MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript

Interview

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SEN. MICHAEL BENNET (D), COLORADO: This election was about fixing Washington and rebuilding our politics, so that it"s worthy of the aspirations that we all share.

It was about and it is about making sure that our generation lives up to the promise of America, that we will leave more, not less, to those who come after us. That"s not a Democratic idea or a Republican idea. That is an American idea.

(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

That was, of course, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado giving his victory speech out there. Yesterday, NBC News declared Bennet the apparent winner after he beat Tea Party candidate Ken Buck in one of the closest races of this election. Only about 16,000 votes separate the candidates at this point.

Senator Michael Bennet joins us now.

Congratulations, Senator. It"s great to have you on today.

BENNET: Thank you.

(CROSSTALK)

BENNET: Thanks, Chris. It"s great to be here.

MATTHEWS: Well, I"m sure you"re relaxed and you"re thinking about what you"re going to be able to do. You seem to be--how would you describe your--you seem to--I know you"re a public policy guy. I know you"re in education. You came up through that route. I know you come from a background of foreign service and public service.

What is it that distinguishes you I guess from everybody in the business right now?

BENNET: I think one of the main--major things is that I have spent my entire life outside of politics, although the first thing one of my daughters said after I got elected was, well, I guess you"re now a career politician.

But I do think that--

(LAUGHTER)

BENNET: -- having spent a lot of time in business and a lot of time working on the tough challenges of our public education system, it kind of gives you a perspective that says maybe we ought to take some time to actually diagnose the nature of the problems we"re trying to solve, rather than leap to the policy conclusions, which, it seems to me, is what people do in Washington all too often.

MATTHEWS: Well, that gets to the heart of--we had Congressman Jim Moran, who I went to school with, and I know him pretty well. And he was talking about--a few minutes ago about the fact, if we"re going to be able to compete in the world and create jobs, we have got to be smarter than the people we"re competing with. And that means better-educated. And we"re slipping.

Is that a too much a long-term solution for the average voter out there to say, yes, we"re going to get our act together, and then some day we"re going to be able to compete with the Japanese, the Indians, the Russians, and everybody else? Or do you need something more of a quicker fix than that in terms of this unemployment rate?

BENNET: I think we need a quicker fix than that.

And we obviously need to get credit flowing to small business. But I think one of the things that people that watch Washington don"t--don"t quite understand is how much it is protecting incumbent economic interests, instead of lifting up the innovators in our economy, the people that are actually going to invent the new things in the 21st century.

And we have got a lot of backward-looking policies. You think about our tax code, our regulatory code, what doesn"t spring to mind is the idea that we"re innovating. And we have been the most innovative economy in the world, but we need to do it again.

And then we also need a system of education that"s going to support our young people, so that they can actually compete with the rest of the world. If you are a child living in poverty in this country right now, whether you"re urban or rural--it doesn"t matter--your chances of graduating with a four-year college degree are roughly nine in a hundred.

I mean, that"s a disgrace. And there"s no way our democracy or our economy is going to be able to be sustained as long as that"s true.

MATTHEWS: Are we ever going to bring back our industrial base?

Are we ever going to be a country where you can come out of high school--back in my generation, you could. When I was coming out of high school, there were kids that actually chose to buy a car rather than get tuition money and they would go work at a factory and they could provide for a whole family. This is the "60s. You could do that.

Will you ever be able to do that again, be able to raise a family without an advanced degree of some kind?

BENNET: I think it"s going to be very challenging. The last time we were creating jobs in this country, 5 million of them were for people with a four-year college degree and we lost jobs for folks who were high school dropouts, created none for people who were high school graduates. And I think that"s the story of 21st century economy, which is demanding more and more in the way of knowledge economy, and more and more in the way of innovation.

So, the answer then is, I think, not to give up. It is to compete and it"s to decide that we are actually going to start building things here in this country again. You know, our single largest export from the United States are aircraft. We export $35 billion a year and no one can compete with us on that.

This year, the Chinese are going to export $15 billion worth of solar panels. They didn"t seven years ago and we invented the technology in the 1970s.

So, I"m open to anybody"s ideas about how we change those outcomes.

MATTHEWS: Wow.

BENNET: But I don"t think it"s acceptable for us to sit here and say, we"re going to allow other countries to outcompete us on clean energy or the other innovations we"re going to see in the 21st century.

MATTHEWS: You know, you"re state of the art on all these issues. You come from an education background. You"re well-educated and then I look at these debates to go in politics that we cover every night.

Mitch McConnell--and I"m not going to say he"s stupid because he"s not. He"s smart. He is a politician fighting to keep his seat. He"s not the coolest guy in the world. He"s there because he"s tough.

And it seems that people make it in politics today by saying, no, no, no to the other side until they brought them down. The Republican strategy of the last two years has been to force Obama to the left so that he could only pass left wing or center-left legislation without the grace of a bipartisan support.

They won. They made him into a lefty. That"s what they wanted him to do.

How do you teach them that they better not do that again? How do you make Republicans, as an institution, not as voters, but as institution to say, you cannot win by screwing the other side and by making it into a worse cartoon of itself?

BENNET: And right, I wish they hadn"t done what they did. But, politically, you"re right. I mean, they were successful with what they did.

You know, Chris, one of the things I learned when I was superintendent of schools is that when you"re doing hard things--I"m not talking about easy things, easy things are easy to do. When you"re doing hard things, the burden, whether it"s fair or unfair, lies on the shoulders of the reformer, and if you do not work to establish a shared and understanding of the facts as possible, you will fail, you know?

MATTHEWS: Yes.

BENNET: In my context, closing schools, no one ever came up and pat me in the back and said, that"s a great idea, until they understood we"re wasting money on empty space instead of spending it on kids. We didn"t do a good enough job, I think, of laying out on health care for example, which is one of the reasons why people could just make stuff up, you know, death panels and all that other stuff.

MATTHEWS: I"m with you on that. I think the president had to--did something historic but he didn"t sell out as history. He never explained why it was better to have it than not have it. He let the guys in the back hall--in the back of the room heckle him instead of teaching the people in the room who came to learn.

Hey, it"s great. Congratulations. You"re really a role model for a lot of people running today. You found a way to win positively and you have a policy perspective, which is so heartwarming. Somebody people out there running for office who don"t even read the newspaper. Thank you very much, Senator Bennet, and you know who they are.

BENNET: Thank you, Chris.

MATTHEWS: Thank you very much for joining us.

BENNET: Thank you.

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