Webcast transcript:
Willy Walker: Welcome to my first live Walker Webcast with my great old friend, Senator Michael Bennet from the great state of Colorado.
Michael Bennet: I’m honored. Thank you for having me.
Willy Walker: So, let me do a brief introduction, which isn't really needed, and then we'll dive into it. Michael F Bennet is an American businessman, lawyer, and politician serving as the senior United States senator from Colorado, a seat he has held since 2009. Bennet previously worked as a managing director for the Anschutz Investment Company, chief of staff to Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, and superintendent of Denver Public Schools.
So first of all, I love the fact that the description of you has three different careers: businessman, lawyer and politician. There are not many people who can play in different lanes, if you will. Why politics?
Michael Bennet: I also wonder what happened to Mayor Hickenlooper.
Willy Walker: He's now your junior senator from the great state of Colorado.
Michael Bennet: I feel really lucky to have as checkered a career as I've had. I think it's rare to have the chance to have experience in the private sector, in the public sector, and then end up here without having spent my life in politics. I spent my life outside of politics. And I hope that I've been able to bring some perspective from my business life and some perspective having been the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools most recently before I was in this job, that is different from the political experience other people here have had. I don't denigrate that experience. You learn a lot about yourself, a lot about your state and the country when you're running for office. But it's not the only experience that's valuable.
Willy Walker: You were born in New Delhi, India, yet you ran for president of the United States. I thought you had to be born in the United States of America to run for the President of the United States?
Michael Bennet: You have to be a natural born citizen. I was a natural born citizen because my parents were U.S. citizens who were working for our embassy in New Delhi. So even though I was born in New Delhi, I'm a natural born citizen. There may be other barriers to my being president of the United States, but that's not one of them.
Willy Walker: We'll talk about that in a bit. So, you grew up in Washington, D.C., St. Albans to Wesleyan University, where your father was president of Wesleyan.
Michael Bennet: After I was there.
Willy Walker: That's neat. I mean, so you were in the third generation of Bennet’s to go to Wesleyan, right? How did your dad end up becoming president?
Michael Bennet: The guy that was his predecessor in the job, was somebody that just had been hired and he just couldn't connect with the Wesleyan community. They decided they wanted somebody who could connect. My dad wasn't an academic, but he had a Ph.D. and he had gone there. And I think that for a variety of reasons, that suited Wesleyan purposes. And he loved that he was there. It was the best job he ever had I think. He thought it was the best job he ever had.
Willy Walker: And then at the Yale Law School, you were editor of the Yale Law Review.
Michael Bennet: Yeah.
Willy Walker: Pretty heady stuff.
Michael Bennet: Yeah, it was the three really most luxurious years of my life in that place. And what I mean, the hard part was getting in. It was really, really hard to get in there. Now, it would be impossible to get in there. But once you got in, it was three years of basically doing whatever it was you wanted to do. You know, there were a lot of great people there too. Enjoyed it.
Willy Walker: Other than Amy Coney Barrett, everyone on the Supreme Court either went to Harvard or Yale?
Michael Bennet: That was true. In fact, that may still be true. Yeah, I haven't been tracking in the last couple. There was a time when half were from Yale and the other half were from Harvard. You know that I think is a shame. I think people ought to come from all over the country, on the court, in the Senate, for that matter. I think we've over emphasized Ivy League credentialing.
Willy Walker: If you will, banged around a little bit of doing some politics, went to work for Dick Celeste out in Ohio, work for a law firm here in D.C. You and your dad actually overlapped in the Clinton administration, right? How is that?
Michael Bennet: I was trying to escape from my law firm, which was, you know, a good law firm in Washington, D.C.
Willy Walker: You were working for Lloyd Cutler?
Michael Bennet: Yeah. I actually literally was working for him on a case with him. And still, I just didn't like practicing in a big firm like that. So, I left to go work for Jamie Gorelick, who was then the deputy attorney general. And that was the same time my dad was working in the State Department for former President Bill Clinton.
Willy Walker: Would you ever see him?
Michael Bennet: No. I'd see him socially but not from a work standpoint.
Willy Walker: And so, you head west and end up meeting Susan when you're living in Montana?
Michael Bennet: No. I really liked the job at the Justice Department, but it kind of was coming to an end. I went back up to New Haven to be in the US attorney's office up there. On kind of a special detail, and I just reached the conclusion that I wasn't put on this earth to practice law. I just didn't enjoy it. I knew a lot of people who did. One was Susan whom I met in Washington. And four months after we met, she announced that she was going to move to Montana. So, it was too early in the relationship to say, “don't move” and it was too late in our relationship to say, “see you later”. So, I actually drove her out there. I spent four months there, ran out of money and then came back here and went to work at the law firm. We got to Denver because she got a job offer from the same group that she had worked for in Montana, which was the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. It's now called Earthjustice and I until about a week or ten days before I was getting married on October 25th of 1997, I was unemployed, which was not the condition that I wanted to show up at my wedding in Arkansas, but Phil hired me a week before my wedding.
Willy Walker: How did you get to Phil?
Michael Bennet: I sent two letters to Colorado, (actually one is here. I'll show it to you.) One was to John Hickenlooper, who had been recommended because he went to Wesleyan. And I met a guy named David Skaggs, who is a congressman from Boulder, who was a client at the law firm where I was working. And he had gone to Wesleyan and Yale law school. And he said, I know this guy, John Hickenlooper, and you should send him your letter. I got no reply from John Hickenlooper. I sent another letter to Phil, and he wrote back and called me back and he said, “I understand you want to get out of the law. Why don't you come here and talk to me?” So, I flew on my nickel, of course, to Denver and stayed at the comfort of the Anschutz headquarters on my nickel and he hired me.
Willy Walker: I remember you and I had lunch in Denver when you were working on the Regal Cinemas roll up I guess or buyout, you were buying debt on Regal Cinemas, which is now part of AMC?
Michael Bennet: No, it's separate.
Willy Walker: It is. Okay. That's been that meme stock that just kind of kept on going for a period of time. And Adam Aron, who used to run Vail Resorts, is running AMC, right?
Michael Bennet: I saw Adam not that long ago. And listen to the tale of that crazy meme stock. It's really nuts. I'm not in that business anymore obviously but it was an amazing opportunity. It was three really significant movie theater operations. It was $3 billion debt, which I bought pennies on the dollar and the subject of the bank debt from United Artists Theaters, Edwards Theaters and Regal Cinemas. We created what was at the time, the largest motion picture exhibitor in the world. And we took the $3 billion of debt down to $400 million debt and they just spat cash is unbelievable. So great.
Willy Walker: So, I'm going to run through the next two stops because I want to get into the meat of some issues going on here now before you get to run off and go vote.
So, to John Hickenlooper as his chief of staff as mayor of Denver, then you become the head of the school board, the Denver Public School System, and you run that very successfully. And then when Ken Salazar goes into the Obama administration, you get appointed by the governor to be the senator from Colorado.
I'll never forget the day that you got sworn in and I was in the observation deck up above and all the senators lined up and shook your hand after you'd gotten sworn in. Take me back to that moment, because I have to tell you, as an outsider, just watching that was just the history, formality and practice everything that makes this body what it is just kind of shown in that moment.
Michael Bennet: I have to go back to the appointment to begin with because that I was appointed, I was a school superintendent and all of a sudden I was appointed to the U.S. Senate. That doesn't happen very often. And, you know, at least maybe not in retrospect, but prospectively a lot of people thought Bill Ritter, our governor, was crazy for having made the appointment that he made. And I certainly read headlines like “WTF!!” that really makes you feel good. And just like starting anything new, if you are a decent human being, I think you have a sense of “how did I get here?” And “Who am I to represent all these people?”
Now, 13 or 14 years later, if there's anybody in the state who's visited more of the state than I have in more town halls or conversations, and I feel home everywhere there, that's a great joy personally for me, because I love the state. It's a beautiful place and I think it's a crucible of American politics. I think that Colorado's politics are really America’s politics. That day, it was a pretty amazing thing because you're seeing these people on TV all the time and now all of a sudden you're sitting there and they're sitting across the table from you, and there's John Kerry eating red Jell-O for dessert. You know, this is crazy.
But Willy, I've thought a lot about what attributes these people all have in common. There are 100 people. There have only been 2,000 people in the history of our country that have been in the Senate, 330 million Americans and 100 people on the floor. And my conclusion is that it's luck – it may be bad luck, not necessarily good luck, but it's luck that has put us here. And I think that that ought to give us a little bit of grace.
Willy Walker: So, that first election campaign, you go from never having run for anything before to a heavyweight prize fight. I mean, it's just like you're thrown right into the deep end of the pool. Talk for a moment about that campaign against Ken Buck because you won it. But I mean, you've gone from 0 to 60 as far as putting together a campaign staff and learning how to campaign. Now your old hat at it and you know how to do it quite well. But back then?
Michael Bennet: I didn't have any idea. I had 3% name I.D. at the beginning.
Willy Walker: 3%? Wow.
Michael Bennet: I had never run a campaign. I had no idea. But I had an amazing team of people. I hired an incredible campaign manager, Craig Hughes. I hired an amazing chief of staff here, a guy named Guy Cecil, who told me he was meeting me for dinner, that there's no way that he would ever come to work with me. And he did. I would have lost that campaign if it hadn't been for his willingness to do that. And as the year developed, it became a horrible year for Democrats. I mean, I was voting for the Affordable Care Act. I had town hall after town all after town hall in rural Colorado with this deck of slides that I put together myself, trying to explain to people, using the same stuff when I was closing schools in the Denver public schools. And now I was trying to explain, here's why I voted the way I voted. And I think in the end, I survived a really terrible year for Democrats, in part because Ken, who's a friend of mine now and a member of the delegation, found himself expressing a somewhat more right-wing view than probably Colorado was going to be comfortable with. And I showed up everywhere, and we did what we were supposed to do. I'm not sure I've ever worked as relentlessly in my life and most of that was about trying to protect Bill Ritter's honor. I wanted to demonstrate that his decision to put me in the chair to begin with hadn't been a stupid one.
Willy Walker: And then in 2016, when Trump won, you won by five points. I mean, five points is a wide margin. You won handily that time.
Michael Bennet: But another tough year in Colorado. You know, while Trump was winning Pueblo County by ten, I was winning Pueblo County by ten. And so now I picked another terrible year to run.
Willy Walker: So, talk for a moment. You're on AG finance and intelligence, right? And so, on AG for a moment now, natural resources, water. Yesterday you and I flew east, and Senator Tester was on the plane with us, and I asked him about Montana, and he said he's never seen a drier winter in his entire farming life. He says he's never seen less water. And we've got a real issue on water in the west.
Michael Bennet: He and I spent a lot of time talking about that. The crisis is extraordinary. I mean, in Colorado, we had the three worst fires in the state's history two years ago. Last year, we didn't have a fire. We had smoke for a lot of that year that obscured the mountains. You couldn't see them, you know, and nobody lives in Colorado, so they can't see the mountains. There were days when there were health warnings because people couldn't go out. We had the worst air quality in the world, as did Utah on one day that year. That led me and Mitt Romney to take a rafting trip together on the Colorado River. But we didn't have a fire until the day before New Year's Eve, when more than a thousand families in Boulder County lost their houses the day before New Year's to a brushfire. It's destroyed everything that they had ever worked for. And so, the Colorado River is empty. I mean, you could just go on and on and on. One of my great frustrations is that I think we've done a terrible job. Those of us that are advocates for doing so for climate change had a terrible job of trying to explain to American people what this transition is actually going to look like. You know, and that's made it hard for us to get over this hurdle. Or to put another way, it's made it very easy for people like Joe Manchin to be able to flick us away with this little finger and not even break a sweat. We just have to do a better job. And I think the people that are representing the West, where we are seeing that kind of dramatic reduction in water resources and fires, we've got to make sure that we're elevating our voice here to get anything done.
Willy Walker: So, on finance, was Jerome Powell’s house confirmation came to finance? It was banking. But you voted for him to be confirmed for another term as Fed chair. What's your take on the U.S. economy right now?
Michael Bennet: What's my take? Well, you know better than I do, but I'll give you my take. Actually, I think that obviously we're facing serious inflationary pressures. I had a conversation with Chairman Powell not that long ago about, my concerns that the length of the Fed's intervention, the size of quantitative easing, the zero rates for as long as we had them, we're having partly, in addition to the scarcity of housing that we have in Colorado and the fast that Colorado is a place that people want to live. The one other unintended consequence of these interventions, which is not to say whether they're right or whether they're wrong, is that housing prices are just going through the roof. Colorado asset inflation is just unbelievable. And even before we were in the inflationary period today, if I had to summarize my last 14 years of town hall meetings, it's really, really easy to do it. It's people coming and saying, we're working really hard. We're killing ourselves, and no matter what we do – we can't afford some combination of housing, health care, higher education, or early childhood education. You know, if we can even find early childhood education because no early childhood educator can afford to live in Colorado, you know, we can't save.
And to me, that's an antidotal reflection of an economy that for 15 years has worked really well for the top 10% of Americans and hasn't really worked for anybody else. So, I think we've got a real opportunity to ask ourselves right now with the realization about the mistakes and the misjudgments that we've made about what China's participation in the global economy would look like, I think we have a real opportunity to think about it. Instead of, you know, how we think about privileging people. They want to make stuff as cheaply as possible in China over everything else. We start thinking about how we can create an economy that can protect or create supply chains. We could have onshore manufacturing with the kind of energy prices that we have in this country. And I just think there's a real opportunity here that President Obama didn't pursue. President Clinton didn't pursue. President Trump didn't pursue a plan that can allow us to try to create an economy that when the economy grows, it grows for everybody, not just the people at the very top. Because I don't think democracy can sustain this level of income inequality and this level of economic mobility for another 50 years. I think it's impossible.
Willy Walker: Let’s talk about early childhood education, something that you've been very involved with. What happens to ‘Build Back Better’? Is it dead?
Michael Bennet: I think it's going to be very hard to get it over the finish line. Probably if it does get over the finish line, probably the stuff that will remain are the climate provisions, which I think are important provisions. But, you know, I'm deeply disappointed that we didn't create a more coherent package. And, obviously, that piece that I led was the enhanced child tax credit, enhanced earned income tax credit. One of those is Bennet Brown and the other is Brown Bennet there’s one I like better than the other. But they were Joe Biden's very significant tax cut for working people and the child tax credit itself meant that families were getting 450 bucks a month to help pay the rent, to feed their kids, to pay for a little extra daycare so they could actually stay at work. And then with these inflationary pressures costing families, on average $300 if they had that's $450 bucks now, that would have made a big difference. And I couldn't persuade Joe Manchin that it wasn't welfare, and I couldn't persuade him of what's been true everywhere else that's got a child allowance like the one we have, which is that the countries that have those have higher workforce participation rates than we have. And we've now experimented with that for six months in America. And we saw that people were not disincentivized from working. They were.
Willy Walker: Intelligence. Ukraine. Russia. Obviously, there's things that you see on the Intelligence Committee that you can't talk about. But I'm just curious as it relates to insight into the conflict, and being a third party to the conflict and that line of potentially getting pulled in. Staying on it. My take of the Biden administration's policy has been pretty fantastic, too, threading a very thin needle here. Michael, what's your take on that?
Michael Bennet: Yeah, I agree. I mean, first of all, the committees and you just said one of the reasons so one of the reasons I like AG is that it's not partisan. We have regional differences. We don't have partisan differences. The Intelligence Committee also, you know, we meet in secret and the partisanship of that sort of finance is brutal on that score generally. But I do think it was an amazing place to be for the last 18 months, watching Putin build up his troops around Ukraine and frankly, watching him make some really fundamental mistakes partly because of who he is, but partly because of the design of his society. I'm a huge believer in democracy, notwithstanding all the dysfunction that I've seen since I've been here, which is staggering levels of dysfunction compared to what I would expect. I actually believe more in democracy today than I did when I walked into this place. And what Putin has just done is a real demonstration of why totalitarianism is a terrible way for humans to organize themselves. Nobody gave him the bad news about the condition of his army and how poor the buildup had been. Nobody told him that the Ukrainians were going to fight back. We knew they would. We didn't know exactly what would happen. We thought Putin was going to be in Kiev in 72 hours, but we thought that he was going to have an insurgency basically forever, that the Ukrainians would never give up. Well, we turned out to be a lot righter than he was. And then the third piece of it was, I think he deeply underestimated what the global community was going to be. And I do think the president deserves credit there. I’ll say the folks that do deserve the most credit are the Ukrainian people. And their bravery has been so inspiring to democracies around the world that it's amazing to see people all over the free world saying to people like me, you got to do more. You got to do more. You got to do more. You know, and that's gratifying for people who think that our democracy is fragile, which I believe and are worried about the condition of it. We're actually seeing a real-life example of democracy taking on totalitarianism.
And then the final point is the balance. When we have something like this, everyone in Congress becomes a general. You know, we all are the experts on whether you should put planes in, or not put planes in. And what is Putin going to view as escalatory and not? And you know what the truth is just like any human endeavor. It's all iterative. You know, you can't predict it all. And what you've got to do is have really good people. You have to do every day check where you are on the line in terms of, you know, inadvertently put as in a World War III kind of situation or not. And you gotta get right up to that line. And I think the Biden administration, working with our allies, has really done a good job of that. And Zelinski has done an excellent job of leading. It's just you can't say enough about what the Ukrainian people are doing, I mean, they are for the moment, beating Russia. It may not end up that way. I hope it does end up that way.
Willy Walker: The Roe v Wade leak from the Supreme Court. You think that that has a big impact on the November elections?
Michael Bennet: First of all, I think it's really unfortunate that it leaked. As a lawyer, I think those are the kind of institutional conventions that you wish people would pay attention to. It bums me out that our constitutional responsibility here to advise and consent has been turned into just one more raw partisan exercise. When I was in law school, every time a judge got 95 or 98 votes when they one on the court reaffirmed the independence of the judiciary.
Willy Walker: Did the Bork hearings change all that forever?
Michael Bennet: Well, it certainly was the beginning of the end. But there was a moment when people started to filibuster circuit court judges, which had never happened before. And, you know, it went tit for tat, tit for tat until McConnell finished it off, you know, with Gorsuch. I think this is 50 years of a relentless effort to reverse Roe versus Wade. I can't predict the effect it's going to have in the midterms. But I will say this: it's now incumbent on those of us that believe that a woman's right to choose to make sure that we've got a pro-choice choice majority in the House and a pro-choice majority in the Senate. You know, and whether we're voting for Democrats or Republicans, we need to be voting for people that believe in enshrining that right in the statute books, since it's no longer going to be in the Constitution.
Willy Walker: Guns. You're a gun owner. You're from a western state. But in 2013, you voted against it was Dianne Feinstein who proposed the Assault Weapon Ban that you voted against. And yet you are for universal background checks and Buffalo, we've gotten more people killed. Colorado has had a tragic history as it relates to gun violence.
Michael Bennet: It’s terrible. I have three daughters, as you know, the oldest one, Caroline, was born the year after Columbine.
Willy Walker: I remember it so distinctly. I know exactly where I was. It was like 911. Exactly the same thing.
Michael Bennet: I was at the Houston airport working for Phil and we were... And so, my kids, like so many kids in America, have grown up in the shadow of gun violence in in our country in ways that you and I did not grow up, in ways that no other generation of Americans or I would say anybody living in the industrialized world. There are failed states where kids have to worry about gunfire as much as they have to here but no other civilized country. And I did vote against Dianne’s bill because I thought it was an obsolete approach. It was an old approach. But I think background checks would be an important thing for us to do. Also, high-capacity magazines. I mean, there are things that we can do. And Colorado is, as you say, a western state. And with our friend John Hickenlooper's leadership, we've addressed some of these issues. I mean, we passed background checks in Colorado after the Aurora movie theater shooting, which was just so catastrophic for our state. We limited the size of magazines. And it's impossible for me to go down to the floor here all the time. And I say, come down here and tell me how you can say Colorado is less safe having background checks in place that prevent every year a handful of people from buying guns who are convicted felons, who are murderers, domestic abusers. It's impossible to make that case.
Willy Walker: So, I think you're being called for a vote. We have a little more time. So, I was going to jump because I thought this is my last question, too, but I was going to jump to who's the Democratic nominee in 2024 and who's the Republican nominee in 2024?
Michael Bennet: I think that you'd have to say that Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee and Joe Biden is the likely Democrat.
Willy Walker: Interesting. You think the president will run for re-election?
Michael Bennet: I mean, I don’t know. I look at the list of people that publish from time to time. And I would say, of all the people on that list he is likely to be the nominee in 2024 more than anybody else.
Willy Walker: You talked about when you first came in, the name recognition when you ran for reelection, getting the 3% of Coloradans, knowing who you were. In 2019, you went on the floor of the Senate and gave a speech talking about the shutting down of the government and the impact of it, and basically saying to Ted Cruz, in 2013, you voted for a shutdown in a Democratic administration that caused significant damage don't kind of turn the tables and that video went viral and was the most watched may still be the most watched C-SPAN video ever. Talk for a moment about seeing that happen on something that you've done. In other words, you obviously have a high-profile job. Lots of people know you are. I traveled to the East Coast with you yesterday and walked through the airport, everyone knows who you are. But what was it like when that truly went viral where millions and millions of people are watching it?
Michael Bennet: I think it hit a nerve. For me, it was an amazing moment just personally, because I was not intending on doing it. I was just sitting on the floor next to Doug Jones, my colleague from Alabama, where we spent the whole time looking like this (over his shoulder), like I was a crazy person. But I listened to Ted Cruz and the guy just goes out there and dissembles, dissembles, and dissembles. You know, he did it again on the 6th of January. You know, when he stood up on the floor and he said how we were disrespecting Donald Trump's supporters by certifying the election, when my view was, it was exactly the opposite. Ted Cruz was disrespecting people by not telling them the truth about what had happened in the election and that he owed them the truth. It was the same kind of thing that day, and I just kind of lost my mind because I have had enough of it. And I knew what it felt like to the people in Colorado in 2013 when he was shutting the government down, while we were basically under a 500-year flood in my state. And by the way, when people of every single political stripe were coming together to actually get the job done and do their work at the local level. That's the way I think that this place ought to be. I'm not naive. I mean, we have partisan differences, but if we really think that this democracy is going to succeed as a perpetual game of shirts and skins, I think that's totally impossible. It cannot happen where you substitute your preferred version of one-party rule for my version of one-party rule. That's not the way this is supposed to work.
This is the genius of democracy: the way this is supposed to work is not that we are supposed to agree with each other. That is not why the founders created a democratic republic. They created it on the theory that we would disagree with each other because there was no king or tyrant to tell us what to think. And out of those disagreements, out of those clashes, we would create not shabby compromises, but more imaginative and durable proposals than any king or tyrant could come up with on their own. And if this place can't operate that way, then the country cannot operate that way. If a country can't operate that way. We're gonna have a very hard time competing with Beijing. You know, just to pick one example, and I think if we do figure out how to unlock the genius of this pluralistic system, there's not a country in the world we're not going to be able to compete with.
Willy Walker: Well, on that system, you need to go vote. Thank you, Senator. It's a real pleasure.
Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Senator Bennet. And we'll be back next week with another Walker Webcast. Thanks very much.
