-You were here in June 2017. -Yeah.
-And I remember spending the whole day
making sure I could say your last name right.
And now you're so well-known, it just rolls off my tongue.
-Yeah. -Are you just as surprised
at the reaction you've gotten in these early days
of sort of announcing your candidacy?
-Yeah, just the speed of it.
I mean, obviously, we were hoping for a good reaction.
We were hoping for a good response.
But the way this thing has taken off
has passed even our most optimistic scenarios.
So now we've got a lot of work to do to make sure we have
the organizing and the substance behind it
to really take us all the way, but it's a fantastic beginning.
-In the early days, before you had name and face recognition,
were there humbling moments
when you were out on the campaign trail?
-Oh, yeah. I mean, not that long ago,
I was getting ready to board a flight to New Hampshire.
A few people recognized me, came up, said hello.
And then, the lady standing right next to me said,
"You must be Pete." And I was like, "Yeah."
She clearly had seen these interactions.
And we had a nice little chat.
She said, "Why are you going to New Hampshire?"
I said, "Well, 'cause of the campaign, of course."
She said, "Oh, right, right, right.
What station are you a reporter for?"
[ Laughter ]
It was one of those moments that cut me back down to size.
-Yeah.
-I forgot that not everybody knows who I am.
But, you know, that's the thing you gotta remember is,
you can feel like -- You can get into this bubble
and feel like everybody's heard your message
when actually a lot of people
still haven't dialed in for the process yet.
They're not following the blow-by-blow.
And my job is to find as many different ways as possible
to get the message out to new people.
-I want to ask real quick, before I get back
to your campaign and your candidacy,
what was your initial reaction to what we saw today
from Barr and the release of the Mueller report?
-I mean, I guess it confirmed a lot of things
that we were worried about,
that we have a president who acts in a self-serving way,
that there was a lot of behavior that was, at best, unethical
and legally problematic, to put it charitably.
And, you know, the way that the Attorney General
conducted himself, as though he were the personal attorney
of the President, was incredibly troubling, too.
At the same time, I think, politically,
I'm not sure it will change much.
And it's one more reminder that if we really want
to send Trumpism into the history books,
the best thing we can do is defeat it decisively
at the ballot box in 2020. -You have --
[ Cheers and applause ]
They're, uh...
[ Cheers and applause continues ]
I'm very good at, uh...
I'm very good at judging how the audience feels about something.
They're split right down the middle on this.
-Yeah. [ Laughter ]
-You have a military background.
One of the other things that's been true, I think,
for the last two years but especially sort of
upholding the focus today is that Donald Trump
sort of always seems to want to dismiss military intelligence
while at the same time boasting about
what a great supporter of the military he is.
Is that a hypocrisy that is -- do you feel more acutely
felt by you because of your military background?
-Yeah, I mean, the thing that's upsetting is when you're --
especially in military intelligence,
when you're deployed, like when I was in Afghanistan,
you do work believing --
You know, the highest honor, really, that could happen to you
as a member of the intelligence community
is that your work goes to a policymaker
to help them make a decision.
You believe that they read these things carefully.
And when people are putting their lives on the line
in order to support U.S. security
through good intelligence, you know,
that whole system rests on the belief
that the president, the generals,
that they're using that infor-- or at least reading it, right?
But that they are using it wisely.
To see the way that intelligence is being politicized,
to see the way that military families are being treated
as props by this president is demoralizing.
And it's one more reason why it might not be a bad idea
to have somebody in the White House who actually served.
-You -- [ Cheers and applause ]
I think there's this question,
and, obviously, in order to be
a successful Democratic candidate,
you have to bring together people
from many diverse backgrounds.
It's obviously a more diverse voting base
than I think what you think of
as sort of a historically Republican voting base.
Yet you -- So, when you make a decision, like,
do you just commit to the Democratic base?
Or when you make an approach to Trump voters,
how do you speak to them?
What message is it that you, or any of your colleagues
who are trying to get this Democratic nomination,
approach Trump voters?
What's the message you try to give?
-Well, look, there are some voters
who we're never gonna get through to.
But there are many others that I think we can.
If somebody voted repeatedly Democratic
and then voted for this President,
out of any number of reasons, but basically voted
to burn the house down,
I want that voter back voting Democrat again.
And they're -- -'Cause they're sitting there
in a house that burned down, and they're like, "Oh, no."
[ Laughter ]
-Yeah. -"This was a terrible idea."
[ Laughter ]
-Well, you know, to some extent,
it came from a level of frustration around the system.
And that's not to excuse the racism and other things
that went into that campaign.
But I think people are more susceptible to those messages
of racism and xenophobia if they also feel
a certain level of insecurity or uncertainty
in their economic and social lives.
And so what I think we've got to do is,
we've got to reach out to those voters,
reminding them that we're the ones trying to get you a raise,
we're the ones trying to get paid family leave,
we're the ones trying to stop the Republican Congress
from taking away your healthcare.
And while we do that -- and this is the important
thing alongside that -- we never budge on our bedrock commitment
to racial and social justice.
'Cause that's where our moral authority as a party
comes from in the first place.