Sen. Joe Biden is no longer the Democratic nominee for president, and Sen. Kamala Harris is now the presumed Democratic nominee. In this episode, Sen. Cory Booker responds to the news and explains why Biden should not have been the nominee, and why he should have chosen someone else. He also explains why it s a good thing that he didn t choose someone else, and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party and the country. And he explains why we should all be rooting for the new nominee, whether it s Kamala or another candidate, to win the nomination. Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast. Please remember that the opinions and thoughts expressed in this episode do not necessarily reflect those of our respective campaigns, parties, or institutions. We are not running against anyone, we are running against a machine. And the machine is bigger than any individual, and it s time to defeat the system we re running against, not to mention the people we re all running against. The machine is a wheel that crushes the will of the manager, the managerial class that is crushing the will and will of everyday citizens, not just in the Democratic party, but in the United States, and in the world, and that s bigger than anyone else. It s not about individual agency, it s about the collective will. That s what the modern left is really about, not individual agency. It s about breaking up the machine it s not individualism, but collective will the system that we re actually running against that s really about the machine, not the government, not about the people who run the government and not the system we re the government . That's what the government is actually running the government. And that s what we re really running against? The government . What do you want to win in 2020, you re not running for? What are you running against the government? ? What you re running for, not against, not the machine? You do deserve a president and a party that at least tells you the truth? -- not just when it s good, but the most impactful on their lives, but how do you live up to their lives? I m rooting for a president that actually lives up to that, not down to the people they can actually live their lives in their lives I think this is a rare thing, right?
Transcript
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00:00:00.000We learned yesterday what I have been saying for about a year and a half.
00:00:04.000Joe Biden is now officially not going to be the Democrat nominee for U.S. President.
00:00:10.000The implications of this are far-reaching for a lot of different reasons.
00:00:13.000One of them is how unsurprising this actually is.
00:00:17.000We've known about Joe Biden's cognitive deficits for a very long time.
00:00:21.000Why was it that it was the obvious public view that he was going to be the nominee, when in fact, the reality is he wasn't?
00:00:27.000I said this at the presidential debate, the Republican debate, back in November of last year, and that was after six months of me saying the same thing, that Joe Biden would not be the nominee.
00:00:37.000And I called on Democrats to at least be honest, so we could have a frank debate about who we're actually up against.
00:00:43.000The reality is, I think this late switch is better for them than had they made the switch earlier, because whoever the new nominee is, they're pointing to Kamal Harris, I have my doubts whether it'll end up being her.
00:00:53.000But whether it's Kamal or somebody else, when it's late in the cycle, the public's in a honeymoon phase with the new candidate, right when November comes around, without the scrutiny phase actually beginning.
00:01:04.000And the reality is the much more honest approach would have been for the country and certainly for the Democratic Party, to be honest, that Joe Biden was not fit to be the President of the United States, let alone the President of the United States, over the course of the next four years, and have made that change before.
00:01:19.000It's also fascinating to me that when I did say that at the Republican debate, it was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
00:01:25.000Anymore, we live in a country where when somebody's trying to silence the expression of an idea by calling it a conspiracy theory or anything else, the sad truth is often that means it's when we need to pay most attention.
00:01:36.000Here's the number one lesson coming out of this swap and this bait-and-switch at the end of this process.
00:01:44.000We're not actually running against a candidate here.
00:02:04.000It's not Biden that we were up against at all.
00:02:07.000His cognitive deficits, and I would argue Kamala Harris's cognitive deficits, they're not a bug to the people who control them.
00:02:15.000Those cognitive deficits are a feature.
00:02:17.000It is a wheel that crushes the will of the manager, the managerial class crushing the will of everyday citizens, not just in the Republican Party, but even in the Democratic Party.
00:02:28.000And I think that actually presents an opportunity for us.
00:02:31.000It's a rare opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless to speak to those Democrats honestly and to say, you know what, Democrats, independents, people who might have voted once for Biden or for Hillary Clinton, you may not agree with everything that Donald Trump or the Republican Party says today, and that's fine.
00:02:47.000No two Americans agree on 100% of policies.
00:02:51.000But you do deserve a president and a party that at least tells you the truth, not just when it's easy, but when it's hard and when it's uncomfortable.
00:02:59.000And I think this could be an opportunity in that sense for Republicans to win over many of those Democrats who may disagree more with Republican policies.
00:03:07.000But even at their core, reject being lied to.
00:03:13.000Beyond just this individual game, whether it's Joe or whether it's Kamala, we got to realize the thing that we're actually solving for is defeating that machine, the rise of that managerial class, bigger than any other individual.
00:03:27.000It embodies the philosophy of what the modern left is really about.
00:03:51.000That's the system we're running to break.
00:03:54.000That's what the deep state is really about.
00:03:56.000This is about the unelected managerial, you could call them elites, you could call them bureaucrats, you could call them monarchs.
00:04:03.000Who have no accountability to the people, but whose decisions are actually most impactful on how citizens live their lives.
00:04:10.000Now, for my part, I am personally rooting for, and I think this should be true for all Republicans, that we're rooting for the Democrats to actually put up the best possible nominee that they can.
00:04:22.000I know that might sound a little counterintuitive, but I think that'll be good for the country.
00:04:25.000It'll be good for the Democratic Party.
00:04:27.000I think it'll be good for the Republican Party, and it'll be good for the United States of America.
00:04:31.000That forces us to say, you know what, whoever they put up, we're going to defeat them by offering our own vision of who we are and what we stand for.
00:04:40.000You look at the last week, this is the stuff of American history told even centuries from now.
00:04:46.000The near assassination of Donald Trump, followed by a historic Republican convention, followed by just a week later, he's back doing the exact same type of rally, sending a signal to the country that he's not going to buckle to fear only the next day.
00:05:00.000For the current President of the United States, since 1968, we haven't seen something like this, refuse to accept the nomination of his own party, the Democrat Party's nomination.
00:05:10.000This is going to be the stuff of history that we tell our children and our great-grandchildren.
00:05:15.000But I think in that historical context, what's good for the country over the long run?
00:05:19.000We should want the Democratic Party to put up the best possible ticket they can.
00:05:24.000I'm not sure that they will or not, but that's what I'm rooting for as an American.
00:05:27.000And if we stick to our own vision of who we are and what we actually stand for, we'll run and defeat them either way.
00:05:35.000I say that as a citizen of this country who cares about the United States of America regardless of an individual party.
00:05:43.000Just as a kid in a household has to know, here's the father figure in my house.
00:05:50.000Here are the people who lead my household.
00:05:52.000You got to know, as a kid, it puts you in a much stronger position if you know this is my father, this is my mother, these are the leaders of the household and the family unit.
00:06:01.000In that same way, I think citizens of a nation It requires some sense of who's the leader of a country.
00:06:08.000It's not something that's on the front of your mind every day, but in the back of your mind and in your heart to know that you're grounded by a sense of conviction that somebody's actually leading the country.
00:06:21.000That's a hole in our heart if that's missing.
00:06:23.000I think it's the stuff of national decline if the people in a country don't have an emotional commitment to who the leader of their country actually is.
00:06:32.000Yes, Joe Biden is nominally the President of the United States of America today.
00:06:36.000But if you think about who is the leader of the country in the hearts of most people, and I think Tucker Carlson did a great job of making a similar case at the RNC in the last week.
00:06:46.000The real person who most people now think of as the leader of the country who inspires them is actually Donald Trump.
00:06:53.000A man who took the bullet, felt the blood, and stood right back up for the people of his country.
00:06:57.000And that allows us to say, you know what, this is where we're going.
00:07:01.000We don't have to be this nation led by a frail, really even mentally incapacitated U.S. president that reflects the vacuum of the moment we're in, but that we can be a nation that's actually proud of who we are and a nation that actually has a leader, even if it's not the current nominal president of the United States.
00:07:23.000One of the questions I've gotten in the last 24 hours certainly is, how did you predict all of this, right?
00:07:28.000I said over a year ago Biden wasn't going to be the nominee.
00:07:31.000I said further that it was going to take place after the Republican convention.
00:07:36.000This is exactly what the Democrats, I believe, want.
00:07:39.000Have the vice president picked on the Republican ticket.
00:07:42.000have the Republicans celebrate their victory on the back of that to be able to pull a bait-and-switch operation that actually takes a sprint to the finish line in November, confuse the public about what Republican policies are, and hope to win the election that way?
00:07:54.000How did I manage to not only predict that, but even darker events that have played out over the course of the last week, over the last couple of weeks, You rewind back to the late part of the campaign trail when I was headed into the Iowa caucus, one of the things I said is that this is the same party that tried to take Donald Trump off the ballot, that sued him in civil suits, that then tried to bring criminal prosecution against him, that they were not going to let the man, one way or another, find his way to that Republican nomination.
00:08:23.000That was my concern, certainly, last December and this January.
00:08:28.000And it is shocking and it is saddening that we saw what happened Saturday before last to Donald Trump at that rally in Pennsylvania.
00:08:40.000It was divine providence that protected this country from that catastrophe.
00:08:45.000But it's worth asking the question, how do you actually foretell the future?
00:08:49.000I've been wrong about many predictions I've made too, but one of the things I do want to share, because I think this is useful, is forget the idea of predicting events in the future.
00:08:58.000Forget the idea of theorizing what the media might dismiss as conspiracy theories.
00:09:04.000And I'd encourage you to just look at what are the incentives that guide actors, right?
00:09:08.000What are the incentives that guide someone to behave the way they do, or a company to behave the way it does, or a political party to behave the way it does?
00:09:16.000Add up the incentives, and that usually gives you a pretty clear picture of where someone's heading.
00:09:22.000What are their behaviors actually telling you that they're doing?
00:09:25.000This is a party and a movement on the Democrat side that has made it its core reason for existence to keep Donald Trump out of office.
00:09:32.000They've tried every which way to stop him within the legal system and extra legally as well.
00:09:39.000Think about the efforts to remove him from the ballot without going through even the legal system.
00:09:45.000What they've learned is that has failed time and again.
00:09:47.000In fact, every one of those have backfired to only make Donald Trump and the Republican Party more popular.
00:09:52.000So now they're going to their last ditch tactic, which is this final bait and switch operation to say that you've effectively trained Republicans to train their criticism on Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket that's running the country today.
00:10:08.000Well, if you make a bait and switch towards the very end, whoever replaces Biden, whether it's going to be Kamala Harris or anybody else, is in some manner going to be loved by the public.
00:10:43.000That might be the best strategy they have left.
00:10:45.000The other strategy they're pairing with that, look at Kamala Harris's commentary over the weekend.
00:10:50.000Claiming falsely that Donald Trump would sign a federal abortion ban into law, when in fact that has been a distinctive position that Donald Trump, along with other Republicans, including myself, when I ran for president, took that this is an issue for the states.
00:11:04.000So that appears to be the new Democrat strategy.
00:12:05.000I think if it's Kamala Harris, a guy like Josh Shapiro is a likely VP. If it's not Kamala Harris, it's got to be somebody who checks those same identity politic boxes while rising above the party infighting.
00:12:15.000I don't think someone like Michelle Obama is still off the table.
00:12:18.000But the temptation is to focus our attention on that, rather than what's far more important, which is answering the question of who we are, not just as Republicans, who we are as Americans and what we stand for in this monumental moment in American history.
00:12:36.000Do we believe the ideals of the American Revolution actually still exist, or don't we?
00:12:42.000It's been said that sometimes, you know what, you may not have a country where people are willing to fight for those ideals.
00:12:48.000The American Revolution was fought for ideals, and the way we're going to fight for those ideals today Is at the ballot box peacefully by reviving the ideals of 250 years ago.
00:12:59.000Channel that energy in a positive way this time to do nothing more than to vote for the person who's going to make you more proud of being a citizen of this country.
00:13:08.000To revive the ideals of free speech and open debate.
00:13:11.000To say that's how we settle our differences in a constitutional republic.
00:13:15.000not through the legal system or through force.
00:13:17.000The basic idea that the people we elect to run the government should once again be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government in the unelected bureaucracy, both of the deep state in Washington, D.C., and the managerial class of, say, the modern Democratic Party.
00:13:32.000The idea of merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their race and gender.
00:13:38.000Ask yourself honestly, do you think that's why Kamala Harris got the job because of merit overshadowed?
00:14:18.000It doesn't matter which puppet the Democrats put up next.
00:14:21.000The temptations to focus on that, that's a trap.
00:14:24.000Avoid that trap and instead redirect that attention to actually define our ideals, why we believe in those ideals, and why we still are committed to them as we were in 1776. And I think if we do, 2024 will mark the year where we turn the page on a toxic chapter of our national history.
00:14:43.000We saw the desire for that at the Republican convention last week.
00:14:47.000It was a convention of not just unity within a party, but a hunger for national unity as well.
00:14:52.000And that's the kind of national unity I actually want.
00:14:55.000Not some fake artificial astroturf kind, but the real thing.
00:14:58.000Grounded in a country where, yes, we will deeply have our disagreements.
00:15:02.000But nonetheless, in spite of those disagreements, we're still committed to giving every American the chance to express their views.
00:15:09.000That's part of who we are, and I think that's how we're going to save this country, not by focusing on the political horse race antics that might be the temptation in the wake of news of the kind we had yesterday.