Amy Klobuchar, Live at The Atlantic Festival

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

So, there's been some news this week.

And while the situation in Washington was blowing up, we at the Atlantic were having our big annual event here, which we call the Atlantic Festival.

Staff writers and editors chat on stage with big names and business and politics, and this week's show is actually a live taping of Radio Atlantic from the festival with one of those big names, Minnesota senator and presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar.

It was recorded on Wednesday evening with the senator fresh off a vote in the Senate.

We talked about impeachment, of course, but also about the MeToo movement, the strange experience of running for president, her distinctly Minnesota backstory, and a James Madison quote she's been thinking about a lot these days.

Take a listen.

We're really happy to have Senator Klobuchar here.

A lot of these that I've been doing have been out on the road with candidates, and this one, we were thinking who would be great to have in Washington to do this.

And let me start with this, Senator.

You just came from a full day in the Senate, just basically fresh off the floor.

A number of your colleagues who are running for president didn't even show up in Washington this week.

I have talked to other people in the Senate, even those who are not running for president, who say there is nothing that is going to get done.

The president says, now that the Democrats have started down the road of impeachment, that's it.

There's no agenda.

Why are you still showing up at the Senate?

Okay, good question.

And by the way, there were a number of us that were here off and on.

I saw Elizabeth yesterday, and I saw Michael Bennett was there today.

I am a little different position.

I'm actually in leadership, and I chair the steering committee of the Senate.

And believe it or not, I had an event today for the senators.

We had about 20 of them there that featured Don Varelli and legal experts, which had been planned because of the Supreme Court's upcoming term.

But of course, we had other discussions as well.

And then I also think this week, I'm actually very glad I'm here.

There's been other weeks I've missed a few days.

Given what's happened, the importance of this.

And I was able to talk to my colleagues on the Judiciary Committee, meet extensively with Senator Schumer and Durbin about this.

So I think it actually was a very important week to be here.

But there are people that are here some days, gone the next.

You just have to keep trying to balance it.

And the last thing I'm sure you heard about our exciting antitrust hearing, but that is actually a really important topic for our country.

And it's been neglected.

It's part of the reasons we're seeing less startups.

And I had that yesterday that I chaired with Senator Lee.

And then Senator Tim Scott and I started

an entrepreneur caucus, which is focused on this startup slump.

And we had 30 women entrepreneurs from all over the country talking about this topic.

So I just, there are things outside of votes that you can do when you're a U.S.

Senator.

And hearing from colleagues and talking to them, like Tim Kaine, we had an Iran briefing today that I was at.

So there is a lot of things that go on outside of the fact that we are not having votes on important things like the guns bills are just sitting there, which is just, to me,

unexplainable when you have the majority of Trump voters want to see background checks, the majority of hunters want to see background checks.

But this president could literally tell Mitch McConnell to bring these things up for a vote and he would, and he hasn't.

So those are reasons to be there, but just remember there's a lot going on and that's why I was there.

there

well there that is a lot but of course let's talk about the thing that we're of course going to talk about which is impeachment

this is something that you were out in favor of in June it took until yesterday for the speaker to say that she was supportive of the process Do you think that that's time that was misspent?

Should there have been,

should that have said move more quickly?

They were doing investigations, as you know.

They've had a few hearings with witnesses and things like that.

I think the main point here is what this was about.

And that is this pattern that we are seeing that really came to light with presumably this whistleblower complaint that I haven't seen, but the summary, I don't call it a transcript because there are a lot of dot, dot, dots.

It was a written summary of the telephone conversation that this president had with the president of Ukraine.

And I think all of that drove this decision, having having talked extensively to Senator Schumer and others who spent a lot of time over the weekend talking to Speaker Pelosi.

I think that this was about that and the fact that you had these

a number of Democrats, that incredible group that wrote the piece in the Washington Post with their military and intelligence experience, Democrats elected who had served brand new Congresspeople, many of them women, who wrote this moving piece about why they were there and why they

believed that this was such a national security risk.

I think all of that in a good way drove the speaker.

And

what we have in front of us right now is not something that happened in the past.

Not that that's the

reason, the defining

line for impeachment.

It is more that it's something that's ongoing.

And that's actually when I came out for impeachment was when he welcomed intelligence from other countries to use this dirt.

It was actually the same kind of thing.

He said that he was interested in this and that it's.

Exactly.

And this is just part of that pattern that you saw start when he stood in front of that wall of those CIA agents who made the ultimate sacrifice, lost their lives, anonymous stars, and he had the gall to stand before that wall and talk about crowd size and make a partisan speech.

Or when he believed

Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence director, or when he said he loved Kim Jong-un,

or when at the G20, when someone asked about invading our elections, he turns to Putin and makes a joke.

And I remember thinking at that moment, hundreds of thousands of soldiers have lost their lives on the battlefields protecting our democracy or democracies around the world.

Four little girls, and this was just commemorated on the 56th anniversary of the bombing of the church in Birmingham, four little girls, innocents, lost their lives in that church

in that quest for civil rights and in people that are willing to stand up and evil people that were trying to stamp out their right to be part of that democracy.

So this is something fundamental to our country that crosses party lines.

And that's why I think that this idea that he on a phone call is basically saying, hey,

you know, Joe Biden and his son are out there and that has to be looked into

and some of the things he said when you read that summary, it's very, very disturbing.

This simple notion that you shouldn't put your own personal interests and your partisanship in front of our country when you're president of the United States dealing with a foreign leader.

And I was, he was, Isaac was teasing me.

I found a quote from James Madison.

This is it.

I thought it would make real sense.

Every happening podcast has

cutting edge.

But it was about way back when our founding fathers decided that they would put those articles of impeachment, that they would have that in the Constitution.

Madison back then said this.

Why would you need this with a president?

He uses the word he.

I would of course say he or she.

He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation, like embezzlement, or oppression.

He might betray his trust to foreign powers.

And when you think about the founding of our country, that was all about independence and breaking away from a foreign power.

power.

And so it makes sense, too, that they were worried that one branch of government, as in one president, would somehow sell out to a foreign power.

So you think about that, and he was talking about that in terms of why we had the ability to impeach.

And I think it just goes back to the founding of our democracy, and we've got to remember that.

And that's what this investigation is about.

And I think that's what...

created this situation where Speaker Pelosi, it tipped it for her because it's ongoing.

You were a prosecutor for years.

Do you think that the Democrats have done a good enough job making this case so far to the American public so that people understand what's going on and why to you it is such a problem?

Well,

I think we all know the Mueller report was that was hard because

he would only talk about what was in the report basically.

I think when you read that report carefully, you see this pattern of conduct where he was basically the president was ready to flaunt the law and did flaunt the law.

But that aside,

this case, we've only had a day to make this case.

We just got this summary, and so I don't think it's fair to evaluate this yet.

And this is a whole different realm that we're in.

The other thing that's going on is the intelligence committees are seeking the whistleblower complaint.

As you know, there's going to be an open hearing tomorrow in the House with the Inspector General, I think.

the

and then later in the afternoon, Senator Warner and Burr are having a closed-door hearing with those same witnesses.

So, there is, this has just started in terms of this inquiry, but I believe that what you can say is it fits a pattern, and we have been making that case for a long time.

And people say, Well, have you guys been doing a good enough job in getting the public to understand this?

Let's not forget 2018.

2018 election, that was a major, big check and balance on this guy.

We took back the House of Representatives.

And we took it back in large part because people didn't trust having a House of Representatives that weren't a check on this guy because they were so concerned.

They were concerned about some of the fears that he wasn't coming in on his promises when it comes to the economy and the trade war.

But they were also concerned about his tone, about his...

flaunting of the law.

I remember visiting the Carter Library in Georgia when I did their Democratic dinner a few years ago, and I, like a Minnesota geek, was looking for Walter Mondale stuff.

And you know, I'm not sure.

I walk in there, of course, and I walk in there, the vice president to Jimmy Carter, and I walk in there and I'm like, where's Jones' dress?

You know, these things.

And I am walking around, and finally, I see these words on the wall that were the words that Walter Mondale uttered after they lost.

And of course, it wasn't a perfect administration, but it was a moral administration, very much so.

And on the wall, it said, looking back at the four years, we told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.

We told the truth, we obeyed the law, we kept the peace.

That is the minimum that we should expect in a President of the United States.

I asked Jimmy Carter about that line

a little bit about a year and a half ago, whether he thought.

Was he on your podcast?

He was on a previous podcast in another publication that I was at.

And he was at that point a little evasive of whether he thought

President Trump was holding to that.

remember this

let me ask uh about your campaign here one of the things that is distinctive uh to me about uh your speeches is the jokes that you uh weave in uh you

that you've got uh the president the what's the difference between the president and greenland uh Greenland is not for sale.

It's not for sale.

You're going to build a blue wall and you're going to make Trump pay for it.

That's kind of true, though,

okay?

And we build the blue wall.

That Trump said he's going to run the government like his businesses, right?

Like a bankrupt casino.

Yes.

No, there is a.

Yes, go on.

You got ribbed a little bit for this by The Daily Show, a joke that you told a lot about.

That made me laugh because all comedians have kind of a number of them, of course, have repeat performances when they have a set.

Are you writing your own material?

Yes, I often do.

Yes, I do.

But when you give political speeches, it's really boring if you give the same speech, but you often add new things for news of the day, but you do keep some of the fundamentals of it, or you would be not really having a cohesive message.

And so,

anyway, yeah, they were kidding.

I thought I arrived when Trevor Noah did a whole video thing on me.

I thought that was actually kind of good.

I mean, it is, it seems to me like one of the weird things.

things in the adjustment of running for president that now every time that you are making a speech as a presidential candidate people people are watching.

I'm sure that there were lines and jokes that you used when you were running for Senate, and it was not a focus of the Daily Show or others.

What has that been like?

You've been in public life for a long time, and this is a year almost, you launched in February, of running for president.

That's a different thing and having a different level of scrutiny on you.

Well, I think when you're in the Senate and you run Senate races these days, you are used to a lot of scrutiny, and you better be.

And the job I had before that, after running three, before three Senate campaigns, was that I was the DA, the county attorney.

And so that's huge scrutiny on cases and what you do, and you have to explain to the public when you have to make a plea agreement or dismiss charges.

I mean, that was a big part of my work.

And I always thought, actually, that was like day-to-day having to explain things and have crises come in the door.

We had 400 people, it was the biggest public law office in the state of Minnesota, bigger than the Attorney General's office.

And so I think all of that prepared me for this.

I think the difference on this one is that

you are going all over the country

and you

are, when you're someone especially like me that likes to get to know people and go to every cafe in every county every year, you just have to find different ways to communicate with people.

So that's the first thing.

And then the second part of it is you just have to make sure you're true to yourself.

And, you know, part of me being back here this week was just everything that was happening.

And I wanted to be part of it.

I think that's part of leadership.

And I have been true to myself since the day that I announced this presidency.

presidential campaign in the middle of a river in the Mississippi River with four inches of snow on my head.

And the words I said then,

there we are, that we need to cross a river of our divides to get to a higher place of our politics.

and that this is about changing policy with bold ideas, yes.

But the only way we're going to get there is if we not just win, but we win big.

And I got to make that point at the last debate: that I am the candidate that from the very beginning has been talking about not just our fired-up base, which is fired up and is so important, but also bringing with us independents, Democrats that voted for Donald Trump, and there are some,

as well as

moderate Republicans and bringing bringing this in in a big coalition.

Because if you win big, you win, keep the House, but you win the U.S.

Senate, then you can get all these things done, like the climate change legislation we need to pass or the work that needs to be done on pharmaceutical prices, immigration reform, which is just waiting for a president to lead on.

So you have to win big.

And to do that,

you need to bring people with you and not shut them out.

And that's about policy, but it's also about tone.

And we are at a point where people used to tune in the president, no matter if they voted for them or not, because they thought it was part of their obligation as a citizen.

They'd have their kids watch the president.

I remember this growing up, even if you didn't agree with them.

But right now, parents are tuning down the volume because they don't want their kids to hear what this guy says.

The racism, the attacks on immigrants, the belittling of people in politics.

It's really outrageous.

It's outrageous for any first grade teacher because it's not what they want to teach their kids.

So changing that tone, and that's why I did the 100-day plan where you just have to change the tone and do things immediately differently so that you're not just waiting a year to pass a bill.

There's over a hundred things you can do without Congress, which are legal.

So, you know, I just think that is going to be a bit of this.

Imagine what it's going to be like for the media when you wake up and someone isn't mean tweeting at 5 a.m.

You guys are going to be like, what are we going to do?

We're going to have to go back to sleep.

It's going to be be rough.

We're going to take a short break here, but we'll have more with Amy Klobuchar in a moment.

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And we're back.

The impeachment news happened just as this year's Atlantic Festival began.

One year ago, when the last Atlantic Festival took place, another story focused the country's attention on DC.

The Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh were underway, and we were all talking about high school yearbooks, calendars, squee.

Remember that?

The path that led to Amy Klobuchar running for president arguably began with those hearings.

She had a breakout moment questioning the judge when she took a different tact from her colleagues.

Okay, I'm not going to ask about the yearbook.

So most people have done some drinking in high school and college, and many people even struggle with alcoholism and binge drinking.

My own dad struggled with alcoholism most of his life, and he got in trouble for it, and there were consequences.

After a back and forth with Kavanaugh,

there was this unforgettable moment.

Okay, drinking is one thing, but the concern is about truthfulness.

And in your written testimony, you said sometimes you had too many drinks.

Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn't remember what happened or part of what happened the night before?

No.

I remember what happened, and

I think you've probably had beer center, and

so's probably.

So you're saying there's never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before or part of what happened.

That's what you're asking about, yeah, blackout.

I don't know, have you?

Could you answer the question, Judge?

So you have, that's not happened.

Is that your answer?

Yeah, and I'm curious if you have.

I have no drinking problem, Judge.

Nor do I.

Okay, thank you.

When she joined me on stage in Washington, I asked Klobuchar to think back to what that was like.

So let's get back to our conversation recorded live at the Atlantic Festival.

Let me ask you, we're coming up on a year from the Kavanaugh hearings.

That was for a lot of people a moment where they saw you maybe for the first time or in a different light.

It was this exchange that you had with

the

then judge, Future Justice,

where he asked you if you'd ever gotten so drunk that you didn't remember things, and you responded in this very,

to me, watching it on TV, a very raw moment.

What was that like?

What was going on?

That couldn't have been planned.

No, in fact,

I later, Rose is here somewhere.

She was in our official office then, and now she's a head of our policy on the campaign.

But I remember saying to her later in the day, come on, you guys couldn't, there she is.

You couldn't predict that the nominee was going to ask me if I blacked out.

Come on.

We should have practiced.

But anyway, it was a complete surprise.

And what was surprising was that I had a different tone than a lot of my colleagues.

And I was actually trying to get at how you could have someone so credible as Dr.

Blasey Ford.

And then you had him saying that it didn't happen.

So I asked him, Well, maybe you were drinking so much back then,

which is my theory of the case, that you blacked out and you don't remember.

And I explained that I had alcohols in my family.

My dad

had three DWIs

the whole time I was growing up and that

you don't mess around with this stuff.

And the end of my story, by the way, is he finally had to choose between jail and treatment.

He chose treatment and in his words he was pursued by grace which is why I'm so focused on treating alcoholism and drug addiction and other things and mental health.

And he was pursued by grace and it changed his life and now he's 91 years old and he's in assisted living and his AA group still visits him there and in his words it's hard to get a drink around here anyway.

But

back to the Kavanaugh thing is what was so raw about that moment was just I was in shock that he was taking this partisan approach that didn't just bring in my mind him down except for the audience of one in the White House, but it didn't just bring him down.

It brought down the Supreme Court and all judges.

And so that was, I had that split second to think, well, I'm not going down with you.

I am not going to act like this.

No matter how rude you were to me, I'm not going to act like this.

And my other thought was

about really when you deal with alcoholics in your life, like I'm taking the key away from you, buddy.

I am not going to drive that car with you.

And so that's why I reacted that way.

And then he later apologized.

And, you know, I told him, okay, but when you have alcoholism in your life, that you, you know, you take this really seriously.

I mean, I don't have alcoholism in my life,

but it seems to me there are other things that I have that are private in my life that I would not want to talk about in front of the country and the world.

You have brought that into your public life.

It was a painful thing growing up, as you mentioned.

Yeah, but it always was.

So my dad was a columnist for the newspaper, and he covered the Vikings and was pretty well known.

And so those DWIs were actually in the newspaper.

So part of it was I felt okay talking about it my whole life because he talked about it.

You know, he talked about how he had struggled with alcoholism.

And so it gave me, because every so often, very rarely, people in AA or something come up and say, should you really be talking about it?

I go, well, here, read my dad's book.

And so

that gave me the feeling like I could talk about it.

And I also believe as a leader, just going beyond

Justice Kavanaugh,

we have an obligation.

If you have stories like this in your life, part of what you do when you lead is you make it so that people understand they're not alone and there's a reason you care about something and why you want to get it done, and then put out some ideas to get it done.

Because there's so much distrust right now in our politics.

The people just think with him in the White House and with some of the other things in the gridlock that you point out going on in the U.S.

Senate,

they just think, how can these people not do gun legislation?

How can they not do this?

So I think sharing truthful stories about yourself and is really part of being a leader.

And it's got to be connected with something.

You're not just doing it to just tell a story.

But for me, it's connected to my public life in two ways.

Maybe in three.

One is I had to try really hard to get to wherever I was.

The second is it's made me want to work on policies related to these, which I've done from the moment.

I got my first public job up through the Senate with the opioid crisis and coming out with this very strong mental health proposal when one in five Americans have struggled with that.

But the third way, which is more subtle, is that when you have something harder in your life and most people have something, a sibling, someone,

it's harder just to see things in extremes.

You have to see the gray areas

because if you don't, you can't love that person.

And so that's how I was going to go immediately to my Republican colleagues.

That seemed a little abrupt.

But you have to be able, if you're going to be a good leader, you have to be able to find common ground.

And while you don't like them for some reasons or you hate some of the policies that they espouse, if there are some things you can work with them on, you do that, including people within our own parties.

If they're rude to you or say something on TV, you know, there's another day.

You go on to fight another day.

to work with them on other things.

And so I think that has really shaped how I've been as a senator and a legislator in a very positive way.

And it's one of the reasons I passed over 100 bills where I've been the lead Democrat.

And that's because I know people well enough and they trust me and I'm able to get things done.

It seems like that's

an evolution of a process.

I want to just dwell for a moment on the history with your father because I think it is interesting that you had this moment in 1993 where there was a trial and you were part of the trial.

And so where you are on this now is not where you were

exactly in 93, right?

No, no, no, he was he had pled guilty to the DWI.

So it was just the issue was working with the judge about what the

that's funny you said that because I think in one of the books he referred to me as a prosecutor.

No, no.

So yeah, I didn't prosecute my own dad.

No, no, no.

I think he was saying it was kind of like tough love, right?

So that was very important to him in making the decision to go to seek treatment, but to go to treatment but we were all in there with him it's like an intervention you know with his minister and his lawyer and me that's all it was no I didn't prosecute him

it wasn't a trial but he was being sort of broad with his language

you know the way reporters sometimes are

I didn't want to go there

The Kavanaugh hearing was this really important moment for the country when the Me Too movement sort of moved into the political realm in a way that it had been

cascading in beforehand.

One of the things that's been interesting to me about this presidential race is we had a record number of women running in that there was more than one.

And in fact,

in fact, that first debate night with three of us on the stage, there were ultimately at the beginning six, but there were three of us on the stage.

That doubled the number of women, Democratic women who had ever been in a primary for president because it had only been three through history.

And there are the six of you, now it's five.

Senator Gillibrand dropped out.

Do you think that there

even though it seems like the Me Too movement has sort of moved to the back of the conversation now, is that

are we missing something that's going on?

No, I think, I mean,

one of the things that is good about what's happened is that for a while it seemed like it was all about prominent people and cases and some of those, you know, obviously are still going on.

But then what happened is two things.

One is that

we realize, and everyone knows this, that this isn't just about famous people, this is about the nurse in the hospital and the factory worker on the front line, that everyone should be in a safe workplace.

And I think a lot of workplaces had those conversations and

made those changes.

So, I think that's one thing.

Then, the second thing,

which is actually the exciting part to me, including the U.S.

Senate, I led the bill with Senator Blunt, worked with the House, and it was actually Klobuchar Blunt that changed the rules for sexual harassment reporting in the Senate because they were kind of a mess and done to protect politicians.

But the second thing is that you just have more women seeking positions of power.

There's that old saying, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

And so you have women running in record numbers.

You look at that 2018 election where we added more women

to the House and the Senate.

Record numbers were now up to what, like 24, 25 in the U.S.

Senate.

And I remember speaking of, you brought up that Trevor Noah show.

So I was on that show about a year and a half ago at the time.

I think we had 22 women or 20 women.

And I explained to him how in the history of the Senate, we have had about 2,000 men and only 50 women in the whole history of the Senate.

And he said, if a nightclub had numbers like that, they'd shut it down.

There's the Ruth Bader Ginsburg line where she was asked how many women on the Supreme Court would be enough, and she said nine.

Yeah, that's exactly.

That's a good answer.

But I just think that is the other thing that's come out of this is just women feeling emboldened to run more people of color, more diversity, men and women, in elected office.

And I think that is a really great outcome from all of this as well.

So I'd say those two things are going on.

One of the weird things also that weird and that it is the first time it's happening is that your husband and other husbands of candidates are out there.

I was standing in the lobby of one of the hotels in Houston for the debate, speaking to Kamala Harris's husband, who saw your husband.

They're a little support group.

They're all your husbands.

They have to go be surrogates with Kamala's husband, my husband, all know each other from the Senate.

So, and there's other spouses as well.

But yeah, they're funny.

They allegedly have a texting group.

I haven't seen it.

And they are,

you know, it's great.

They all three, I mean,

they're at a lot of things with us, which is it's just a different way for people to see the candidates and to have those male spouses.

I mean, it's an amazing thing.

So, and my husband has been with me on all my campaigns with our daughter.

And he's just been a big part of them.

He did do an interview recently on his own without any campaign staff there, right, Carly,

with the Baltimore Sun.

He teaches at Baltimore Law School and at Georgetown, but he's been, he's tenured at Baltimore.

And he,

that was when Trump was going after the city of Baltimore, so I defended Baltimore, and then all this came out that my husband teaches at Baltimore Law School, right?

And so he does this interview in the Baltimore Sun, and no one knew what he'd said, and it was all fine and about his work.

But

the pull-out quote in the paper was, yeah, yeah, sometimes I give my wife advice, but like a lot of spouses, she doesn't always take it.

It's that role reversal, though, right?

He actually has gone around, he's gone around a lot and given,

he gives speeches sometimes, and he's just been great in Iowa, New Hampshire, other places, so that's been nice.

My favorite story of him, he met with a woman, a sort of mid-level elected official in a county, in one of the smaller counties in Iowa.

And he's so excited.

He called me, and he met with her like an hour and a half, and she says, you got to call her I think it's good I think she's going to support you and I said okay great so we set up this call and she's all excited she has her sister on the line and then she says I got some great news for you I loved your husband got some great news I go what's that she goes you're in my top three

But you're all getting that all the time.

I will say I have some.

Steve Bullock, the governor

of Minnesota, was in Iowa at the state pride.

Governor of Montana was in Iowa.

And Governor Bullock said, I've learned what Iowa nice is.

It means I'm on your list.

And it was like a little bit of an edge in there.

Yeah, although we have achieved, we have the most endorsements, according to Iowa Starting Line, of current and former electors.

So it's pretty good.

But, you know, that's kind of the old-fashioned way to do politics.

And it does matter when it gets closer to those caucuses because people talk to each other, especially the legislators and former legislators.

Let's close with a couple of quick political questions.

You were just on a Blue Wall tour tour in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan.

You brought up this question of exciting the base versus winning over voters who voted for Democrats before but voted for Donald Trump.

Some of those voters, just by the numbers it would seem,

voted for Trump in 2016 and for you in 2018 in Minnesota, given

just how many votes you won.

Yeah, right?

You won.

It was like almost 300,000 people.

I got their votes for different than

when Hillary won in 2016.

I mean, just crack the code.

What is that?

That is, so, first of all, I will say I think we need both things.

We need a fired-up base, like we had in 2018, and voting, young people voting in record numbers, people of color voting in record numbers.

We have to keep that up.

That is so important.

And every they have the biggest stake in this.

People basically just look at the groups that Donald Trump has gone after, and you will see some pretty fired-up people and some pretty hurt people.

And so it's very important for us to keep reaching out to our Democratic base.

And I think we've been doing that with all of us running, and we will continue to do that and not take anyone for granted.

But the second piece of this is we know nearly 10% of those Donald Trump voters had voted for Barack Obama.

And I always like to say about Barack Obama something that David Brooks said when Barack Obama left.

He said, you don't know what you got till it's gone.

And that is for sure the dignity that he and Michelle had in that office.

Well, you look at those voters, what were they looking for?

Well, they still weren't felt that they weren't and were right getting a fair shake in the economy.

They're looking for something different.

Their drug prices are too high.

And they thought this guy would, you know, his name's on hotels.

And I thought that's, you know, I thought, well, at least he'll do infrastructure on election night.

Far from it.

He just hasn't made true on a lot of the promises that he made to working people.

And so the reason I picked those states, the Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, those are three states we should have won, and we didn't.

Base turnout wasn't as good as it should have been, but it was also about places like western Pennsylvania.

And look at what happened since then, right?

Connor Lamb wins there.

We win the governor's race in the state of Michigan, where she runs on the slogan, fix the damn roads, you know, very direct.

Wisconsin, we beat Scott Walker.

And that is because we had candidates that brought people in, didn't shut them out, and because people were starting to see by 2018 that Donald Trump wasn't being honest with them, that he would rather lie than lead, that he's running the country like a game show.

And so making the case to those voters and getting people excited, and I would add even more voters just because it keeps getting worse and worse and worse,

is something, and I think you can do two things at once.

I do, because everyone, people have a lot in common in this country, and we have to remember that what unites us is bigger than what divides us when it comes to wanting to have affordable education and doing something about those health care premiums.

I prefer public option and bringing down the pharma prices.

And immigration reform, which we passed in the Senate with Republican votes before, and I know where those votes are.

We can get that down when that guy is not in the White House.

Let me ask you this.

You said on that tour you were in Detroit, I think is where you said this.

You talked about, you were talking about some of your competitors, and you said that some of these ideas would work well in a faculty lounge and maybe should be less than that.

I said they would score 100% in the faculty lounge.

Wow.

So I'll let you do your own material.

It seemed pretty clear what you were pointing out there, given that one of your competitors is...

She was a law school.

Yes, she is.

No, no, no.

It actually, I promise, it was more about a lot of the ideas, because it wasn't just about

it.

It was about all these ideas.

And I think they're good, and they're good for discussion.

But I think if we really want to be bold, then we've got to win, and we've got to have a candidate that is going to do something about these things, but get them done.

And that is everything from, I mean, my differences, right?

I want to see the public option because I think once we do that, that's what Barack Obama wanted to do from the beginning.

You can do it with Medicare or Medicaid, and it's a non-profit option that people can buy into.

One of the bills, the Medicaid option, Bernie was on that bill, but it doesn't kick 149 million people off their insurance in four years.

I don't think that's doable.

I don't think we're going to do that.

And so I just think we need to be honest with people instead of just coming up with these bumper sticker solutions that sound appealing, and then you lift up the hood, and it's a little different than the bumper sticker.

So there's that.

I want to double Pell Grants for people that need them and that is I would also double eligibility up to $100,000 in income and then double the amount of Pell Grants from $6,000 to $12,000.

That's a good chunk of money to help people with college.

So instead of the free college idea.

And I would give free community college, that is the fastest growing area of job growth in our country.

It makes me think last Friday when the climate strike was happening here in DC, I was walking along the route of it and I saw some people, and you know, not to overstate what any particular protester is doing, but some people were doing chalk on the streets and one of them is writing, burn the government, don't burn oil.

And

what it made me think of is that there are all these big promises that are being made and what happens if one of you wins and if it's one of the people who's making big promises and those promises don't come to be and what that does to voters if they see that.

And it seems like that's part of the concern you have.

Well, it is and also that you want to have things that will work for bringing people with you and that you can get done.

It's a two-fer.

But I don't want to at all concede that these aren't bold ideas.

We have not done anything on climate change.

So saying that, which most of the candidates in the race do, that you want to go carbon neutral by 2050, you want to have a goal by 2030, bring back the clean power rules, get back into the international climate change agreement, bring back the gas mileage standards, those three things you can do without Congress, right?

But they never really took effect because Barack Obama had proposed them and then Donald Trump won.

Those are big, bold things to do.

Immigration reform, imagine the change to give people a path to citizenship and to allow dreamers to stay.

Imagine the change to start investing in impoverished communities and in communities of color.

Imagine the difference that's going to make at this point in our country's history.

So I don't think those are small things.

I think they're bold things, but they're only achievable if we win and we win big.

Last question here.

Over the next 14 months, now that impeachment is moving forward, is it better for the government and is it better for politics if President Trump is removed from office or if the impeachment happens?

I'm not going down that road with you.

Just because I think that we have to look at this as our constitutional obligation instead of obviously there's going to be political ramifications.

You want to think about how you want to explain it to people.

I think explaining it in that security lens like those seven members of Congress new members did who had served in our military is most important.

And that's what it is.

It is a security issue.

He has crossed the line over and over again and now there's a tape to prove it.

And so that's

I think that is our constitutional duty as beyond, way beyond political considerations.

Because if we're only looking at everything through a political lens, we are no better than him because he is only looking at it through a partisan and a personal enrichment lens.

That's how he sees the world.

And we must be better than that as a country.

Well, I wish we had another 30 minutes to keep going here, but you've got a schedule to keep.

Everybody else has been sitting here.

Senator Amy Klosher, thank you for being here.

Thank you, Isaac.

It was great.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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