- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy; Claire and Carl Stuart; Christine and Philip Dial; Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com Diane Land and Steve Adler and Karey and Chris Oddo.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's been the US ambassador to Japan, the mayor of Chicago, a member of Congress, and the White House chief of staff.

He's Rahm Emanuel.

This is "Overheard."

(upbeat music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

"This is Overheard."

(audience applauding) Ambassador, welcome.

- Thank you.

- Very nice to have you here, and good to see you.

- Yeah.

- Let's get the newsmaking out of the way.

You're gonna run for president, right?

(audience laughing) - Well, let me say this.

If I decide to do it, I'm not announcing on this show.

- You're not?

(grunts) I though if I snuck it in at the beginning, you might say something, yeah.

- No, look, part of going around the country is making sure you are listening and hearing.

My wife thinks I need to work on that as a skillset, (audience laughing) and I'm trying very hard at it.

But on the second point is you have to be sure that you have what it takes to answer what's ailing America.

And that's a bigger question.

And then also, as I joke sometimes, but, you know, got to be humbled by the responsibilities.

And humble is not a natural quality for an Emanuel.

So that's also a part of that.

- When will you know that you are ready to make a decision?

- I think, well, temporally, I would just say in the next six, seven months, but basically, you know, I kind of gut check it.

And look, having been around, left out of the introduction was also senior advisor to President Clinton, but having been around and studied the presidency, been around in and out of the Oval Office for eight years, leadership for this particular moment in time, two things is you have to know why you're doing what you're doing and then have the courage and guts to get it done.

I happen to think having been ambassador gave me some distance from America to watch it.

Every election's important, but we are as a country, unlike the election, we're at a tipping point.

We're not going four more years like this.

We've gone 12 years.

This is on both parties.

It's on everybody.

We've had two presidents back-to-back trying to restore our past that's never coming back.

We either start building a future that includes more Americans or this game is up.

- Is that the problem you're trying to solve?

Is that it?

We have to figure out what the future looks like?

- Yes, we have to figure it out on a couple levels.

I mean, the most important thing to me is if you look back in the last 25 years, it's been the most disruptive first quarter of a century ever.

One of these would have been defining.

But in 25 years you've had an Iraq war built on a lie where we've lost 50,000 Americans, fellow citizens either died or wounded, and the people responsible under the yellowcake from Niger are still part and parcel and never paid a price.

Four years later, liar loans had six million of our fellow citizens lose their home.

And bankers were arguing that they deserved a bonus, with no compunction that they were culpable in something that happened to the American people.

And then four or five years later comes COVID.

And those four things are massively disruptive.

And I fundamentally believe that the moment the American dream that I grew up with, I hope other people here as a basic, basic kind of contract, owning a home, saving for your kids' education, your retirement, and having your healthcare, the moment that became unaffordable is exactly when our democracy became unstable.

I'm all for all the processes reforms, mail-in balloting, et cetera.

Fought for them.

You wanna restore democracy?

You wanna restore that sense?

Restore the accessibility of the American dream to more and more Americans.

When Americans have lost faith in America, we got a problem.

Houston, we have a problem.

- Right.

And it starts with education.

I've heard you say this before, that in order to give people a sense that the American dream is possible, you've got to get them into a system that educates them and prepares them.

- Look, look, I grew up in a home where being a Democrat was one of the 10 lost tribes of the Jewish faith, okay?

(audience laughing) You can't be a party that believes in equity as a core principle and be complacent with 50% of our kids not reading at grade level.

50%.

This is on us.

This is not China doing it to us.

And about two weeks from now, I'm gonna go to Louisiana.

The reason I'm going to Louisiana is it's only state in the union of 50 states whose reading and math scores are above pre-COVID.

We actually know what to do.

We have lost the courage to do this.

Now, we live in a period of time where you earn what you learn.

Now we had a policy in Chicago we implemented, and I say Janice Jackson and I, to get a high school degree, you had to produce a letter of acceptance from a college, a community college, a branch of the Armed Forces or a vocational school.

And we got 84% poverty, 98% compliance.

I don't care.

You wanna be an electrician?

You wanna be an EMT worker?

You wanna be an engineer?

Great.

You're not walking until you tell us where you're walking to.

And you raise your kids, I raise our kids, Amy and I did this with a sense of value of where you're going, having a purpose, an education to achieve it.

Don't ever throw in the towel on an American child.

All over this country are examples, Mississippi on the reading example, Louisiana on math and reading.

We know what to do.

We lack the courage to do it.

- Yeah.

And it's both parties.

I've seen you say Republicans gave up on public education, but Democrats gave up on standards and accountability.

- Yes, I mean, look, there's two things that happened in 2012, make 30 years of gains and then we plateau and then COVID, we drop.

We walked away from standards and accountability.

President Bush put those in place, continued, and it was the right thing to do.

There was some adjustments that needed to be, but not abandoning it.

And Instagram comes on play in 2012.

And across the developed world, you see this.

It's not just United States phenomenon, but I care about United States kids.

That social media has ruined a generation, which is why I was the first person in public life to say, "We're gonna do exactly what Australia does, ban social media for every child under 16."

I do not want an algorithm raising an adolescent.

I want an adult doing it.

And we've given up responsibility.

- Yeah.

Now, the education piece of this, I know we could talk about for three days and not have enough time.

- Yeah, I don't wanna talk about it anymore.

I want to start doing it.

- But I wanna talk about also the economy because you're an old Clinton hand.

34 years later, it's still the economy stupid.

We're in the middle of an economy that is not working for a lot of people.

Inflation is outpacing wage growth.

There are a lot of people who are having a hard time paying for food, paying for gas, all the things.

That will be a narrative thread in this last seven weeks of the election, will it not?

- Well, first of all, it's always a thread.

But there's no doubt it's about gas and it's about inflation.

But to me, the core, and this shouldn't be this hard, being able to own a home, save for your retirement, save for your kids' education, and be able to have healthcare as a peace of mind, not a nightmare.

Now, every one of those is broken.

Not weakened, vulnerable.

Broken.

And the bigger piece is once you slip that away, where the example of two of them, used to be you get an education, your pre-TSA, punch your ticket and you're on your way.

Today, you get your diploma on the backside is a lifetime invoice of $38,000 of debt.

You go right to your parents' basement and you have no prospect of getting out.

Today, your health insurance, do you know a single insurance company that's ever said to you, "Yes, we'll cover that"?

(audience laughing) You all laugh but it tells you something.

They literally don't have a glossary of the English language that goes beyond the word no.

I grew up, my dad was a pediatrician.

My brother's an oncologist.

You wanted a second opinion, you used to call another healthcare professional.

Today, our healthcare professionals spend 40% of their time arguing with an insurance executive or a person on the teleconference telling you the word, "No, we don't cover it."

And it's become a nightmare.

- So what can government, as an example, if you put a new president in or you put a new Congress in, what can government do to fix that?

- Well, there's a couple things.

I mean, first of all, a number of things, on the housing, on college education.

I've laid out a specific idea.

Let's just take college costs that are driving parents crazy.

One, allow every university and college across America to take up to 20% foreign students who pay full price.

Every American student then whose families make less than $200,000, you go for free.

And the foreign students basically, short order, foreign students will subsidize American students.

- We're going in the opposite direction on that right now, by the way, yeah.

- Your ability to spot the obvious is a gift.

Keep that.

- Thank you very much.

I will.

Why I'm on the air, man.

Hey, way to go.

All right.

That's it.

Yes.

- Number one got that in, okay.

Number two.

Number two on this, and I mean this.

We did 10 credits.

Set a standard.

We got 50% of this in Chicago.

We made 100% of our... We did 50% graduate with college credit from high school.

You get 20 credits of college credit in high school and you can get a three-year BA, not a four-year.

And parents save a full year of tuition and room and board.

But I'll give you another example on this on healthcare.

Now, I was for this a long time.

This is governing.

I lost the fight about this.

I would not, I'm for Obamacare, obviously.

I used to be 6'2" and 250 pounds.

I'm now 5'8," trying to get that sucker passed.

I would not have 50 exchanges across the country.

You know what's the greatest healthcare exchange from a negotiating position in healthcare?

The federal employees.

Your congressman, your senator, your president, your cabinet is all in it.

Every federal employees in that have a health exchange.

You got 20, 27 insurance companies competing for all the federal employees across the United States.

So a rural county doesn't lose insurance companies.

Put everybody that's in the exchange and the federal employees.

- Good enough for them, good enough for us.

- If it's you're paying for your congressman and his family or her family, you'll get the same exchange.

The same companies will now compete.

Number two, we spend $1.5 trillion on administrative costs.

Today, 25% of hospital costs are just administration.

Has nothing to do with healthcare.

Has to do dealing with health insurance companies and all their different forms.

You can take 10% out of that and then standardize the administration across Wellpoint, UnitedHealth, Blue Cross across the board.

That itself would actually give you stability in healthcare pricing.

There are other things to do on prescription drugs, et cetera.

As a person that passed over Tom DeLay, he's a guy from Texas, by the way.

- He is, indeed.

- Passed the first time ever re-importation of pharmaceutical products from Canada.

Get the competitive pricing.

You want competitive pricing?

You want competition?

Part of the free market principle?

Let's bring it to pharmaceutical prices.

So those are the examples of where you can do savings.

But to me, literally the American people, and you can see it as you go around the country, and this gets back to the first question, they have a look in their eyes that I would never accept from one of my three children.

This sense of loss, the sense of helplessness, the sense of they've internalized a sense that their life will not produce what they think it can and they have given up, they're starting to give up on themselves.

And so to me, there's a moral component to this.

As I'm coming out, there's a part of their soul, but it's also part of the promise of this country.

I grew up in an immigrant home.

I think being an American is winning the lottery ticket of life.

I think being born here, growing up here is like one of the greatest gifts you can be given.

And people feel like America is not that.

We don't keep score, Evan, by whether my kids have access to the American Dream.

It's whether the American kids do.

My kids are gonna be fine.

They grew up in a loving home, they have a great education.

They're grounded.

Two of them are part of the Armed Forces.

They're giving something back.

They're gonna be fine.

But that's not how you keep score.

It's not whether your kids and my kids are okay.

It's whether their colleagues and their friends are good.

- So the stuff you're talking about is tangible education, the economy, all that.

I wanna ask you about something that's a little bit more existential.

That is the moral- - Who knew that Camus and Sartre are coming to lunch?

- Coming to PBS.

Exactly.

Right.

Yes.

We can handle that- - You get water, not a French little bistro.

- We can handle complexity here on this show.

I wanna ask you about the moral rot that we're now seeing out in the world.

You know, we have stopped trusting that people are in this for the public good.

A lot of people who are in office, elected and appointed, seem to be in it for themselves.

Rather than draining the swamp, the swamp is flooding, right?

The flood waters are rising.

What do we do about that?

What does the next person do about that?

- One, across the government, all three branches, ban all stock trading.

Two, (audience applauding) two, at the age of 75, you are done.

(audience applauding) - White House and Congress.

- No.

- Every office.

- And the judicial branch.

- Totally.

- 75.

- You're out.

- You have another way to serve, go teach.

I'm not joking.

Pre-TSA clear, you'll go right through.

It would be touchless.

(audience laughing) I was responsible for helping pass the assault weapon ban when I worked for President Clinton.

I was on the phone multiple times a day with Senator Feinstein.

Her last tenure in the Senate, she didn't know she was a senator.

This is ridiculous.

Number three, your net value is a north of a million dollars, mandatory blind trust.

Number four, anybody in the federal government and family, everybody, you cannot participate in the prediction markets.

(audience applauding) Number five, you take what's ever in the constitution as it relates to foreign investment and ban it.

The idea that you have a Russian oligarch paying for Donald.. Like, what happened to William Sonoma registering?

(audience laughing) You're paying $150,000 for somebody else's wedding?

And here's what's more shocking.

Not that he paid for it, but Trump's kid didn't think there was anything wrong with it.

The only reason he's now paying is he got caught.

He didn't think there was a single thing wrong with it.

There was a story today in Yahoo, Lutnick's kids are negotiating to do the IPO for a business.

His father is putting $5 billion of public money into it.

This is not... I'm from Chicago.

I have a high standard on corruption.

(everyone laughing) Okay?

- You know from corruption.

- Our city, we have a doctoral thesis on it.

(audience laughing) This is- - It's insane.

- No, because this presidency's got three qualities: greed, grievance, and grandeur.

He is spending his time on ballrooms and you're picking up the bill, okay?

He is spending his time making money while you're losing money.

He's walked off.

Take his big crypto.

He's gonna be a billionaire and all the retail guys are losing money.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

He's been given a permission slip by the Republican Congress.

So across the board, all three branches of government, all basically both parties, the last real ethics reform when we won the majority, there was this guy called Senator Obama and this little congressman called Rahm Emanuel.

And we passed with Senator McCain, Senator Russ Feingold, Marty Meehan, and we passed the most comprehensive lobbying and ethics reform, and it needs a clean.

And if you don't power wash Washington, this thing is a rot from the inside out.

- Right.

So will this, to pivot to the midterms directly as it relates to some of this stuff, will this be a referendum on the last two years?

- Yes.

- I mean, we hear all the time elections are a choice, not a referendum.

- No, no.

Well, 2028 will be a choice.

- 2028 will be a choice.

- Will be a choice.

2026 is a referendum.

When one party has power.

I wanna get back, remind me, I wanna say something about corruption.

- I will.

100%.

- Okay.

Okay, that's kind of your job here.

- I got it.

- Okay.

Okay.

- All right.

- Okay.

On a serious note, there's a law of physics, when one party controls the microphone and the gavel, and you're seeing it play out.

Massive turnout by the party out of power and massive decline by the party in power voters.

In the primaries to date, 12.6 million Democrats have voted and 8.6 million Republicans.

And independents break two to one for the party out of power.

Democrats are 12 for 12 on every statewide election since 2024, and they have flipped 36 out of 36 state legislative seats.

Republicans are zero for 12 and zero for 36.

In 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, those physics played out, and that's what's gonna play out here.

Now, have they gummied it up with redistricting and the amount of massive money?

Yes, but that's taking a hurricane five down to a 3.5.

- So it will be a hurricane.

I mean, we say wave or tsunami.

- Well, that may say something about your border on the Gulf, but yes, everything you're seeing, every detail.

No, in 2006, that's my touchstone when I ran the DCCC, and I would say this is exactly that election.

Unpopular president, unpopular president, unpopular war, unpopular war, massive corruption, massive corruption, spiking energy prices, spiking energy price, stagnating.

So it looks like it, feels like it.

When it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

So could they, on the margins?

Now, the hardest problem for the Democrats.

In '06, we had cash equivalency.

Here you have a five-to-one Republican advantage on cash.

And I know I'm supposed to say money, not cash, but I'm from Chicago, and we are talking politics after all.

- We are.

- The thing that scares me, when you have a widening field, take the Senate, you can't get sloppy because it's better to kind of put some over the goal line than to spread your peanut butter too thin.

And you got to have strategic and discipline, and you're gonna see massive opportunities open up.

Like October 1, all of sudden you're gonna start seeing data and race is seen and it's considered.

And you have to be disciplined to know what's real versus what is fleeting.

And that, I'm telling you, is really hard.

Now, can I say one thing?

- Of course.

- On corruption.

Yeah.

- Come back.

- This is one of the reasons traveling around the country, being all over.

Corruption in the public debate between New York and DC is about, you know, quid pro quo, making money while you're in public office.

The American people see corruption in a much larger and more real way than the elite.

Their idea is the whole system's corrupt, not just the political, the economic system.

The whole structure of society is corrupt, that basically people, myself and et cetera, we're gonna win.

And it's set up, you can't lose.

And so the corrupt- - And it's without regard to party, right?

It's both sides.

- No, no, but again, you have to get it, the economic system is corrupt.

- Right.

- The political system is corrupt.

So when they hear corruption, they are not thinking of it as a common cause Kennedy School of Government essay on pay to play.

It's a much bigger understanding of the corruption and its impact on their lives.

- I'm thinking about the data center issue as it's emerged in this political cycle, and how there are rural Republican voters who voted for President Trump, who are voting for their statewide Republicans, who are now all of a sudden saying, "I'm not voting for any more Republicans because they're screwing me with these data centers."

Right, the system is not working for them.

- Yeah, well, basically it's like the old model of the Volvo car factory, which is the guy on the hubcap didn't like it, he stopped the whole thing.

Well, they're pulling a stop and the whole system is, to them, both political, judiciary, legal, whatever you wanna do.

Legally, they think there's a rule book for people at the top.

That's what's driving the Epstein piece, is there was one societal rules up here and everybody else had a rule book that applied to them in the same way that it's operating in government and in the economic system.

- We just have a couple minutes left.

I want you to put on your prognostication hat here, 'cause you've always been very good at seeing into the future politically.

As you're sitting here seven weeks out, Democrats win the House, yes or no?

- Yes.

- Yes.

By a lot or a little?

I mean, the governing majority question is one that now people are starting to ask.

- Look, on the low end, it's basically 10 to 13.

On the high end, it's somewhere 17 to 20.

- That's the majority.

That would be the majority.

- Yeah.

I'm kind of on the high end of the low.

- High end of the low.

- Yeah, but I don't... That was just to confuse you because I'm confused by the answer I gave.

(audience laughing) I don't know it race by race like I used to, but going around, I would say that's where I would put it.

That's kind of like a slightly informed, not well-informed guess.

- I heard you say last week at the Atlantic Festival that you were small c cautiously small o optimistic- - On the Senate.

- About the Senate.

- Look, the field is widening, et cetera.

Here's the prediction I will make.

In about three weeks, they're gonna start writing stories about races you hadn't even though about.

- Well, they're already talking about Kansas.

- Well, the Kansas one, South Carolina's another, but it'll be more on, and that's where the discipline has to be created.

Because, I'm in Texas, I don't know if you know this, but you're an expensive date, okay?

- Oh my God, the most expensive date, right?

Seriously.

- But you look at Texas as an expensive date.

Kansas is not an expensive date.

I was about to say something else, but not an expensive date.

(audience laughing) But it's gonna be like that across the board, and that's why you have to be really, really disciplined about it.

The biggest gains will be in the states, governors, state legislative chambers, constitutional officers, county commissioners.

The farm team for the Democrats are gonna get a replenishing like we haven't seen.

- And that's actually an important outcome of this, regardless of what happens with Congress, right?

That becomes the farm team.

- I love President Obama, but 2016, he walks out of office, Democrats are at the lowest in Congress and in the state legislature since the early part of the 19th century, 20th century.

So this will be a replenishment of the system, and it will be good for 2028, 2030, 2032.

And you will see a senator one day.

I've already campaigned with people, said that person's gonna be, if they get through this race, mark my words.

- Give us one name to watch.

- Rebecca Bennett running for Congress in New Jersey against Tom Kean Jr.

This is a Navy.

She has a funny line.

She was a Navy pilot.

Her husband was a Navy submarine.

She goes, "We're not really good on land," so.

(everyone laughing) But her daughter is seven years old and she's trying to convince her daughter to brush her teeth, she says, "My body, my choice."

(audience laughing) - The daughter says this?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Daughter says this to her mother.

I'm like, "Okay, I'm good with that."

- It's a family business.

- But look, on a serious note, you got two people who went to the Armed Forces, served their country after 9/11.

She's getting a MBA at Wharton, or she got it.

They bought a home on a GI Bill.

They went to college on a GI Bill.

She's got not just an incredible story.

She knows who she is.

She's from your state.

And she has served her country.

She is building a family.

She is what we wanna highlight as the kind of values of public service, and she knows why she would go into public service.

- Really important.

- Yeah.

- All right.

We are out of time, Ambassador, if you - - I'm not out of answers.

- You're not out of time or answers.

- Henry Kissinger had a great quote: "Do you have any questions for my answers?"

(everyone laughing) Pretty good.

- If you do run, come back.

- Okay.

- All right.

Very good.

Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, thank you very much.

Give him a big hand.

All right.

(audience applauding) Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- The foreign donations is a part-- we have governments and individuals as representative of governments.

Like, the UAE is an investor in the president's crypto business.

- Yep.

- I mean, you don't have to be a PhD student to figure this out.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, ellergroup.com, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and Karey and Chris Oddo.

(gentle music)