Who is there to save the Democratic party from itself?
As polling now consistently demonstrates, the Democratic brand is in disarray. The party has hemorrhaged support among voting blocs who’ve long been considered core elements of the left’s governing coalition. It has moved away from supporting measures focused on the plight of working Americans. It’s leaders have aged and even not uncommonly died in office. Far from showing fight to their political adversaries inside the Trump administration, the Democrats have routinely chosen silence or acquiesence.
If change was ever necessary, it is now.
To help right the ship, a new and younger crop of voices have emerged as primary challengers to the party’s leadership, direction and policies. One of those newer faces is Abdul El Sayed.
El Sayed is running for Senator in the state of Michigan. According to one of his online biographies, he's a "epidemiologist, educator, author, speaker, and podcast host.” He's also the former executive director of the Detroit Health Department, served as assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University, was a Rhodes Scholar and even earned a medical degree from Columbia.
While accomplished, what’s more important than what he’s done is the change he potentially represents. If the left wants to ever hold office in any kind of sustained way, it cannot be what it has been and El Sayed is anything the same old Democrats. He's a progressive firebrand who has been embraced by Bernie Sanders who is confronting the party's failures while fundamentally reorienting what it stands for as well as who it serves.
In this conversation, we lean on El Sayed's background in both establishing and repairing healthcare systems to talk RFK, Jr’s damage to the CDC while also evaluating whether Medicare for All can finally succeed. We delve into what U.S. policy towards Israel should be, whether he has faith in Chuck Schumer's leadership, the Trump admin's use of emergency powers and what it's going to take to restore the Democratic brand.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
01:39 Sec. Kennedy’s destruction of the CDC
04:27 Why the lost in trust in scientific expertise and institutions?
08:49 The future of STEM
11:10 Is now a better time to pass Medicare for All?
15:13 Cost estimates for Medicare for All budgets
21:02 Do you trust Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer?
23:12 Can the Democratic party be reformed?
27:18 What should be the official U.S. policy towards Israel be?
28:52 Can Dems win if they don’t repudiate genocide?
31:02 How the younger right view the Gaza conflict
33:00 Has Trump shown that the U.S. government can’t actually be reformed?
38:36 The filibuster and DC home rule
41:41 Trump administration’s use of emergency powers
46:23 Are you willing to be jailed as a political adversary in service of our Constitutional order?
