Episode 52 – Sanders v. Warren and the Overton Window with Robert Hockett

Macro N Cheese – Episode 52 
Sanders vs Warren and the Overton Window with Robert Hockett 
January 25, 2020 

 

Robert Hockett [intro/music](00:00:02): 

We know what it’s gonna to be with Bernie. It’s going to be “Crazy Bernie,” but we can deal with that. That’s fine. I mean, that seems to be part of what people love, right? The thing that makes them go “crazy” is the wild-like hair, the kind of passion with which he speaks, but that’s part of the brand.  

People actually kind of love that. So that might actually be a miscalculation on Trump’s part. So my bet is that an awful lot of these people are now thinking, you know, maybe Liz isn’t so bad after all, maybe closer to us than she is to Bernie. I think we saw last week that that doesn’t mean she’s not willing to play ball with them, even if that means shafting Bernie, in order to get herself into office. 

 
Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:01:35.280) 

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.  

Steve Grumbine (00:01:34): 

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today we’re going to be speaking with Robert Hockett. Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, visiting professor of finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and senior counsel at Westwood Capital LLC.  

He specializes in law, economics and philosophy of money, finance and enterprise organization in their theoretical and practical, their positive and not normative, and their local national and transnational dimensions. And otherwise Bob is also my friend and gratefully he accepted my invitation to come join me today to talk about what is a very timely and yet timeless discussion.  

And that is of political opportunism, the Overton Window and the back waters of understanding the calculus of political decision making and marriages of convenience. Without further ado, let me bring on my guest Robert Hockett. Hey Bob, how are you, sir? 

Robert Hockett (00:02:41): 

Hey Steve. Doing fine. Thanks. How are you doing? 

Steve Grumbine (00:02:44): 

I am doing well. This recent dustup between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren has obviously put the entire Progressive movement on edge. Seen such a tremendous blow back from both camps as they’ve retrenched. You’ve had people literally not getting on stage with Bernie Sanders, calling him a misogynist.  

You’ve had Elizabeth Warren try to approach him on live television saying, “were you calling me a liar?” And you’ve had all this, what I consider to be absolutely movement killing nonsense occurring. And yet there’s a political calculation going on here. This is not an accident. And I’m just curious from your perspective, I guess let’s start with, let’s break down what just happened and let’s talk about it in a broader sense so that we understand these marriages of convenience as we try to make massive, bold, Progressive change happen. 

Robert Hockett (00:03:43): 

Yeah. Great. So this has been a very difficult week as you know, and, and painful in a number of ways and for a number of, I think, related reasons. And it also really sort of hasn’t been without irony. So as you know, and as you and I have talked about before, both on the program and just, you know, in person, I’ve tended over the years to give Liz the benefit of the doubt and it even got to the point at certain times this past summer where, you know, I ended up getting into fairly testy exchanges with some folk who were questioning Liz’s motives and, you know, sort of suggesting that she’s a fraud or a fake, or she is simply a kind of a knockoff of Bernie kind of simply glomming on his message because she saw that it had traction or momentum behind it and the like.  

And what I would typically, you know, reply would be that you don’t really know that yet, at least about her motives.  

You’re kind of surmising that on the basis of, you know, the certain bits of evidence and you might, I suggest may be over reading into the evidence, but then she turns around and does what happened this past week; and the irony here is that this actually does, to my mind at least, cast some doubt on what her actual motives are or have been all along, and what she’s sort of in this fight for. Presumably she does mean much of what she says, and she does mean much of what she has, you know, sort of pushed over the years.  

She does have a pretty good track record when it comes not only to particular proposals on the campaign trail, but even to particular things that she’s tried to get done in the Senate and things that she tried to do before that. But at the same time, I think we all know that, you know, Bernie’s got a much longer track record when it comes to this sort of thing, and he’s been at this a lot longer and he, of course, was pushing the Bernie message even when Liz was still a Republican.  

So it shouldn’t be surprising A: that his roots here might be a bit deeper when it comes to, you know, the sort of the real grounding of what he proposes and what he’s pushing, but maybe more importantly, you know, surely somebody whose motives are entirely above board would see that in Bernie, would recognize that about Bernie and thus would never stoop so low as to try to suggest somehow that he has some sort of reactionary strain in him or that he would somehow be a sexist or that he would actually believe, let alone say that, you know, a woman can’t win or something. And the idea that anybody would sort of stab Bernie in the back that way, I think really does suggest that whatever sincerity somebody like this might have about some of the proposals that she puts forth, these clearly aren’t the only values on which she is ready and willing to act.  

And that’s disturbing to me. And it’s again, particularly ironic because it was primarily the motive question that I was finding myself arguing with people about this past summer, because I was saying again, you’re overreading the evidence.  

You’re taking a bit of a leap from what you’re seeing. And some would admit that. Some would say, yeah, I just get a sense. I just got a feeling.  

There’s just something about her that just doesn’t, I just don’t quite feel trust, you know, and I don’t think that was misogyny itself. I think they sort of sensed that there’s something opportunistic in her personal constitution and I, myself either wasn’t seeing it or was willfully setting it to one side and willfully disbelieving those worries, or I don’t know what it was, but in any event, certainly what happened this past week suggests that there are, you know, some motives that are not all about helping working folk, because there’s no way that somebody whose entire life was about helping working folk would have introduced this particular split, which is now seriously threatening the movement, or would think that, or believe that about Bernie or would collude with CNN as clearly happened in this case in order to sort of smear him because this conversation allegedly took place in 2018. And isn’t it odd that, you know, it’s suddenly gets leaked to some CNN people a couple of nights before a debate, and then CNN brings it up, of course.  

And then as if on cue, she plays her part in helping to give the thing legs, and then we’re talking about it ever after. What we should be talking about, we should be able, we should, you know, it should be possible to talk solely about Joe Biden’s record on social security and things like that. Right? So, yeah. 

Steve Grumbine (00:08:19): 

You know, Bob, I think for me, the frustrating thing here is obviously this show is primarily about macro. So hence macro, but the cheese here. And I look at this and I say to myself, austerity, you know, I mean, my Twitter handle is bold as it can be. It’s austerity is murder. And I mean this, and going back to the summer, I keep looking at the positions they take.  

They’re making different political calculus. They’re making these different decisions. Clearly we’re fighting for this robust fiscal expansion that takes in and lifts all ships, and hopefully saves us from calamity and clearly they continue to dull the tip of the spear. And for folks like myself, who don’t have the benefit of living in the backwaters and watching the deals go down and watching how people make these calculuses, to us it’s just a betrayal.  

To us, it’s impossible to put our hat on that and say, yes, you’re going to carry my fight forward. I trust you here it is. Run with it.  

And yet at the same time, you’ve made some very eloquent explanations, if you will, forget Elizabeth Warren for a minute, just in general, about these marriages of convenience and seeing people as natural allies; seeing people that could be situational allies and seeing people that, you know, are flat out just dead to us and so forth. You know, this Overton Window thing’s a bit tricky, right?  

You know, in talking with Lua Yuille she had mentioned how people are at various stages of “wokeness,” so to speak. And we’re all in this path of trying to shake the cobwebs out, trying to get past programming, trying to make sense of our own lives and what’s going on around us. And so it’s perfectly reasonable that people at different phases would come to different positions as they’re on their trajectory, but that’s at a personal level.  

At a strategic political level, these people are making calculations on one side and other people are taking a passionate, this is who I am; these are my convictions; and I want to take them to the finish line. Talk to me about the difference between a position of conviction and a position of opportunity. 

Robert Hockett (00:10:37): 

Sure, sure. So this might sound like a somewhat extreme analogy, but maybe it’ll help kind of dramatize the distinction. I think that you and I are both sort of recognizing and trying to come to terms with, and figure out what to do with, or what to do about. So if you think about the three, maybe principal allies who were fighting against, you know, Hitler or the ‘Axis’ in the 1940s, I guess that would be right, FDR Churchill and Stalin.  

They were all three allies and they were all three sort of coordinating and working together. And sometimes there were disagreements among them and other times there weren’t, but they were, you know, by and large on the same page and definitely coordinating in the effort to finally bring an end to the Third Reich and the whole sort of ‘Axis,’ or the Axis of Evil at the time. Now within that Alliance, you know, FDR and Churchill seemed to have been pretty friendly and they seem to have shared a lot of basic values, even though Churchill was a conservative and FDR was a New Deal liberal.  

You know, they both were children of privilege; they both came from wealthy well to do sort of aristocratic backgrounds. They shared basic assumptions of, a lot of basic assumptions, about the world, at least, and about what the postwar order should look like.  

There were differences of course. Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire. FDR wanted to see an end brought to that. But as far as, you know, basic political values are concerned or what kind of quality any given polity ought to be, they were, you know, by and large on the same page. Stalin of course, was on a rather different page from the two of them.  

And, you know, personality wise probably didn’t have the same warm, fuzzy feelings toward them. And they probably didn’t have the same warm, fuzzy feelings toward him as they kind of did with one another. And so when you think about it, I guess there’s a difference in the kind of a nature of the collaboration between Roosevelt and Churchill on the one hand in between either one of them and Stalin on the other. And so you can sort of see why given that then that they might’ve been pretty much on the same page when the most immediate exigency was at hand, namely that of Hitler’s continued life or Germany’s continued existence as a Nazi invading force.  

But once you know, that particular urgency was done because Nazis had been defeated, they sort of started to go their separate ways a bit. Roosevelt and Churchill split up less than the two of them did with Stalin.  

Or I guess we have to talk about FDR successor Truman in this case is because FDR died shortly before the war was done. But in any event I used to think, let’s say that you and I are FDR. I used to think of both Bernie and Liz then as Churchill or as other FDR’s, so to speak. And then I would have thought of, I don’t know if some of the more middle of the road, but somewhat leftward leaning Dems as being the Stalin’s, so to speak.  

I mean, we can collaborate on certain things, but not as much as we can with each other. And I think what Liz did this past week has me now, you know, sort of putting her outside of that inner circle while recognizing nevertheless that it might certainly be possible to ally or collaborate on certain urgent issues going forward, but it’s never going to be the same as that kind of intimate partnership I used to think that all of us in the kind of diehard progressive left on the one hand could have with both Bernie and Liz on the other hand. Now I kinda feel like it’s just Bernie, and, of course, the squad, the next cohort, who will all of them, you know, be more or less old enough to run for president next time around, but not this year.  

So I guess that’s the distinction, right? And so the question then becomes, yeah, so how much, and what can you collaborate with somebody who’s not part of the inner circle on, you know; and I guess we just have to sort of decide that on a kind of case by case basis. But this distinction, by the way, tracks another distinction, I guess, and that would be something that you can favor rationally or somebody you can favor rationally on the one hand and somebody you can really be enthused about on the other right.  

Let’s go back to the old cliche distinction between heart and head, but you know, the sweet spot is when there’s somebody there or there’s a movement or there’s a party, or there’s a loose assortment of people, or there’s a candidate who sort of, you know, engages your heart as well as your head, then you’ve got full integration of your personality and that entire integrated person, right, can be part of the cause. I used to feel like, okay, that Bernie is that guy.  

And I used to think Liz is about 80% of that. Remember last summer I kept saying, she’s kind of 80% Bernie for me. It partly engaged my heart, not as much as Bernie did, but pretty far, and then engaged the head as well. So I have to say, I mean, I’m kinda heart sick after last week, and I think that my heart has gone quite cold when it comes to her. And so now it’s only my head that can kind of engage with her.  

And that doesn’t mean that there won’t be, you know, collaborations or alliances or partnerships with respect to particular products, but instead of a kind of ongoing partnership that exists indefinitely, these will be more like particular short term, what we call joint ventures in the world of enterprise organization, which is basically a partnership for a specific purpose. And once the purpose is fulfilled, the partnership comes to an end, you know?  

That’s, I think the difference. 

Steve Grumbine (00:16:08): 

That’s a great insight. And I think, you know, for an activist and for, you know, voters and so forth, you know, we’ve always been told to eat our peas. I mean, Obama’s famous line, “it’s time to eat our peas.” And each time around, you know, the vote blue machine comes rolling through shaming people for not being enthusiastically engaging in the neoliberal corporate Democrat that they trot out there.  

And it’s that gaslighting, that feeling of there’s no other alternative I think has absolutely crippled people. You know, I hate to use that term, but I can’t think of a better one right now.  

It’s really, really blunted their enthusiasm for being a part of the political process. It’s blunted their ability to see a bigger picture. I mean, all these wonderful ideas that Bernie’s painting out there. You know, you walk into Elizabeth Warren, you walk into Buttigieg, you walk into any of these other candidates Biden, and you’re left with that residual after taste from old saccharin sweetener. It just leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.  

Cause they’re busy trying to dumb down your expectations. They’re busy trying to make you dream less, but yet feel really good about the watered down version of nothing that they just laid before you. And I think that that right there, if we could put that in a bucket and just kind of put it aside for a little bit, it’s difficult to understand how the Overton Window works and why people choose the trajectories they choose. Who are they serving?  

Who is telling them that these moderate, very lightly treaded paths are the correct ones? I can’t think of a regular person that would want less benefit. It’s a struggle for me to where that mindset comes from. Who is the outside the voice that is making that the answer that they’re championing? Cause I know it didn’t come from me. 

Robert Hockett (00:18:09): 

Yeah. It’s almost like a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, isn’t it? That people have kind of normalized the life without expectations or of life without high hopes. You know? And so we’ve gotten to the point where some people apparently actually believe, at least at the surfaces of their minds, probably deep down, they don’t believe this is, which is one reason a lot of them don’t end up voting even when they talk this game.  

But maybe, you know, my bet is that on the surface of consciousness, some of these people kind of talk themselves into thinking, well, this is really the best you can do. So you might as well kind of lump it, accommodate yourself to it and then try to show, you know, however much enthusiasm you can for it, but don’t expect to get carried away because that’s a childish expectation.  

Right? And you know, there might’ve been times in the past when that was kind of true, at least in the sense that there might have been nobody on offer and insofar as there was nobody who was kind of willing to step up and carry the torch, then you did, to some extent, kind of have to accommodate yourself unless you were going to run yourself instead and you know, be the change to quote somebody, speaking of being the change that we were seeking. But you know, that way of thinking, it seems especially strange ever since may of 2015, because since may of 2015, we actually have had a standard bearer.  

We have had a torchbearer. Bernie is, you know, he is clearly, by far, the most Progressive person who ever would have run for this office. Right? FDR, I think was quite Progressive, but I think Bernie is in many ways, even more Progressive than FDR was.  

And you know, if you can’t get enthused about him or if you say that, Oh, there’s nobody that can get enthused about even when there’s Bernie well, then there’s just something missing, I think from your, I don’t know, maybe it’s a missing gene or something, but it’s like, it’s like, you don’t have any adrenal glands anymore or something. I mean, you kind of have to be dead, right?  

Not to experience the electrifying sort of sense of hope that Bernie exudes and that his very existence is kind of proof of the vindication of, if one might put it that way. You know. 

Steve Grumbine (00:20:25): 

You know, I look at this and I say to myself, the reason why I got in this is pain. I didn’t do this stuff for any other reason than pain. So pain is my motivator, you know, why did I do this? Okay. And so, you know, I kept feeling and mind you, I started on the right wing. So I understand what it’s like to have diminished expectations.  

And I sat over there and you know, and I understand, I still understand their positions. I mean, they don’t believe government works for the people. They don’t believe government can be trusted. They believe government is corrupt. All of which is true. And these, these are true statements.  

They’re not untrue statements. The right doesn’t come at this all the time and maybe the nefarious leaders do, but the people, the rank and file the people that show up the house, make dinner, feed their kids, go to ball practice, whatever they’re protecting home, they’re looking and they’re saying, Hey, these guys talk a good game, but I’ve never seen them coming, right? And they don’t put it all together and they come up with a different calculus. 

Robert Hockett (00:21:25): 

Yeah. I think it makes perfect sense. You know, I mean, you got these like people like Neera Tanden on the one hand and then this David Frum, you know, a lot of these kinds of disaffected Republican, you know, neolib types who are upset about the Republican Party now because Trump has taken over; are basically hoping that the Democrats will run, you know, somebody other than Trump who would have qualified as a Republican, you know, five or 10 years ago.  

But what they always keep saying, they say, I don’t understand, you know, why is it that, you know, what is it with this Bernie Sanders?  

Do they really think that they’re going to beat Trump with somebody as far left and crazy radical as him? Then if you say, well, you know, an awful lot of people in the rust belt voted for Trump rather than Hillary because he was promising stuff to them. And it’s like, “well, that’s just because they’re racist or whatever.”  

Well, what absurdity! I mean, the thing is sure there are plenty of racists who vote for Trump. But I mean, do they really think that the literally tens of millions of people and we have the records on this, tens of millions of people who voted for Obama and then voted for Trump are racist? It makes no sense at all. Whereas there’s a very obvious story that you can tell that would account for why Bernie might be preferred to Trump while Trump is nevertheless preferred to Clinton, which is precisely what you and I were talking about, right?  

If you’re in the rust belt or if you’re in the old manufacturing sectors and you know, you’re basically, you’ve just been kind of, you know, reamed for the last 40 years, if not longer. And nobody pays attention, they just say, well, you’re just a bunch of ignorant yahoos, you’re probably meth heads.  

You’re probably a bunch of yokels. You live in fly over country. We don’t give a flying F about you. Well, why wouldn’t you vote for those people? You know? And even if they don’t say it, they show it, right? I mean, what does it say when Hillary Clinton doesn’t stop in Wisconsin, or spend time in Michigan or in Western Pennsylvania or Ohio?  

I mean, what is she telling them when she doesn’t do that? There’s Trump. Yeah, sure. He’s a huckster. He’s a con artist. He’s a liar. He’s full of crap. But you know, at the very least he shows that he’s interested in what you care about because he’s trying to con you, you know what I mean? Like, you know, Clinton doesn’t even try to con you and she just doesn’t give a flying fuck that, you know, she doesn’t care that you’re there as far as they can tell, right?.  

So, you know, I think people don’t really seem to get that even a con man can be flattering because he bothered to try to con you. He thinks that you are worth conning, which is another way of saying he thinks that you are worth persuading and Hillary won’t even give you that.  

So the difference of course is that Bernie is not just conning. Bernie actually means it, really cares. So it’s not surprising at all that he would rank number one, Trump would rank number two and Hillary Clinton would rank number three in some non-racists’ rankings. And I don’t see how that shouldn’t be difficult to understand.  

This is not a particularly, you know, subtle form of psychological gymnastics that you and I are going through here to try to understand these inscrutable yahoos or something. These are just ordinary Americans, right? 

Steve Grumbine (00:24:33): 

I want to hit right on the head, man. Okay. So before we got into this, and even during your prior time about relationships of convenience with Stalin and Churchill and FDR, you know, you look over there at the UK right now, and we’ve got a case study. They gave us everything we needed to see in advance.  

We got to see a preview and the elites, these same neoliberal elites in the left, made it out to be that all the yahoos that were still wearing their flags, still enjoyed their tea at two or whatever it is; they still enjoyed all this tradition. And they enjoyed their family lives and stuff, rather than just understand that people had their own preferences.  

And they had their own motivations rather than acknowledge those things, they just said, you’re a racist, you’re a Xenophobe, you’re this, you’re that. And sure enough labor got left at the altar and they all ran off to Boris. And you can see that happening here in the United States.  

These people are left. They want a Progressive agenda. They just don’t see anybody willing to do it, except for Bernie Sanders here. And over there, Corbyn was just beaten down with propaganda being called an anti-semite and every other ridiculous trope in the book. I mean, it doesn’t take much to push that.  

I don’t know if it’s the right word in this case as the Overton Window, but the propaganda window certainly can play a huge role in the way that these folks vote. I think that it’s, it plays part and parcel with the lack of vision or the lack of willingness to go big or go home kind of thing with this bold Green New Deal and this bold, you know, student debt elimination and all these things that require not only does it require a big dream, but it also requires a little teeny bit of macro because you can’t dream a big dream if you’re still chasing taxpayer dollars. There’s just no way to dream a bigger dream and be stuck with this zero sum game idea.  

So there’s a lot going on here. How do you unpack that, Bob? 

Robert Hockett (00:26:44): 

So I think there are a number of different strands, I guess, that we have to kind of maybe distinguish and then address kind of sequentially or at least each one in its own right. And when I say address, I mean sort of both react to, or respond to, but also develop strategy in connection with. So, you know, on the one hand at the lowest sort of level of human consciousness, I suppose you could say there’s the kind of Pavlovian politics angle, right?  

So I’m old enough and young enough that the first election year in the states that I remember paying a lot of attention to and being kind of fully conscious for was the 1988 election, you know, between the first of the Bushs and Dukakis. And I think you might remember that one too, or at least have read about it, even if you were kind of too young to be following it.  

One thing that Bush did all the time. Was he just basically constantly had photographs taken of him and film footage shot of him standing around policemen all the time. You know, there’s always cops, you know, and like blue uniforms.  

And of course this is at the same time the Willie Horton ad is being sort of propagated. And there’s all these sort of racial paranoia, suffused headlines at the time about, you know, gang wars between Crips and Bloods. And everybody’s like, Oh, public enemy, man. Oh, look out Black Militancy is coming back.  

Oh, this is terrible. And so, you know, Bush basically, I think I remember I found this so disgusting that this was the way campaigning happened and that this was what passed for public discourse that I remember sort of quote, unquote “prophesizing” at the time as this sort of would be precocious young guy, is saying, you know, I would bet you within 20 years, what we’re going to see is people are going to do market research and find out what colors people have antipathy toward like the color orange, let’s say, and then they’ll just broadcast, you know, wall to wall television ads of the opponent against an orange backdrop, just to get people to kind of react like Pavlov’s dog. You know that the, Oh, he’s bad because I associate him subconsciously with the color orange, which I really dislike or something.  

And there’s a sense in which that has kind of come true, right? I mean, that’s essentially what seems to be happening in part is people sort of just get themselves associated with certain tropes and then they try to get their opponents associated with certain tropes. And so in a certain sense, this is what Trump does with his nicknames, right?  

His nicknames are all in effect, the same kind of strategy, right? You call Pete “Bootyjudge,” Alfred E. Newman. And then anybody who remembers Mad Magazine, they see, they see him and that’s what they think. And so they don’t take them seriously, right? Then they hear “Lyin Ted,” so they just think, Oh, Ted Cruz yeah, he’s the guy who lies, right.  

This is the same kind of thing, right. And you know, that’s just going to happen no matter what I suppose. The problem of course is I think it’s the least conscientious people who do this. And I think the Republican Party probably has the advantage when it comes to the lowest conscientiousness index. Even though the Democrats often give them a run for the money, or at least some do.  

We just have to be prepared for that and fight it. We know what it’s going to be with Bernie. It’s going to be crazy Bernie, but we can deal with that. That’s fine. I mean, that seems to be part of what people love, right? But the thing that makes him quote, unquote “crazy” is the wild white hair, the kind of passion with which he speaks, but that’s part of the brand.  

People actually kind of love that. So that might actually be a miscalculation on Trump’s part to sort of try to make that his Alfred E. Newman smear. But what kind of worried me, this is actually getting back then to what Liz did last week, but apparently in coordination with CNN, was they effectively stooped to the same kind of thing. And this is what I thought Liz was above.  

And this is exactly why last week was so painful. It’s almost like a member of the family died last week for me or something. I mean, I never, in a million years would have expected her to kind of, you know, resurrect that ridiculous Bernie Bro thing from 2016, which is effectively what she was doing. And to try to get people Pavlovianly, to associate Bernie with sexism, not through anything substantive at all.  

There’s nothing you can show in his record. There aren’t any old speeches or there’s literally nothing that you can actually associate him with that is in any sense associated itself with sexism or old fashioned attitudes toward women or anything of that kind. So the only thing that you got is just the Pavlovian thing.  

If you just maybe just repeat his name and the word misogyny in close proximity with enough frequency, you can get people just Pavlovianly to associate him with that negative thing in the same way that Pavlov’s dogs learn to associate the ringing bell with being bad, you know, and that’s just completely disgusting, right? Yeah.  

That’s the kind of thing that Republicans in the past have sort of specialized in and some Democrats have done as well, of course, but I never thought Liz would do that. So that’s one thing, and we have to figure out strategies to sort of counteract that and to deal with that. And if it means fighting fire with fire by, you know, reminding people of the Native American thing and you know, lately I’ve been tempted to say, you know, she’s running on chromosomes again, or she’s running on DNA again. That’s not a good thing.  

That doesn’t tend to work well for her. And that’s a way of sort of not so subtly reminding people of the Native American thing. And I don’t want to do that. I don’t like to do that, but my God, if it’s that, I mean, if, if the choice is between not doing that and having Bernie get a fair shake, then I’ll do it. You know.  

I mean, I just, so that’s one thing. I guess another thing is to make clear, this . . . a lot of discussion right now under the rubric of intersectionality. You know, this, this kind of buzzword that’s been going around for a while now. There’s a lot of re-examining of traditional associations. This is sort of other things that people sort of have tended to have Pavlovianly to associate with, but don’t have any logical necessity to they’re being associated and they’re actually kind of being decoupled now.  

We have to get used to that and start rethinking. We have to think a little bit more carefully now because there are certain things that are being decoupled. So, you know, one is that it used to be that if you were Progressive and left leaning, you were a Globalist Internationalist.  

And if you were looking out for the good of American workers or something that you’re just like some kind of a nativist or some kind of a reactionary, and therefore you’re a racist. And so, you know, being in favor of American labor on the one hand and being, you know, against the Mexicans on racial grounds or against any other Latinx person on racial grounds were somehow one in the same thing.  

Well maybe in the distant past there might’ve been some kind of a correlation between those things, but there clearly is no necessary link between those things. And indeed, if we go back even further, we look at the most progressive labor movements we’ve ever had in this country, namely those at the later 19th and early 20th century, first in the form of the Knights of Labor and then in the form of the Industrial Workers of the World or the IWW better known as the Wobblies, the thing that really set both of those immensely progressive unions apart was precisely the fact that they were completely non-nativist, non-racist.  

They had these even slogans that made that clear, right?  

One big union, right, that was the IWW line, right, across all of the trades, all of the industries, all ethnicities, all genders and the IWW had African American leaders just like it had non-African American leaders. And it had women leaders and male leaders. It was the most amazing movement ever.  

And of course it was largely destroyed by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the Palmer Raids and all that during the red scare after the first world war. But, you know, I think it’s high time that that tradition of American labor progressivism be revived because that’s what Bernie comes out of. You know, you of course know a lot of people and the popular image of Bernie isn’t quite as detailed as the image of Bernie among people like you and I who’ve known him for a while and have gotten to know more and more about him.  

But as you know, Bernie sort of cut his teeth on the Eugene Debs School of American Thinking. And, you know, Debs comes out of that same movement.  

He was a labor organizer first on the railroads and was very closely associated with the same progressive labor rights who were behind the Knights and then were later behind the IWW. And I think Bernie even sees himself as a kind of resurrected Eugene Debs. And that is a tradition being pro labor and being pro working class and being egalitarian on the one hand and being just, you know, militantly anti-racist and militantly anti-male chauvinist, being militantly cross gender, cross racial in your orientation is at the very core of that vision.  

And so when people like Neera Tanden try to say, well, you know, Bernie, he’s just like this kind of labor reactionary guy. This is why, you know, he’s got a problem with whites and with women.  

Well, you know, first of all, they apparently don’t know anything about the tradition of American labor. And second of all, they don’t seem to have bothered to look at, you know, where Bernie’s support comes from. The most racially diverse, the most gender wise diverse of all of the bases, right? That’s the thing that makes us doubly ironic is that it’s not only unjust because it’s untrue, but it’s like 180 degrees opposite to the truth, right?  

If I were not fearful of being ageist, it would be tempting to say that a lot of these people who sort of pushed this trope about Bernie are themselves, shall we say over 50? And so it’s sort of tempting sometimes to rejoin and say, actually, it’s really a divide between old and young. 

Steve Grumbine (00:36:38): 

Is this one of those “Ok Boomer” moments? 

Robert Hockett (00:36:41): 

Kinda, right? Except I don’t want to say that, right. Because there are a lot of older folks or people who are not just kids who are pro-Bernie. There are tons of boomers who are pro-Bernie. Bernie is a boomer. It’s sort of, I don’t want to, I don’t want to kind of . . . . 

Steve Grumbine (00:36:59): 

He’s a boomer at heart, right. It’s the boomer at heart. There’s young boomers out there, too, by that curmudgeony definition. 

Robert Hockett (00:37:03): 

Yeah. Like Pete Buttigieg is basically a boomer on that definition, right? So I kind of don’t want to go there, but part of me is sort of tempted sometimes because it is quite stark when you look at the stats. Anytime you see some polling results that divide according to age and they say, you know, people under 50 and over 50 or under 55 or over, it’s amazing how, no matter what your ethnicity, you can be African American, Latino American, you can be Asian American.  

You can again have any ethnic background. And irrespective of whether you be male or female or trans or any of the other possibilities, it doesn’t matter.  

Any of those things, you are overwhelmingly likely to be a Bernie supporter if you’re under 50. And if you’re under 40, it’s even more, it’s like you’re 95% likely to be pro-Bernie. And you know what? Some of these people who are trying to kind of push the Bernie as misogynist or Bernie is having a problem with race trope, what they all seem to have in common is they’ve all been around for a while shall we say.  

So they might be speaking their age or their sort of cohort more than they’re speaking their gender or their ethnicity when they talk like that. And they really need reminding of that, even if they need reminding in a way that doesn’t itself, you know, uh, regrettably traffic in age stereotyping, which I, again, prefer not to do, but you know. 

Intermission (00:38:32): 

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Steve Grumbine (00:39:27): 

So, Bob, let me ask you this question on the piggyback of that. I think that there is another component there and I think, and I’ve seen it with the David Brock gang, the last election, and I sort of see it now. There’s a machine at play, and they kind of flip the switch and it’s like, okay guys, we’re going into motion. We’re about to pull the misogyny switch everybody . . . 

Robert Hockett (00:39:51): 

Yup. 

Steve Grumbine (00:39:51): 

Mark your, start your engines. We’re getting ready to go. And then all of a sudden, like on cue, the tweets follow, the shared speech follows, the common language follows, the talking points follow. There’s a machine effect here. I don’t believe this is happenstance. I’d like to say it’s lemmings, but I believe it’s a coordinated approach to trying to derail Bernie.  

And I don’t think Liz has any illusions of winning. I actually believe she’s trying to position herself to be Biden’s vice-president. That’s what I see. 

Robert Hockett (00:40:25): 

It could be, Steve. It’s certainly not implausible. I’ll tell you. I mean, you sort of anecdote that, I think if it’s generalizable than it is sort of revelatory. So I’ve got a number of very, very progressive friends who are, let’s say they’re over 50 or 55 or so, but they’re nevertheless very, very progressive.  

A couple of them actually used to be in the US Congress and then retired. And, you know, I’ve talked to them about Biden in particular and say, you know, wouldn’t it be just awful if like Biden . .  

. Cause these are like friends who actually used to be at loggerheads with Biden when they were all in Congress together or whatever. And they say, what they’ve sort of said to me, partly I think by way of maybe reassuring me, but in a weird way, it’s done the opposite. They said, well, the thing you got to remember is that Biden is such a kind of bungling, bumbly old, you know, on the way out sort of fellow, that he is going to matter a lot less than are his appointments and his people he basically has around, his team. And you know, the momentum within the party these days when it comes to team formation, seems to be in favor of more progressive politics, not quite of the Bernie Stripe, but maybe getting kind of close at least to the Liz Stripe, that the Overton Window has shifted to some extent even within the party itself.  

And that’s not just a matter of marketing to millennials, even though it’s partly that, but also it’s just that the party itself is growing a little bit younger over time.  

And each new cohort is a little bit more progressive than its immediate predecessors. And so what they say is that, you know, a Biden administration would probably be significantly more progressive than Biden himself. Now, A, I don’t know whether that’s true or plausible.  

It might not be again, they were trying to reassure me and make me feel better about the horror as they might’ve overstated their case. But let’s assume that they were actually speaking to some extent from knowledge, from actual exposure to what’s going on, you know, behind the scenes. If that’s true, then that of course renders the proposition that Liz herself might be willing to be his vice presidential running mate more plausible too, right?  

That, that if my friends who have said this were speaking an opinion, that’s kind of widely shared, let’s say among well-established, but not exactly establishment Democrats, you know, kind of quasi-establishment Democrats like Liz herself, then, you know, maybe you could imagine her then, you know, being a running mate for him and being willing to accept that offer. And if that’s the case, then you could certainly imagine her basically being motivated to do what she did last week for reasons resonating with those that you just proposed, right?  

And the terrible thing for me, Steve, right now is after last week, I can’t rule that out as implausible on the basis of, you know, what I know about the person, you know, I can’t say, Oh, you know, I know her so well; she would never do that. That can’t be the way she would think.  

I can’t say that anymore because if I’m perfectly candid, I don’t actually know what motivates her. I mean, it was so . . . I don’t want to overstate that either. I actually do believe that she is actually sincere about a lot of the quasi-progressive positions that she pushes and that even if she weren’t sincere about them, that she would feel constrained to keep supporting them just because of her track record, right? She is on record and did fight pretty hard against those bankruptcy law changes in 2004 and 2005.  

She did go on Bill Moyers. So it’s all over YouTube. There she is talking to Bill Moyers about how dastardly Hillary Clinton was in not fighting that bankruptcy reform . . . And I think that was coming from a place that’s actually inside of her. I think she does feel that way.  

That is the way she is. And even if it weren’t, she’s so out there on record with that stuff that I think she would probably feel constrained not to, you know, sort of disavow it too radically on pain of being embarrassed. But what last week told me is not necessarily that she didn’t mean all that other stuff. It just told me that there are other motives that drive her that can be at odds with that other stuff.  

Whereas that’s not the case with Bernie, right. You know, there’s the gospel message about you, you can’t serve two masters. Or there’s the old Kierkegaardian line, you know, purity of heart is to will one thing. I don’t think that there’s purity of heart there now in the way that I used to think.  

I don’t think that there’s only one master, so to speak. I think that opportunism or the chance of quote, unquote “winning” or “getting a leg up,” or “getting into a Biden administration as his VP” is a possible competing motive. And that can of course come into conflict with other motives, even if those other motives are pure.  

Like a pure motive, let’s say to help rebuild the middle class or to revitalize labor unions. Let’s give her the benefit of the doubt and say she really, sincerely wants to benefit labor unions. Even if we do that, which I get, I’m sort of wanting to do, the thing most disturbing about last week to me is that I now know that there are other motives that activate her as well. And that those might sometimes come into conflict with the motives that I cherish.  

And I can’t be sure that the motives I cherish are the ones that are going to win in the event of a conflict like that. And that’s just a very long winded convoluted way of saying, I agree with you, Steve, in the sense that it could be that she’s angling for that. And that that’s part of what prompted last week.  

And it could be that she might be thinking along those lines even now. And the thing is, even if she’s not, even if let’s say the other thing is possible, let’s say that you’re not correct, that she knows that she can’t win this now. And therefore she’s angling for a VP spot on a Biden ticket as a kind of consolation prize. Let’s say that that’s not the case, but she still thinks that she might be able to win.  

The fact that she would be willing to shaft Bernie in that way to do it. And maybe more horrifying, like, or at least, you know, adding to the horror, let’s say that she would be willing to do it precisely by revitalizing that preposterous bullshit meme from 2016 in a manner that cannot but alienate and disgust all of us Bernie diehards in a manner that would then lead to yet another Democratic split of the 2016 variety, thereby guaranteeing Trump’s winning again. The fact that you would do that, it’s just beyond the pale.  

Again, as you know, I was totally flabbergasted last week. I just stared at the screen with my jaw dropping, dumbfounded for like a half an hour after that bizarre exchange in that debate and then obviousness with which it had clearly been coordinated with CNN. I just thought, Oh my God, it was as though I just learned, you know, like I had admired my sister or my mother or something for decades.  

And then she suddenly tells me, Oh, it’s like maybe the show “Alias.” I never told you. I’ve actually been a secret agent all the time. And I’ve killed 16 men. You know, I went through the so-called 12 stages of grief or whatever the stages are all within about a 24 hour period. And you know, it’ll never be the same, 

Steve Grumbine (00:47:55): 

You know, it’s funny you say that. I want to take a step back. And I’m going to say something for you so that you don’t have to be the crazy guy on the . . . and you can make me out to be a nut job or you can kind of come up saddle up next to me. So my question to you is this, right? None of these campaigns are islands in and of themselves.  

It’s not like one person standing up there by themselves. They have an entire team. They have not just a team, but they have the internal team that supports them day to day. And then they got the machine that they’ve got to interact with to kind of get on board and talk with the super delegates and talk with the other long-term, non-elect, or should I say, you know, party elected, internal surrogate and you know, machine pullers within the organization that is the party. I see bigger things at play, right?  

I see chess players playing chess pieces with each of these candidates as well. And in other words, I don’t think Liz in and of herself said, Hey, let me just go out there and play this misogyne thing. I think there were other people involved in that decision that said, Oh, wait a minute, there’s an opportunity. And maybe it was just a local campaign thing, or maybe it was the people within the party that really hate Bernie Sanders who say he’s not a real Democrat, and who want to do anything they can to burn him.  

They still hold him accountable for Trump because he didn’t bow to queen Hillary and all the other things that go into that. To me, I see this as far more choreographed.  

I don’t want to go conspiratorial. I just want to say, I believe that’s the operational reality that is the Democratic Party in the machine that goes on behind the scenes. And that’s kind of the back waters that I’m wondering about because Bernie is kind of detached from this. And I think that his outsider status maybe works with that 99% electorate; but it also kind of runs counter culture because the people that are in the party are saying, “Hey, we don’t want to be at the party.  

We kind of like what we do here and Bernie’s threatening us, and you’re not; you’re not threatening us. You’re one of us, Liz.” 

Robert Hockett (00:50:03): 

Yeah. I’m with you on that. I actually, um, not only am I ready to sort of saddle up to you on that, I’m happy to quote, unquote, “join forces” or “join the chorus,” or form a chorus with you on this. I won’t say that I know that to be the case or that I’m 100% sure that it must be the case or whatever, but I think it is so plausible to suggest that; and there’s so much evidence that would be consistent with that, that I think it’s more likely than not that that is the case.  

And that the only real question is how tight the coordination is. I think it’s beyond cavil at this point that there is at least some kind of loose coordination going on and there could very well be more than loose coordination.  

And there are number of reasons I have for saying that, all right, a number of pieces of evidence for this, I think, you know, warrants this thought, or at least make clear that it’s not an insane or paranoiac thought. One is again, I mean, CNN is the network that released this bombshell news before the debate itself, right, on Sunday or Monday before.  

They were then holding the debate, of course. They sort of primed the public, right? Be sure to tune in to see this debate and raise our ratings because there’s going to be some sparks between these two people who have previously been allies, because look what we’ve just revealed. And then, you know, they’re quote, unquote “revealing” stuff from a conversation that happened in 2018.  

It’s not like this would somehow be new to Liz. Like, Oh, I have to report this. This just happened yesterday. I’ve lost faith in Bernie because just yesterday he told me a woman can’t win. I mean, you know, she, and he were, you know, huggy bear. I mean, they were hugging and there was, you know, allies, you know, almost looking like a presidential ticket already before many of the Democratic debates, especially the one in this past July.  

And that was all after this event allegedly occurred. So now why would Liz suddenly be, you know, wanting to play this game now? So we know that.  

We also know that one of the questioners for CNN used to be a press person for Hillary Clinton, right? We know that. We also know that Bernie has very vocally and very conspicuously advocated breaking up AT&T. It’s right at the heart of his reindustrialization vision. And AT&T owns CNN. Liz for her part has offered really, I think ambitious and laudable revitalizations of antitrust, too; but I note that her targets have been Facebook and Amazon, not AT&T, or therefore CNN.  

We also know that there are a lot of former Clinton campaign people who are part of Liz’s team. Now, happily, they’re not the only ones. There are a lot of people who are very serious Progressives who are part of her team as well.  

And a lot of them I think are probably uncomfortable or at the very least kind of holding their noses about the Clintonians on the team. But the fact nevertheless remains that there are these Clintonian types on the team. We also know that some of the folk who we were thinking of before, as the heirs apparent to Hillary who that establishment might’ve been expected to get behind, that kind of flamed out or proved not to be good bets, right.  

People, I think thought that Corey Booker would do well, but no. People thought Kamala Harris would do well, but no. Then, you know, Pete Buttigieg was kind of their guy.  

No, he seems to be, you know, on the way down again. And of course Biden, who’s always the kind of the fallback is just, you know, one pratfall after another, one embarrassment after another. So my bet is that an awful lot of these people are now thinking, you know, maybe Liz isn’t so bad after all. Maybe she’s closer to us than she is to Bernie and, you know, they might not be clearly wrong about that, but either way, even if they’re wrong about it in their heart of hearts, she’s still closer to Bernie than to them.  

I think we saw last week, pretty clearly that that doesn’t mean she’s not willing to play ball with them, even if that means shafting Bernie in order to get herself into office. 

Steve Grumbine (00:54:02): 

Absolutely. I want to take a second and just do a quick rattle. Going back to 2015 and 2016, when you know, Real Progressives were literally out there at the Dakota access pipeline, we had five or six people from our team there, literally reporting day in, day out. And you know, we saw Tulsi. We saw others.  

Everybody that cared about this for real, in some way, shape or form, either spoke on it or out there fought against it, et cetera. Liz withheld any kind of support for that. But then she was more than happy to try to appropriate the Native American culture. I’ll say it for you. And then you’ve got the situation where, you know, if she would have simply thrown her hat behind Bernie at that time at the end, there was absolutely no way he doesn’t crush because the movement was there. I’ve never seen America so excited in my life.  

In my 50 years, I’ve never once seen America like that. Not even under Obama, not nothing. I’ve never seen anything close to it. And had she done that, that would have been the final, that would have been it. And she’s still withheld herself. And then you can still see her in that blue outfit, holding hands with Hillary, running around with the glee and that joy. And I see this as somebody who really said my take to Hillary was, Hey, I really do want a woman president, just not you and maybe Elizabeth Warren.  

And I was out there saying that frequently. And then I thought about Tulsi, but Tulsi showed these Libertarian colors that I just can’t quite get behind. But regardless the point is, is that the signs for me personally have been there for a very, very long time.  

And I guess the hard part for me is I don’t want to be that guy that’s just seen as negative, et cetera. But at the same time though, I feel like there is got to be some way for Progressives who clearly are not the quote, unquote “majority” in America. We may be organizing, we may be fighting for change, but we are not the majority yet.  

With that in mind, we have to make some of these relationships of convenience or by policy or by moment or whatever. We’ve got to come into some of these relationships, some of these collaborations that help us advance that Overton Window when it properly hitting. You get to a point where you see these people and you recognize they’re standing in between the way of you and your health care. 

Robert Hockett (00:56:34): 

Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s essential for a lot of us. Right? 

Steve Grumbine (00:56:37): 

How do you find a way to overcome that so that Progressives don’t bite their nose off to spite their face, yet at the same time, stay true north and not allow a charlatan or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to enter into the family household and devour them when they sleep? 

Robert Hockett (00:56:53): 

Yeah. I think what we have to do, I mean, I sometimes think of this stuff so pragmatically as to be almost just kind of like mechanical about it while at the same time being sort of suffused with or motivated by, you know, sort of uncompromising motives the whole time. So what does that mean for present purposes?  

Well as, you know, one way I was thinking about the race here ever since 2015 in fact, was that, well, we have to think of a pair of people, right? We have to think in terms of a ticket. And that means we have to think of who would be, and we know that Bernie is the top, right? We know that Bernie is our gold standard, right?  

So the question really boils down to then as something as simple as who’s the optimal running mate for Bernie. And then when we figure out somebody might say, well, what would be the criteria of optimality? We might say, well, somebody who on the one hand has sufficient overlap, whose values sufficiently overlap with his while on the other hand, being able maybe to draw in a few additional cohorts of people to vote in favor of a ticket who otherwise wouldn’t, but without scaring away or alienating the real core Bernie supporters. Now those conditions are fairly tightly drawn in the sense that there probably are not many people who fit that bill, right?  

And so the first question I guess, is, you know, is there anybody and can we find somebody? And then the second would be, if there’s not what’s the fallback, right. What’s plan B, so to speak. Now for a long time, I thought that there was an answer to that.  

I thought there was actually one and only one person who fits that bill, and that was Liz. And so it was when I talked about before, back in 2015. I was trying to get both of them to run together. I’d say, well, you guys should run as you know, Sanders Warren 2016, then promise to flip it to Warren Sanders in 2020, and then flip it back in 2024, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they all kind of laughed and said, you’re cute.  

You know, that’s kind of hope springs eternal doesn’t it? That’s our Bobby. And then, you know, they didn’t do it. Of course, then 2018 comes along and I’m working with both of them on various pieces of legislation. Then I say to the teams, Hey, why don’t you guys, you know, are you less inclined to laugh about that now? Would you be willing to think about that now?  

And they kind of chuckled, but they didn’t look quite as they looked a little nervous, almost like, Oh, he knows what we’re doing. You know, like how did he know or whatever. So I had the feeling that they were actually thinking along those lines now and such, you know, in the last week or so additional information has come out that indicates that some pretty highly placed people on both teams were indeed thinking along these lines, I’m sort of happy to say, but I’m also heartbroken to say now, because just as this news is emerging, it’s turning out that it might not be possible anymore because of what Liz has done. And frankly, at this point, I’m thinking if it’s still possible, it’s only possible in a slightly different way than it would have been before.  

Before I think it was possible in the sense that it really could have been a love fest in addition to being a workable marriage of convenience, right. That it was going to be more like Churchill and FDR than it was going to be like either Churchill or FDR and Stalin, you know. But now I feel like it might well be possible still, but it’s going to be more transparently, a matter of convenience.  

Another analogy that came to mind, it’s a sort of a common trope in lots of films and in literature as well, that two people are madly in love. They get married. They’re a beautiful, happy couple. At some point, one of them breaks faith.  

There’s an infidelity. The other party finds out. There’s a crisis. Are they going to split or are they going to figure out a way to make it work? They ended up finding a way to make it work, but it’s never quite the same. And indeed there’s another comparison we can draw with FDR here, right? FDR and Eleanor, right, seem to have been very, very close, just deeply in love with each other, just this beautiful, perfect 100% across the board, every dimension covered relationship between them.  

And then he has, of course the affair when she’s away. I think it’s in the, during the first world war period. She eventually finds the love letters between them, you know, 10 years later or something like that, is totally crushed and devastated.  

They almost divorced. They find a, you know, make an accommodation. They stay together. They have a beautiful working partnership still, but it’s never quite the same. Right?  

The spark has been taken out of it because there was something fundamentally breached there. And in a weird way, I mean, I don’t want to over romanticize or sort of over state the analogy, but I sort of felt like, you know, Bernie and Liz would be a little bit like a Franklin and Eleanor before the affair. You know what I mean?  

And now I feel like the best we can hope for is something like the partnership after the affair. And even that might not be possible, especially if they continue to kind of, you know, put out the Bernie Bro stuff. And if they don’t tell people like fucking Joy Ann Reid to stop bringing phrenologists and body language interpreters and seance holders, on to, you know, respectable news programs to sort of interpret, you know, his Brooklyn Jewish gestures as signs of his untrustworthiness, you know. They’ve gotta nix that immediately.  

And I actually do think that the onus here is on Liz and her team to say, if they really want to salvage this thing, they’re going to have to say to people like Joy Ann Reid and everybody else, CNN, you know, you’ve got to stop this shit immediately. You know, we had a little misunderstanding. We patched it up. We’re all good. Now, now just shut the fuck up and go after Biden. 

Steve Grumbine (01:02:38): 

I couldn’t agree with you more, Bob. All right. So let’s put a bow on this thing here. In terms of the Overton Window as a whole, in these marriages of convenience, what would be your parting words to a Progressive Movement and to those who are actively trying to bring about change? What would be your parting wisdom to them as a means of staying sane as all these things take place? 

Robert Hockett (01:03:06): 

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I would have a plan A and a plan B and plan B as the fallback as usual. So plan A, I would say let’s do all that we can to ascertain whether it’s possible for Bernie and Liz to form a working marriage of convenience of the FDR Eleanor sort post affair, you know, post infidelity. Think hard about whether that might be possible, whether there is anything we can do to encourage it to happen.  

If it does seem to be possible and indeed desirable. And of course that means that we also have to decide whether we trust her or not, right. And if we don’t trust her, then we’ve already decided that it’s not possible, but that would be plan A. Now, if we decide that it’s not possible because we don’t trust her, or if we decide that it is possible and we trust her, but it just in the end, it’s still just doesn’t happen because she keeps aiding and abetting the Bernie Bro, meme spreaders, then plan B is let’s start thinking really carefully and constructively.  

And, you know, as though this were serious planning, not pipe dreaming who Bernie’s best running mate can be, right.  

This is a great way of not stewing over stuff and not just wringing our hands, but actually, you know, kind of putting the energy that is our negative energy out of the negative energy that is our disillusionment or anger into a constructive channel and a constructive avenue by starting to think seriously about who, not just who would we most love to see as vice president, but who do we think would be the most plausible running mate on the basis of those criteria that I sort of laid out before — A agenda at least compatible with Bernie’s and B able to bring in some people who might not otherwise have voted for Bernie without in so doing scaring off Bernie supporters. I myself am thinking increasingly about Rashida in this connection at this point, but I might be myself being too sanguine, you know.  

Cause you can imagine all the nativists are going to pull out the Muslim thing or the we’re going to impeach the motherfucker or, Oh, she has polished Indian relatives or whatever, you know. I don’t to give aid and comfort to those forces by saying, Oh yeah, you’re right.  

I guess we better not think about her. I think she would very well be that she would be the best running mate, not withstanding all of that shit and that we should just lean into it; but it’s also possible that I’m being overly optimistic about that. And so what I would suggest is we think all of us seriously, like who would be the next best thing, or if you’ve never really thought that Liz was plausible in the first place, who do we think is just the best thing, right?  

Who’s going to be the best. And again, I think if we can get somebody who again is on the one hand compatible in the sense that we all are at least well disposed toward this running mate, all of us Berniecrats are at least well disposed or at the very worst were neutral. And at the same time she might well bring in sizeable blocks of voters who Bernie alone might not have brought in.  

That would, I think be the sweet spot, right? Now It seems to me that without question, would be AOC, if she were five years older or four years older even, right. But unfortunately she’s not four years older and we can’t amend the constitution in time to lower that age, which I wish we could do. So we have to figure out who that’s going to be.  

And I can’t claim to be the wisest or best thinking person here by any means. But if anybody’s curious, that’s actually what I’m thinking about most of these days. I’m now basically in full plan B mode, trying to think whose name I think would be best to see on the right hand side of that slash mark as it follows the name of Bernie Sanders; and Rashida is a really intriguing prospect to me right now, but there might be others I’m just not thinking of. 

Steve Grumbine (01:06:47): 

I’m going to say this real quick. I think that you’re exactly correct, but I will say something and I’ve been extremely harsh with this individual, but Tulsi Gabbard the one thing that she brings here that is just absolutely key is she’s got some right wing support – people that see her through the Libertarian lens that might lend Bernie a wider birth instead of just eating inside the Democratic Party because after all, they’re just vote blue, no matter who anyway.  

Right? 

Robert Hockett (01:07:20): 

Yeah. That’s what they say. 

Steve Grumbine (01:07:23): 

Just an opportunity. It’s just something to think about. 

Robert Hockett (01:07:26): 

Yeah. I certainly am not inclined to reject that categorically, Steven, that there’s a lot that I like about her as well. I recognize the dangers and the worries and the weaknesses. And there’s some stuff that she says that I find not only, you know, kind of odd, but even downright off putting; but I’m certainly not going to say, Oh, she’s simply .  

. . And by the way, I think she deserves a presidential medal of freedom for having spared us the horrors of a ongoing Kamala Harris candidacy. Thank God she took her out.  

For that alone, right? I mean, it was like maybe that was a kamikaze mission as far as the Democratic Party is concerned, but that was really, really necessary. And I was going to say somebody has got to do that with Mayor Pete as well; but I think that might now be done because he seems to be plummeting by like, but yeah, maybe it’s Tulsi, maybe it’s Rashida, you know, Nina Turner obviously is another strongly plausible possibility. Right?  

We might decide that she’s not the best bet, but how can you not love her? How can you not think highly of her? And think of all of the people who might otherwise have been Biden voters, you know, basically African American folk who are older than 50 or older than 40 that might have been Biden inclined, who she would win, you know, who she would get on, you know, to the support. And it doesn’t have to be a woman necessarily, but I think that’ll be helpful now that Liz Warren to her shame and our horror has to some extent given legs back to that absurd preposterous disgusting meme from 2016.  

There’s certain things to be said for it’s being a woman. And again, just to get back down to basic values, too. I think as you and I both said, right, it is all else being equal.  

We got to have a woman president or vice president or both some time soon, right? It’s an important milestone that we’ve got to reach, but I think you and I, and most of us, Bernie supporters, one thing that we’re not willing to do that some of the, you know, vote two X chromosomes, no matter who are not as you know, I think we’re prepared to recognize that some women would not be a good idea. Right.  

Um, anytime they say it’s gotta be a woman, I don’t care who, you know, there’s a really easy two word answer to that: Sarah Palin. Need I say more, right? So we’ve got to find . . . so maybe naturally then when I think about plan B, I find myself thinking about Rashida. I find myself thinking about Nina. I do find myself thinking a little bit about Tulsi as well.  

And there might be others that we haven’t thought of yet. I wonder if like Stacey Abrams would be willing. She might be too neoliberal, but I just, I don’t know her well. 

Steve Grumbine (01:09:57): 

She’s out there with Bloomberg, man. 

Robert Hockett (01:09:59): 

Nevermind. 

Steve Grumbine (01:10:02): 

I can’t get . . . and I thought about, she’s a little young but Ayanna Pressley is all over Warren right now. So she’s kind of eliminated herself from mine. 

Robert Hockett (01:10:10): 

Another one is, you know, Jayapal of course, who just endorsed Bernie this morning. So we’ve also got Jayapal as a possibility. And then we’ve also got . . . Actually is Krystal Ball over 35 yet? I think she might be. 

Steve Grumbine (01:10:22): 

A good question. 

Robert Hockett (01:10:24): 

You know, she’s, she’s got some real star power and she’s the real deal. And you know, she’s very energetic, very devoted. I mean just profoundly moral to her core, politically moral as well as just personally moral. And she’s also of course, just very well spoken and very effective as a communicator.  

And so, you know, I think she’s another one we should think about, although she might, it’s possible. She’s only like 32 or something. 

Steve Grumbine (01:10:53): 

What about that lady Stephanie Kelton? 

Robert Hockett (01:10:55): 

Oh, you know, it’s funny. I actually shot Steph an email. We were kind of backing and forthing on Tuesday night after the shock, you know, after the bombshell, you know, she was in Australia, but bless her heart. She had her phone handy. I guess we were backing and forthing. And I actually said to her, I said, why not Sanders – Kelton?  

Because you know, I mean, as we know, as anybody who’s had any exposure, even superficial exposure to her knows, she’s scary smart. She’s extremely effective as a communicator, very well spoken, very well written. And she’s also a bloody economist, which sort of suggests, you know, all of us who keep having to say, you know, all of us have to keep repeating the old Clinton line. It’s the economy stupid because it still is the economy stupid.  

You know, we immediately have that taken care of. Well, we can say, you know, Bernie says, I take the economy stupid thing so seriously that I’ve chosen the most distinguished American economist right now as my running mate. Yeah. I wouldn’t rule that out at all. I mean, it depends on whether Stephanie would be comfortable with having even more limelight like that.  

But you know, we have to admit also that she’s had a nice buildup to it gradually, right? I mean the attention to her, you know, sort of really began to pick up around 2013 and it’s kind of grown year after year after year. And so it’s not like it would be a sudden shock.  

Like, you know, she’s just suddenly been dropped from obscurity into renown, you know. She’s pretty renowned already. So I don’t think . . . I think she could handle it. 

Steve Grumbine (01:12:24): 

Hey, look on that note, Bob, thank you so much for joining me. This was a great talk and I can’t wait to have you back. 

Robert Hockett (01:12:30): 

I agree my friend. It’s always inspiring and reassuring. I feel I’ve gotten many more endorphins circulating in the blood stream after talking to you. Thanks. Thanks for, uh, once again, underscoring or buttressing my hope and I’ll wear it upward. My friend. We’ll talk again soon. 

Steve Grumbine (01:12:47): 

Absolutely have a great one. Folks, Steve Grumbine and Bob Hockett, Macro N Cheese. have a great day. 

Ending Credits (01:12:58): 

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressive Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.