co-sponsored. The bill...

BOOKER: And, Jake, we're friends long enough to say that, whenever you start something with, "All due respect"...

(LAUGHTER)

TAPPER: You know it's trouble.

BOOKER: I know it's trouble.

TAPPER: Well, the quote -- the text of the bill says -- quote -- "It shall be unlawful for a private health insurer to sell health insurance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided under this act."

And I just wonder -- look, you favor a pragmatic approach that doesn't go that far. And I just wondered, did you feel pressure from liberal and progressive activists, oh, you need to sign up for Medicare for all, when you actually didn't believe in it?

BOOKER: Look, I'm the guy that stood in the saddle under the most different conditions and made change because I don't bend to pressure. I focus on people.

In America, health care should be a right. That is where we need to go to. And, by the way, most Americans agree that, if you're in this nation, this wealthiest country on the planet Earth, it should be right.

Now, there's many ways that we're going to get there. I believe, now, if we're designing our system, Medicare for all is the right way to go. But I'm also realistic to say -- and you know this -- when I become president, we may have only maybe a 50/50 tie in the Senate. And my vice president, whoever she is, is going to have to get a lot of exercise going to the Senate and breaking ties.

We are going to have to do things that do -- might get me towards my goal of expanding access and lowering costs. TAPPER: You're on Senate Judiciary. The attorney general, Bill Barr, testified before your committee. Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that he lied to Congress.

Do you agree?

BOOKER: I think that if you, number one, have seen the conduct of an attorney general, he has eroded his credibility, to the point where I believe he should resign. He has clearly misled Congress.

TAPPER: Should he be impeached?

BOOKER: I believe, right now, he should resign. And I think everything should be on the table at the end of the day.

But if you have a person that has undermined the urgent independence of the attorney general's office, who is a guy's who's literally overseeing ongoing investigations into criminal activity into this president, and you lost your ability to trust -- you clearly were trying to spin. You were acting more like Rudy Giuliani than the independent attorney general of this country. I'm definitely worried.

And then, when you read a report which is a testimony to deceit, which literally shows the -- a campaign that had multiple, dozens and dozens of contacts with a foreign adversary doing things like sharing polling information that, if any of my colleagues who are running for president did that with their own super -- with a super PAC, would be considered illegal here.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: We will have more of my interview with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, including his personal experiences with gun violence in his Newark neighborhood coming up.

Stay with us.

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[09:29:26]

TAPPER: Welcome back to STATE OF THE UNION. I'm Jake Tapper.

We have more now of our exclusive interview with Democratic presidential candidate Senator Cory Booker and why he says he's got the best approach to taking on Trump.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: North Korea test-fired multiple short-range projectiles this weekend.

It's understood to be its first missile launch since late in 2017. President Trump remained optimistic on Twitter, saying, a deal will happen and that Kim Jong-un -- quote -- "knows that I am with him."

What do you make of all this? And, as president, would you be willing to meet with Kim Jong-un?

BOOKER: So, this is the problem. We have a president now that continues to mislead the American people.

You remember his deplorable tweet when he came out and said, oh, there's no need to worry about the nuclear threat from North Korea anymore. He has been much more about bluster and being braggadocios, as opposed to substantive strategy, and making sure we're checking a North Korean dictator.

And of course I will meet with our enemies, but I will meet with them under the right conditions, using every bit of leverage I have to focus in on the goal, articulating a strategy for getting there. And this is something our foreign policy has been woefully acting.

We've seen foreign policy by tweet. We've seen a president that contradicts his diplomacy corps, contradicts his military leaders, who then have to go and try to clean up for what they've done.

We have no strategy when it comes to foreign policy. And what's eroding right now is not only our position in the world, but even our alliances themselves.

And our allies, as I have these conversations as I travel internationally, are beginning to question our commitment to fundamental democratic values when you have a president that seems to buddy up with Chairman Kim or Duterte or Putin more than he's friends with people like May and Merkel and the people that are our real allies that can work with us to holding not just Russia accountable, China accountable, but these are critical allies we need in our trade deals.

These are our critical allies we're going to need if we're going to deal with global climate change. And so it's been very frustrating -- and I've heard this on both sides of the aisle from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- to have a president that has been lacking strategy, unpredictable, undermining his diplomacy corps, and even undermining his generals when it came to -- comes to things like Syria policy, where he tweets out that we're pulling out of Syria imminently.

TAPPER: There is a divide right now in the Democratic Party among the presidential candidates, between some like, Vice President Biden, who seem to see President Trump as just an aberration, and others like Bernie Sanders, who see Donald Trump as just the natural next Republican president, that he's not an aberration, that this is what Republicans now are.

Where do you come down on that? Do you see him as an aberration, or do you see him as, this is what the Republican party is now?

BOOKER: I think, as long as the conversation is about Donald Trump, as long as I can turn on my TV and coast through channels and see him being talked about in every single interview, he's winning.

I beat a machine here in Newark. There's an Oscar-nominated documentary about me challenging the machine with a charismatic leader at the top of it. And I didn't make it about him. I made it about the people. And we energized an entirely new electorate to come out, and we won.

I think we're going to be defined as a party not by what we stand against, but by what we're for. And I want my Democratic Party now not even to be defined simply as trying to beat Republicans at a time where we need to unite Americans back to a sense of common purpose and common cause.

I do not think this is a time that we need to fight fire with fire. I ran a fire department. It's not a really good strategy. I walked into one town hall, and a guy puts his arm around me and says: "I want you -- I want to punch -- I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face."

And I turned to him and said: "Hey, man, that's a felony. And us black guys, we don't normally get away with those things that often."

Let's sit down and let me tell you why the best strategy right now is doubling down on the best of who we are, not the worst, by talking about love and a beloved community, and not the kind of Twitter trash- talking and trolling that we hear from the White House right now.

And I know Donald Trump wants us to try to fight him on his turf, in his terms. What's needed right now is not more of that. We didn't beat Bull Connor by taking bigger dogs and more powerful water hoses. We -- we won that expanding the moral imagination of this whole country about who we are and who we must be going forward.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: While we were in Newark, Senator Booker and I also took a walk in his neighborhood, where the issue of gun violence has become quite personal for him.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: How prevalent has gun violence been in this area?

BOOKER: You're literally standing where, last year, as it was related to me, this was -- the shooter was over there with an assault rifle, killed Shahad Smith, who live with me in Brick Towers right here.

This is a -- this is not an intellectual issue to me. It's not something I read about, hear about in the news. You're standing in a community that has been plagued by gun violence. And even though my mayor, Ras Baraka, continues to drive down the rates, this section of this street was one of the most violent places in New Jersey when I first moved here.

And you live in a community where fireworks go off on the Fourth of July, kids evidence behavior of somebody with post-traumatic stress. They hide. They have anxiety.

TAPPER: They think it's a gunshot. BOOKER: They think it's gunshots -- where you see in your neighborhood shrines to children, to teenagers that were on the sidewalk, teddy bears and candles.

So, for me, this is -- I so badly want to be president because, if I'm president of the United States, I'm going to bring a fight to the NRA that they have never seen before. And I will tell you what. The people in this community know that this is not just a horrific mass shooting after horrific mass shooting.

We have mass shootings in our country in the aggregate every single day. So there's a sense of urgency I have that, every day we lose, we lose thousands of lives by not solving this problem and that there are commonsense things that even NRA members agree we should do, but we're not getting it done.

[09:35:03]

TAPPER: Is that what you're going to push for? I understand you're going to introduce some gun legislation in the next few days.

BOOKER: I'm going to come at this like folks have never seen before. I'm going to choose policy and use tactics to end this nightmare in this country.

And I come home, and I'm reminded by the survivors of shootings, by the community fabric that is still torn, because people get that one shooting in a neighborhood kills the business at a restaurant. People lose jobs. Family members lose income.

I mean, this is a problem that is at crisis levels in our country. In our lifetime -- we're the same age -- more people have died for gun violence than all the wars from the Revolutionary War now combined.

TAPPER: But what can be done? Because, first of all, the Republicans control the Senate, as you know.

And, second of all, you know this. A semiautomatic rifle that was used in this -- in this shooting, that's not typical. Usually...

BOOKER: No, it's 5 percent of all -- I'm...

TAPPER: Right. Mostly, it's handguns, right?

BOOKER: I have analyzed this more than -- I mean, this has been a part -- this cause has been a part of my life. This isn't new for me.

So, I know the levers you can pull to get pretty dramatic results. Just by having universal background checks, the murders we don't talk about enough between an intimate, like where your spouse kills you, they go down -- violence against women in that sense goes down 40 percent in states that have enacted those laws.

So there's things we can do, there are levers we can pull that can make us much, much safer. But we're not doing them. And I do not accept the excuse that we have tried before. I have seared into my mind the gruesome realities, literally with a

gunshot victim bleeding to death, as I vainly tried to stop him from dying, literally with people who grew up...

TAPPER: You were here?

BOOKER: It was not right here, no.

(CROSSTALK)

BOOKER: Around the corner. No, that -- I mean, that's the irony. I could sit here and name shootings of bodies I have seen on the sidewalk.

I can name Hassan Washington. I can name Shahad Smith. I can talk about the kids that I knew growing up whose lives are ended by gun violence.

And so I am -- I'm running for president many reasons. This is one, that we will get it done. We will get it done.

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