Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: talking politics, and history, with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown – he’s up for reelection this year, in a state where Biden got only 45%.  But first: what is happening with the Trump campaign?  He seems to be losing his grip.  Harold Meyerson will comment, in a minute.
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This past week, Kamala has been soaring and Trump seems to have been floundering. For comment, we turn to Harold Meyerson. Of course, he’s editor-at-large of the American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Flounderings are us, Jon. So this should be fine.

JW: The New York Times poll, which for months found Biden a few points behind Trump in the swing states, released a new poll over the weekend that showed Kamala leading Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania by four points in each state, 50 to 46. That is a pretty dramatic shift.

HM: Oh, it’s a huge dramatic shift — and it mirrors some other dramatic shifts that different polls have picked up. Kamala is now generally viewed as having a small lead over Trump nationally. There was a Financial Times poll that showed when voters assessed who would be better on the economy, which Trump had been beating Biden on by wide margin since for a very long time they were about tied. Kamala was, I think, at the same level as Trump, which is a serious improvement over Biden and suggests that whatever remaining anti-Biden sentiment about inflation was bringing Biden down, it doesn’t quite seem to be attached to the vice president.

JW: While Kamala was on this tour of swing states last week, meeting big, excited crowds, Trump mostly stayed home at Mar-a-Lago, and just sort of complained about the unfairness of it all. His campaign wants him to go after Kamala on what polls show are Democrats’ vulnerabilities. They want him to talk about the border. They want him to keep talking about inflation. So two weeks ago, at first, he went to Chicago to the Black Journalist Conference, and he did attack Kamala, but it was for not really being Black. You have any idea why he thought that would be a good idea?

HM: Well, it’s in line with his whole campaign, even before he was running for president, to convince people that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. I mean, he creates false lives for people he views as his adversaries. There is this section of Trump’s base that eats his stuff up, but there’s also a section of the American public that says, “Are you nuts?” And what Trump actually said was that it’s only recently that she’s claimed a Black identity.  That leaves a big question mark over when she went to Howard University having decided to do that at age 17, which was a little over four decades ago. That doesn’t sound too recent to me.

JW: And then the next week he went to Georgia for his one campaign appearance that week to campaign for Republicans there. But he went off script, off the prompter and spent a while attacking the Republican Governor Brian Kemp for not coming up with those 11,800 votes, he needed in 2020. What does that tell us about Trump’s strategic thinking?

HM: It suggests that if there’s strategic thinking, it gets overridden by his general bouts of rage and what he views as damage to himself. So I mean, this is Trump unbound, which is exactly what his campaign advisers keep trying to tamp down. But you can only keep the man unbound for so long apparently.

JW: And last week, while Kamala and Tim Walz were touring all the swing states, Trump had one campaign appearance. He went to Bozeman, Montana last Friday. This is a state he carried, 57 to 41 four years ago. He was there to help defeat the incumbent Senator Jon Tester. He spent a lot of time talking about Biden. He did talk about Kamala a little bit. He called her “a bumbling communist lunatic.” Do you think that will stick?

HM: I doubt it. And when you think about it, bumbling and lunatic don’t really suggest a communist threat. I mean, a communist threat has to be somewhat focused.

JW: Then he called what he said was a press conference where he went way off script. Maureen Dowd said he was “like a blender going at full speed with the top off, goop splattering everywhere.” Instead of focusing again on inflation, on the border, he talked about crowd size. He claimed that the crowds at his events were 30 times bigger than at Kamala’s.
Kamala recently spoke to 15,000 people in Detroit and probably more in Arizona. 30 times 15,000, I did the arithmetic here – it was about half a million people. That’s like five times as big as the Super Bowl. Trump said, “Nobody has spoken to crowds bigger than me.” And he means not just this year, but ever. He said that he had the same number of people at his rally before the attack on the Capitol on January 6th as Martin Luther King had in the 1963 march on Washington. Now, the march on Washington drew a quarter of a million people. Historians say that’s about six times the number that showed up before the attack on the Capitol. What is this obsession he has with crowd size?

HM: Yes. Well, it sounds like the cleaned-up substitute for other size measures that insecure males dwell on. There’s this whole theory that I’ve written about precarious manhood being sort of the through line as it were of the Trump Coalition. I think this kind of demonstrates that.
I should add that I myself was at two demonstrations on the mall, one right after the invasion of Cambodia in 1970. That probably got about half a million people. And somewhere in the recesses of labor history, it has been reported that on Labor Day 1937, Jon L. Lewis spoke to a crowd of nearly a million people in Pittsburgh.

JW: At this same press conference, I just have to dwell on this for one minute because this was so much fun, Trump told the now famous story. He said that former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said “terrible things about Kamala” while he and Trump were on a helicopter that almost crashed. Reporters spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell this is about, because Willie Brown said he was never on a helicopter. It never crashed, never with Trump. It turns out Trump was on a helicopter once that almost crashed. It was his own helicopter. But the Black man who was with him was not Willie Brown. It was a man named Nate Holden, an LA city councilman who also happens to be Black. And neither Nate Holden nor Willie Brown, they say, ever told him terrible things about Kamala. I think you were writing for The LA Weekly when Nate Holden was still on the LA City Council, wasn’t he?

HM: I was indeed. Every now and then it was necessary to attack him for one thing or another. Nate Holden is well over 6-feet. Willie Brown is an inch or two over 5-feet. So there are real differences in appearance there. I believe the helicopter flight with Nate Holden was on the East Coast, not the West Coast.

JW: Yes, they were–

HM: And the reason Nate Holden was there was that Trump wanted to buy what was left of the old famous old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Midtown Los Angeles and put up a Trump hotel and Casino there, and that was in Nate Holden’s district. So he was probably lobbying Nate Holden about that at a time when Kamala Harris, I think, was probably California Attorney General, and the odds that she would’ve come up in this discussion were low. I should finally add that what eventually happened to the old Ambassador Hotel on that plot of land was it was turned into the Robert F. Kennedy High School.

JW: And the Ambassador Hotel, of course, is the place where Kennedy was assassinated on a primary night in 1968.

HM: Yes, in 1968. Yes.

JW: Everybody is giving Kamala advice on how to run her campaign. Some pundits are telling her not to follow Biden in pursuing a progressive economic agenda. They say the proper thing to do at this point in the campaign is tack to the middle. I believe you disagree with this advice.

HM: Yeah. Well, what I wrote about this, which appeared on The Prospect website on Monday, was in response to the regular weekly column that the columnist Jonathan Chait writes in New York Magazine, which is widely read in political circles. And he was basically denigrating Biden for having turned against the more economic centrist policies of his Democratic presidential predecessors, Barack Obama in particular.
I don’t think the argument made a lot of sense. For one thing, while he really bemoaned the fact that a lot of Biden’s appointees more or less came out of the same ideological universe as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and are all over agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the SEC, the Labor Department, the Trade Representative, and the National Labor Relations Board, he didn’t actually go after any of those policies. He just said it was a mistake to go to those kinds of people.
Then he pointed out that the record of Biden getting things through Congress wasn’t as good as that of Obama. One would have to point out that Biden only had 50 Democrats in the Senate, whereas Obama had initially 60 and then 59, which made a hell of a difference. But Obama got no Republican votes finally for the Affordable Care Act while extolling Obama’s record. And there’s a lot there to be extolled about. I’m not objecting to that. He neglected to note that Obama didn’t get any Republican votes for the Affordable Care Act. It only passed because he finally corralled all the Democrats, or rather actually, Nancy Pelosi corralled all the Democrats. The gospel of free trade extended unbroken from Ronald Reagan straight through Obama, who even as Hillary was getting clobbered by Trump in the 2016 campaign for NAFTA and permanent normalized trade relations with China, Obama was still going around trying to get a Pacific Rim trade agreement, which is not helping Hillary one bit.
So I think the recalibrations that Biden has made to a more national industrial renewal policy rather than corporatized and financialized free trade, that’s a real advance, and it’s one that the American public supports as well as all of the stuff in the Build Back Better bill, which has become sort of the core of Kamala’s campaign right now, “the care agenda,” as she calls it. All that stuff is actually popular, and I would advise her to stick to it. And if there are lurking free trade advocates out there, or others who want less financial deregulation, she should avoid them like the plague.

JW: Trump does have one campaign stop coming up this week. On Wednesday he’s going to Asheville, North Carolina. That is the state that Biden lost by the smallest margin in 2020, 1%. There’s some good news in the polls. On Sunday, a new poll of North Carolina showed Kamala tied with Trump in the state, 46 to 46. In May, the same poll had Trump ahead, that was of Biden, 45 to 43. And in the governor’s race, Democrat Josh Stein is now leading the extreme right-wing Republican Mark Robinson, 46 to 36. 10 points. In May, Robinson was at 43%. So he’s lost seven points over the last couple of months. That’s a lot in one of the key swing states.

HM: Yeah, if I was managing Mark Robinson’s campaign, I would lock him in a closet until election day because he spews such hatred at gays and lesbians and women and liberals and whatnot, literal rather than figurative evocations of violence. He’s not exactly the candidate from central casting that the Republicans want. I suspect, to a very small degree, he would help drag down Trump in North Carolina just as Kamala is, I think, destined to do significantly better than Joe Biden would’ve in North Carolina.

JW: Just a couple more things. At her campaign rally on Saturday when Kamala was in Las Vegas, she said she wanted to “raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” Trump tweeted that eliminating taxes on tips “was a Trump idea. She has no ideas. She can only steal from me.” But the idea of scrapping taxes on tips for some workers is not really an original Trump idea. Unions representing service and hospitality workers have been arguing for that for years, haven’t they?

HM: They have. In particular, the largest union in Nevada, the Culinary local, which is all the hotel workers in Vegas, have been arguing for that for years. But I mean, look, to the extent that Trump introduced it into this year’s possible agendas, she sort of said, “Okay, I’ll see you and I’ll raise you.” And the “raising you” was raising the minimum wage. And even more for tipped workers, raising the sub-minimum wage. Now they got rid of that in Nevada, but there are still about 20 states that adhere to the federal minimum wage for tipped workers, which is, believe it or not, $2.13. In order to get tipped workers to have just a decent income, okay, yeah, eliminating taxes on tips certainly helps, but getting rid of the sub-minimum wage and raising the minimum wage, which has been at the federal level, stuck at $7.25 for 15 years now, I think, is a greater contribution. And that’s where she isn’t stealing from Donald Trump at all.

JW: Okay, one more thing. Trump in his one campaign appearance last week, Bozeman, Montana talked a lot about Joe Biden. Here’s one quote, “You know,” Trump said, “he wanted to debate. And if we didn’t have that debate, he’d still be there. Can you imagine if we didn’t have that debate? Why the hell did I debate him?”

HM: [Laughter]

JW: Harold Meyerson – read him at prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk politics and history with Sherrod Brown. Of course, he’s the senior Senator from Ohio. First elected in 2006, he’s up for reelection this year in a state where Joe Biden got only 45% of the vote four years ago. I spoke with him in 2020 and asked him how he managed to win reelection in 2018 by seven points in a state Hillary Clinton had just lost two years earlier to Trump by eight points.

Sherrod Brown: We knew he had to win one out of seven Trump voters, something like that, and I’m a Progressive and I never compromise on gun safety. I will never sell out to the NRA. I don’t compromise on marriage equality. I’ve supported marriage equality for 20 plus years. I don’t compromise on choice, and I’ve been my whole career strongly pro-choice.
But you need to talk to voters. You need to talk about the stress of the dignity of work. It means honoring and respecting all work, whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge or work for tips, whether you’re raising kids or taking care of aging parents. And when I say fight for workers, I don’t think just of the white male firefighter.
I think of people that work as clerks in an insurance company and people that prepare food in cafeterias and people that work construction and people that work in small manufacturing or work in an office setting. And if Democrats run a campaign seeing the world through the eyes of workers and then govern that way and plan to govern that way and make that contrast with the president who has betrayed workers, every day, the Democratic candidates need to talk about Trump’s betrayal of workers while we talk about the dignity of work. That will peel off enough Trump voters and excite new voters enough, I think, to win not just my part of the country, but to build a huge electoral college majority.

JW: In your book, you also talk about the 2000 campaign, Al Gore challenging George W. Bush. Tell us about the conversation you had at the Ford Plant in Avon Lake.

SB: Yeah, I was sitting around just drinking coffee in the cafeteria during a break for the workers, and there are, I don’t know, half dozen, eight, nine people around. And they were all voting for Gore except one UAW member there said he was voting for Bush, and I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, Gore wants to take my gun,” and the guy next to me turned to him, and he said, “Well, Sherrod has the same positions on guns as Gore does.” He said, “Yeah, but Sherrod fights for workers and fights for us in the workplace.”
And I think that’s the issue. I know in some smaller towns and among some people, they don’t like my grade of “F” from the NRA, and I know they don’t like my positions on marriage equality and choice. But if I’m their fighting for their kids, fighting for their ability to send their child, send their teenager, their 18-year-old off to community college or Ohio State, or I’m talking about their healthcare, if they have a pre-existing condition, in many cases, that will be their vote determinant.  “We vote ’cause this guy fights for us, and at work, this guy fights for our health insurance. This guy fights for our kids going to college or trade school.”

JW: George McGovern is featured in your book “Desk 88.” He’s one of the people who occupied your desk in the Senate chamber before you arrived. Of course, he’s a hero of ours. He was right about pretty much everything, especially the war in Vietnam, but he’s the biggest loser in the history of modern American presidential elections. For those who don’t remember, 1972, when he ran against Nixon, he carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. When Nixon beat McGovern that year, it was really much worse than Trump beating Hillary. Hillary, of course, won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. McGovern lost by almost 18 million votes. You worked on the McGovern campaign. You were, I guess, a teenager at the time. Tell us about that campaign.

SB: Yeah. Well, it was a disaster from the beginning to the end. I wasn’t smart enough to know that. I thought it was a close race until they counted the votes, so what do I know at that point? But what I laughed about as you were talking was the story in the book about McGovern sitting down with Mondale. Mondale had just lost in ’84, not quite by as much, but Mondale had carried only Minnesota, his home state, and Washington DC, and McGovern was talking to Mondale soon after the ’84 race. This had been 12 years since McGovern lost, and Mondale asked him, “How long does it take to get over this, George?” And George McGovern said, “I’ll let you know when I do.”
We can laugh now, but that kind of loss has got to be just earth shaking and shattering and scarring probably. I think McGovern was scarred by it maybe the rest of his life. I don’t know. He had other tragedies. His daughter died way too young, and so I’m sure he had other tragedies, other problems. We all do. But I think that campaign, I remember the idealism of it. But the good thing – what McGovern had in common, as I said in the book with Goldwater, the two things. One is my dad very improbably voted for Goldwater in ’64 and voted for McGovern in ’72. Not many people had that journey.

JW: Wow.

SB: But the other thing they had in common is they both brought a lot of new people into the political system. And Tip O’Neill said, I don’t know what number he used, but dozens and dozens of House members, people serving in Congress came out of the McGovern campaign and that was their first time really involved. So there is still a positive lasting impact even in a catastrophic loss.

JW: You describe union members, especially the more conservative, overwhelmingly white, and male members of the building trades voting for Nixon instead of McGovern in ’72. Sounds like a foreshadowing of Trump in 2016. Is that fair?

SB: Yeah, it’s fair, but it was more pronounced in McGovern. As you point out, McGovern lost by 18 million, I think was the number you said. I’d forgotten that number. And Hillary won the popular vote by 3 million in large part because of your state, but nonetheless, and there is a smaller number of union members now. But McGovern didn’t do well among union member and did pretty badly among every segment of the population. If you can dig down, you don’t always know this, but Hillary probably won among union members, but the unions by now are much more diverse than they were in McGovern’s days. Even the trades the most conservative and probably the whitest of the unions, maybe the trades and the firefighters, even there, you see a number of people of color. You see more women. There were very few women in the trades or in the big industrial unions in McGovern’s day.
So that really begs the question, this book. This book “Desk 88” is about eight white men and everybody who ever held on my desk was a man as far as we can tell from the names we can see scrawled in there or not scratched in the desk. And if somebody’s writing this book about the last eight Senators that held it and a few 100 years from now somebody writes about the eight Senators that held it since I have, I think you’ll see significantly more women and people of color. And I think you’ll see a more progressive Senate because if the Senate looks more like California, if the Senate looks more like our country overall, you’ll see these progressive eras I talk about last longer and be deeper, and that only spells good for the country.

JW: Well, I think my favorite chapter in your book “Desk 88” is the first one about Hugo Black from Alabama elected to the Senate in 1926. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is a wonderful story about how a Klansman changed his mind and changed sides in the great battles of the 1930s. How did that happen?

SB: Well, it happened because he was mostly an opportunist, the world to Black in those days, 1926, understanding that people of color were simply not voting in Alabama with maybe exceptions of you could count on your fingers and toes if any exceptions, and he saw the world divided two groups. He called them the Big Mules and the Little Mules, and the Big Mules were the power companies, the coal companies, the steel companies, the mining companies. That was one group. The other group was the Little Mules, and they were many, many Klansmen in that group, and he could not have chosen the Big Mules. So he said later, “I would’ve chosen to join any group that helped me get votes.” So he let his ambition flip itself over on its ugly, racist underbelly. He did things as a young man he shouldn’t have done by joining the Klan.
But coming almost full circle, if you can ever put that behind you and ever be forgiven for being a member of the worst terrorist group in American history, then he, in 1956, I believe it was a year or two after Brown v. Board of Education, which he was involved in the unanimous decision to finally put the court on the side against segregation, because he was burned in effigy at his law school in Tuscaloosa Alabama, and he was a great civil libertarian. So you give credit for change. It’s hard to forgive somebody ever that belonged to the Klan, but Black in some ways, I didn’t know him, I can’t analyze him psychologically, but he may have spent his whole life trying to make up for that terrible decision he made to join them.

JW: He followed an unusual course after he became one of the leading supporters of the New Deal in the mid-1930s, he was appointed to the Supreme Court where he was an extremely important figure.

SB: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s what I mentioned, Brown v. Board of Education, and he was probably Roosevelt’s favorite Southern Senator. He had a major impact. He was always a populist, but real populism, I’ve always contended, can’t be racist. But he was a real populist in fighting for, quote, “the little guy,” even though it was only in his early days for the little white guy, if I could say it that way. But he helped to write the collective bargaining, the 40-hour work week. He actually introduced a bill for a 30-hour work week, and he compromised it to 40, and that’s what we still have. And that’s made a huge difference in our economy and in worker rights and in wages.

JW: Another senator who occupied your desk before you, was Bobby Kennedy. He was elected to the Senate from New York shortly after his older brother was assassinated. And he’s another great example of someone who changed sides, although in a different way from Hugo Black as a young man, he had worked for Joe McCarthy and as Attorney General, he’s the one who approved FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King, but that’s not where he ended up in 1968. What explains his transformation?

SB: Well, again, I don’t engage in psychoanalysis. I don’t know, except that his brother’s assassination clearly was both earth-shattering and I assume made him re-examine his values, his place in the world, all that. He had always been the little brother, the guy that looked out for the big brother and did things for him that was the operator for all that and then he all of a sudden is thrust into being the patriarch more or less of this family. Ted Kennedy certainly took that role later. And I think the other thing that happened is he was a really privileged kid, a very wealthy Irish Catholic kid from Boston that had every advantage in life, except obviously the deaths of two of his family members, three of his family members, I guess. But when he went to Mississippi, he went to Southern California and saw farm workers, went to Mississippi and saw maybe the poorest areas of the country in the Delta, and it really changed him.
Marian Wright Edelman tells a story when she was Marian Wright as a young Yale Law School graduate. Peter Edelman, who she later married, came to that community with Bobby Kennedy and as Senator Kennedy in those days. And Marian didn’t really much like him ’cause she didn’t like his brother’s appointments to the court, John’s appointments to the court. He’d appointed conservative Southern, many cases, segregationists. She didn’t expect to like Bobby, and she saw him interact with some of the poorest least privileged people in the country, and it changed her view of him. And she later married to Kennedy’s staff guy there, but she changed her – as we all are, Kennedy is a complicated guy. Kennedy was a complicated man in his evolution.
But my wife always says that you want somebody to change, and they do, you can’t keep pointing to their past. You’ve got to embrace that change. Working for McCarthy is pretty bad. Being a KKK member is really bad. But each of these characters, as did Al Gore, Sr., who voted against Civil Rights in ’64 and went down as a victim of Nixon’s Southern strategy and his unrelenting attacks on Gore in his 1970 race ’cause Gore had stood up to Nixon on appointing two Southern, very conservative, maybe racist judges. Gore lost his election over that. So one of the lessons here is nobody in an elected office should be – everybody should be willing to lose for a principle, and I’m not sure how many of us are in that category.

JW: I also want to ask you about something from your own biography that you write about in the book “Desk 88.” You were a student at Yale in May 1972 when Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam. This was infuriating escalation of the war for those of us in the anti-war movement. You described joining a demonstration of Yale students, but you say something about this demonstration didn’t feel right. Tell us about that.

SB: I was a college student, and I grew up with more than some. I wasn’t a rich kid. My dad was a family doctor in a good practice in a small conservative town. As I said, my dad voted for Goldwater in ’64, was so repulsed by Nixon and Agnew that he changed to a Democrat eight years later. So I more than anything wanted to end the war. I was supporting McGovern trying to help as an anti-war presidential campaign. And I saw these students from Yale that had surged out of their dorms when Nixon announced mining the harbors that I fought, escalating the war. They marched down Elm Street, I believe, and there were some police officers standing behind wood horses, the barriers, to say to the kids, “You can’t go any further.” And they were yelling obscenities at the police officers.
And I thought, I don’t know why this occurred to me as this kid from, Mansfield, Ohio, these police officers, I knew they weren’t making a lot of money. I knew perhaps some of their kids were in Vietnam or they themselves had served in Vietnam. And I knew that most of my classmates that were walking down this street demonstrating and swearing at the cops, the cops who were there to protect the property of maybe some of these kids’ parents, I don’t know, but these kids marching down the street, most of them would have good cushy jobs a year or two later or go to law school or med school. And most of them weren’t going to go to Vietnam. So even though I supported what they wanted to do in the war, it just struck me as I didn’t feel in that group. I didn’t feel of that group at that time as I had marched against the war before, I can’t really describe it very well, but there was something untoward about all that.

JW: Last question. We can’t let you go without asking you about the presidential election. What’s it going to take for the Democrats to carry most of those states?

SB: Well, it’s all about the earlier comments I made that Democrats have got to start talking more about work, the dignity of work, not just to talk to white male workers, some of whom might’ve voted for Trump, but to energize young voters. There are a whole lot of people in this country that are people of color and women and young people who are making 8 and 10 and $12 an hour. And we’ve got to show as Democrats, we care about them, we care. They’re all working hard. They just aren’t making enough money to get ahead, and Democrats have to be for them and with them.
Point out that Trump has betrayed them. Trump has refused to raise the minimum wage. He’s taken overtime pay away from literally, we think as many as 2 million Americans, 50 or 60,000 in my state alone. We know that Trump has put people on the courts that put their thumb on the scale of justice and choose corporations over workers and Wall Street over consumers.
Trump says he’s for workers, but you can’t be for workers individually if you’re not for workers collectively, and Democrats have to make that contrast.

JW: Sherrod Brown is the senior senator from Ohio. Thank you, Senator Brown.

SB: Thank you. What a fun interview. I really appreciate it.

JW: We spoke with Sherrod Brown in October 2020. The latest polls this year, from the end of July, show him ahead in his race for reelection by four points, 46 to 42.