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Inside Politics

Harris Unveils Medicare For All Plan; Warren Unveils Trade Proposal; Biden Unveils Endorsements; Police Search For Second Suspect in Gilroy Shooting; Trump Attacks Cummings and Baltimore. Aired 12- 12:30p ET

Aired July 29, 2019 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:00:15] JOHN KING, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King, live today from Detroit, the site of this week's CNN Democratic presidential debates.

Live to Gilroy, California, in just a moment for the latest on a tragic weekend shooting, three killed, 12 injured when a gunman opened fire on the city's annual garlic festival.

Plus, new pre-debate plans from two Democratic contenders. Elizabeth Warren offers her thoughts on trade, while Kamala Harris stokes a new fight over Medicare for all.

And, a treat for me right here in Detroit, lunch with four undecided African-American voters. They weigh in on the president's repeated attacks on Democrats of color and they share their takes on the 2020 Democrats and what it will take to win their votes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ERIN KEITH, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC VOTER: So I've gotten text messages from candidates like, could you please donate to my campaign so I can participate in the debate? And I literally text back, like, I'm not donating anything until I know what your plan is on student loan forgiveness. And someone actually responded. I was like, oh, I thought this was a bot. My bad.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Back to that conversation in a moment.

But we begin the hour with some telling pre-debate maneuvers. Elizabeth Warren outlining her views on trade this hour, mindful of the industrial Michigan setting for this week's Democratic competition. Joe Biden rolling out 91 new endorsements, looking to counter any impression a shaky first debate hurt his long-term prospects.

And Kamala Harris, today, giving her final answer on a critical question in the Democratic primary, what happens to private insurance if she wins the presidency and gets her way in the health care debate? The new Harris version of Medicare for all puts her to the right of Bernie Sanders and to the left of moderates like Biden. The California senator offering a role for supplemental private insurance called Medicare Advantage. But she would do away with private employer- sponsored health care. Harris wants a decade-long transition to Medicare for all. Sanders proposes four years. She pays for it by raising taxes on families making more than $100,000 a year. Harris, today, defending her plan right here in Detroit.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Frankly, I have a vision of what it should be, and the existing plans that have been offered did not express what I wanted.

Over the course of these many months, I've heard from people and they want -- they want a different way. And so I went back to the drawing board and said, OK, let's create our own plan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: With me here in Detroit to share their reporting and their insights, CNN's Phil Mattingly, Lauren Barron-Lopez with "Politico," and CNN's MJ Lee.

Let's start with Senator Harris and her version of Medicare for all. This has been a frustration for her from the beginning, unable to give a consistent answer on what happens to private health insurance.

Under this plan, there's a modest survival, if you will. You can have a Medicare Advantage plan, but it does away with the employer-based health care that millions of Americans get, so she's moving to the right of Sanders? Help me out here.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, so what it does is it tries to find, I think, some kind of sweet spot between where Senator Biden -- or Vice President Biden and Senator Michael Bennet are with a public option idea, and the full Medicare for all proposal that Senator Sanders has laid out. And I think it's a sweet spot that she's been searching for, grasping for, to some degree, over the course of the last several months. We've all watched it play out in real-time.

What it would actually do, the transition period would be longer, four years for Sanders to Medicare for all, ten years for Harris Medicare for all. How the private plans would actually be phased out, for that period of ten years, private plans that fit into the Medicare Advantage structure, which is stricture than some other private plans, would be allowed to be maintained. So that kind of hits the three key areas, which was, how are you going to pay for it, where she says transaction costs, raising taxes on people over $100,000.

KING: Right.

MATTINGLY: What the transition period is going to be, six years longer than Bernie Sanders. And what happens to private plans. So she's trying to find that middle ground between Sanders and Biden. And I think, to some degree, the timing is important. Putting this out right before the debate --

KING: Right.

MATTINGLY: Tries to undercut any attacks that she's almost certainly going to have on the debate stage. And the policy here is very important. But I will also note, the policy, there's a lot of details that need to come further in this policy to fully kind of get the gist of how it will play out --

KING: It will be interesting because she'll be on night two. So she'll be with former Vice President Biden. They clearly will have some issues here. She will not be on stage with the purist in this fight, which is Bernie Sanders and Medicare for all. Elizabeth Warren will be there with Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders campaign calling this a retreat. The campaign manager tweeting, so continues her gradual back down from Medicare for all. This is why you want a candidate with a lifetime of consistency. Let's take a popular, good government-run program, add a lot more privatization and profit seeking into it. What could go wrong? And then Ian Sams, Harris' press secretary responding, you haven't read the plan, disappointing.

But here -- you mentioned trying to hit a sweet spot. The question is, in the Democratic primary, where is that sweet spot?

MATTINGLY: Yes.

KING: There's a separate question of selling these dramatic changes in a general election, but where in the Democratic primary is going to be the sweet spot on health care?

[12:05:02] MJ LEE, CNN POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: I think it's really interesting that she's clearly, politically speaking, trying to stake out this middle ground and saying, you know, I'm still for Medicare for all. But her plan, if you dig into the details, is not actually the Medicare for all plan that Bernie Sanders has been touting, because it maintains a significant role for private insurance companies. The Medicare Advantage plan that already exists, she wants to make sure that that is a part of her Medicare for all plan.

So I think politically speaking, she wants to make sure that she can tell her supporters that this is sort of reflective of Medicare for all, but actually it isn't. And I think the flurry of tweets that we've seen between the Bernie Sanders camps and the Kamala Harris camps, this is a preview of the fight we are going to see and the clash that we are going to see between Kamala Harris and a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren, probably just not this week on stage because they're not taking the stage together.

KING: Right, but I think you will see this part of the Biden thing though. And back to that point, Harris has a strong first debate. She's looking to keep growing. And she's looking to answer a question about her. You knew that senator -- you knew that Vice President Biden was going to turn to her and say, you can't give a straight answer on this. LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ, NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER, "POLITICO": Right.

And even during the first debate there was confusion when they were asked, would you get rid of private health care insurance? And so this is an attempt to try to stop having that confusion surround her on this policy.

And, again, it also is interesting because right ahead of this debate it puts Elizabeth Warren in an interesting position because now she's the only leading Democrat without a health care plan. She says I'm with Bernie, but she hasn't released any details.

KING: Right. Well, she'll get asked on that as well.

And since you mentioned Senator Warren, let's go there. She'll be in Toledo, Ohio, tonight to unveil her new trade plan. The debate is right here in Detroit, Michigan. Both of those states carried by Donald Trump after being carried by Barack Obama in the previous election.

What are the highlights of this Warren trade plan? Why is this significant, a, in the primary and then, b, more broadly?

LEE: Well, what I find so interesting overall about the fact that she is putting out this plan is how much Elizabeth Warren has been going on, on this economic patriotism theme. She's put out a couple of plans over the last couple of months that get at this theme. And, you know, you look to the fact that she is going to Toledo, Ohio, tonight. Tomorrow, obviously, she's taking the debate stage here in Detroit, Michigan.

You think about a state like Michigan, a state that President Trump actually only won by about 10,000 votes, and I think the key strategy for the Democrats going forward will be really, really going hard on the economic message, right? Telling maybe the Trump supporters of 2016, this is a candidate, the president, who said that he would bring manufacturing back, but he hasn't. This hasn't come back to a state like this. At least that's the message that I think we're going see from the Democratic candidates who want to make sure that they do better in the rust belt.

KING: And as we spend the next couple of days here, this is more of a preview. Joe Biden, today, rolling out 91 current and former elected officials to endorse him, from Colorado, Tennessee, Utah, Florida, Maryland. Smart campaigns do this. They keep a file cabinet with the endorsements in it so when you're having a bad day or a bad week, you need to prove, oh, all this talk about falling in the polls or struggling is wrong, bang, endorsements.

The stakes for him here, obviously there are 10 or 12 lesser known candidates, struggling candidates, for whom this could be the last act. Beyond that, for Biden, who did have a shaky first debate performance, the -- rolling out the endorsements saying, hey, I'm OK, is part of a very important week for him.

BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes, and those endorsements come right as "The New York Times" just wrote that there are allies that are nervous about how steady he is. They didn't like his first debate performance. They want to see that he will perform better this time, not be giving back his time the way he did when he was asked questions and cutting himself off, but actually challenging other Democrats. We saw a preview of that in the last few weeks with him being a bit more aggressive and going on offense in his attacks against Harris and against Booker. And so they want to see that he has the stamina to win this primary.

KING: What do -- what do each of you think about the big stakes as we close out this first conversation? We're going to have them over the next couple of days. The vice president, a lot to prove. I would say Mayor Buttigieg, who was the surprise early candidate in the race, has kind of plateaued.

What else are we looking for?

MATTINGLY: I think we -- there's a -- there's tiers, right?

KING: Right.

MATTINGLY: And I think what's interesting for the kind of lower level tier is, this is probably it for a lot of them. Most of them won't qualify for the next debates that are coming up. The qualifications are a little bit too strict. And so this is -- if you want to have a moment, this is going to be your moment. And as we saw in the last debate, Senator Kamala Harris proved that you can have a moment and it can have real repercussions on the race.

On the top tier, I think it's interesting to see how the fights actually play out. You're starting -- you've gotten a better sense over the last couple of weeks of who's competing for whose voters and does that mean that you need to go to war with whoever you're competing with? Do you need to draw the distinctions that everybody wants to see? And whether or not that can actually play out.

I actually think, to MJ's point on Senator Warren and her plan on trade, in this area, and shout out to Toledo, my hometown, great town, it's extremely important. And I know Laura's been up there too. You talk to congressional Democrats, well, where do you differ from President Trump on trade? Talk to me about where your issues are. And they have a difficult time explaining it. And I think how that is conveyed over the course of the next couple of nights will be very interesting for these very, very important states in the Midwest.

KING: All right, we'll continue the conversation as we get ready for those debates.

[12:10:03] And the CNN Democratic presidential debates start tomorrow night. Two big nights, 10 candidates each night, tomorrow and Wednesday live from Detroit, 8:00 p.m. Eastern. You want to watch it right here only on CNN.

Up next, a sad story. We go live to Gilroy, California, where we're learning more about the 19-year-old who opened fire on an outdoor festival.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [12:15:00] KING: Back to the debates and to politics in a moment.

But to California now, and the police hunt for a possible second suspect in a shooting that killed three people and wounded at least 12 more. Police shot and killed a 19-year-old gunman. This is how one man described the moment he realized there was gunfire at the annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy. That's a city of about 50,000, 30 miles south of San Jose.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Two shots rang out first. And at the same time the music started for the concert. So I thought it was like an opening act for the concert. But after few seconds, there was so many shots -- tat, tat, tat, tat, tat -- and I saw people falling down, kids falling down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Police say the gunman snuck into that festival and into the grounds by crossing a nearby creek and cutting a hole in the fence. One of those killed, just six years old, Stephen Romero. His mother and one of his grandmothers also shot. They are hospitalized.

CNN's Sara Sidner joins us now live from Gilroy.

Sara, what more do we know about this gunman and this possible second suspect?

SARA SIDNER, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So far we've gotten zero new information about a second potential suspect. One thing police have not said is there was a second shooter, just that there was one shooter, this 19-year-old. We have also seen some of his social media posts on Instagram which have been taken down at this time.

And one of those Instagram posts he directly mentions the Gilroy Garlic Festival. He says an expletive as he's explaining how he feels things are expensive at the festival. And then he also recommends a book, which is a known book that is filled with white supremacist ideals. So those two things are new information about this 19-year-old who police shot and killed, saying that he was the shooter that took -- killed three people and injured as many as 11 people.

We are getting new information as well about those people who were shot during this terrible incident here at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. And just to give you some idea, this is a summer pastime here in northern California. I've lived in this area. When you come through Gilroy, you know it's the garlic capital. That's what they like to call themselves because you can smell it. People come here with a lot of joy in their hearts, with their families, especially on Sunday, which is family day, to enjoy this festival. And then as it was starting to wind down after 5:00 p.m., it ended up being a crime scene with people running for their lives.

But we do now know ages ranging from 12 to 69 still in the hospital, one person in critical condition, John. KING: Sara Sidner with the latest of a horrible tragedy.

Sara, keep us posted as this plays out. Appreciate it very much.

Coming up for us here, the president continues his attacks on an African-American congressman from Maryland. We sit down with some African-Americans here in Michigan, at the Sweet Potato Sensations Cafe to ask them their thoughts about the president, politics and race.

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[12:22:41] KING: President Trump escalating his feud today with Maryland Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings. The president now adding Senator Bernie Sanders and the Reverend Al Sharpton to his Twitter attacks.

Among the morning tweets, this, Crazy Bernie Sanders recently equated the city of Baltimore to a third world country. President Trump then adding that, quote, Baltimore can be brought back, maybe even to new heights of success and glory, but not with King Elijah and that crew.

These tweets just the latest from the president, who has tweeted more than a dozen times since Saturday about Congressman Cummings. The president going so far as to call Cummings a racist and demeaning the city of Baltimore, in the heart of Cummings' district as, the president's words, "disgusting" and "filthy."

Democrats call it more racism from the president. He says this has nothing to do with race. But it is another Trump attack on Democratic lawmakers of color.

CNN analyst David Gergen joins our conversation.

The president says it's not race. Democrats say it is. Why? What is the president's objective here?

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, his main objective is to mobilize his base, but he's doing so at the expense of the country and the kind of things that hold us together. He's driving us apart.

But, clearly, race is at the heart of this. It's all wound all through it. It -- he's speaking to whites, but most of his base is white. He's white. And he's basically trying to scare them into thinking if you let these other people grow in numbers and we let in more immigrants and all the rest, we're going to be a nation that's going to be a minority white nation. We're heading that direction anyway, but he wants to scare us before we get there and make diversity our enemy, not our friend.

BARRON-LOPEZ: Right. I --

LEE: And I think the last 48, 72 hours have really foreshadowed a dynamic that we're going to see over the next year and a half, you know, when we have a president who is constantly and eagerly sowing racial divisions, demonizing immigrants and then getting incredibly defiant and untruthful when he's faced with criticism for those kinds of comments.

We see how easily and quickly policy ends up falling to the wayside. And I think this is a dynamic that the Democratic candidates are going to have to confront because they are so eager to talk about policy right now. I can't think of another recent presidential campaign where policy has been sort of this sexy and candidates are so eager to talk about it. But when you have a general election candidate, the president, who is taking this kind of tone and creates these kinds of distractions that the Democrats have to engage to some extent, I think it's a tricky position for them to be in.

[12:25:07] BARRON-LOPEZ: And I -- I think --

KING: And that he keeps doing it --

BARRON-LOPEZ: Right.

KING: Leads you to believe that he thinks it's fertile ground for him, for bad reasons maybe, but that he thinks it's fertile ground.

BARRON-LOPEZ: No, he finds this to be an effective strategy. And he -- this demagoguery from President Trump isn't new. It's something that he engaged in, in 2016 with the build the wall chants. We saw it in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm with him tweeting out the racist ad about the migrant caravan and Mexicans. And now we're seeing it again with his repeated attacks on black and brown members of Congress and with the "send her back" chants.

So this is very much a part of his motive when it comes to running for the presidency. And it's going to be throughout. And again, as MJ said, Democrats have to find a way to respond to this and we have seen more and more of them explicitly talk about racial identity.

KING: I'm old enough to remember when some Republicans, yes, would say liberals have it wrong, liberals can't run urban America, liberals are making mistakes. You had a Jack Kemp. You had his protege, Paul Ryan, say there's a different way to do it. At least you had a debate. You had a policy debate about it. You had Rudy Giuliani, got elected mayor of New York City, said the liberals before him had done some things wrong. Michael Bloomberg followed in that suit.

But this is not a policy argument. This is the president, show up in Baltimore, say you're going to do something, but listen to Rush Limbaugh, he says, Mr. President, don't listen to the media, don't listen to the Democrats, keep at it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RUSH LIMBAUGH, HOST, "THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW": Detroit, Flint, Los Angeles, San Francisco, massive homeless problems. Wherever you find this decadent decay, you're going to find Democrats having run the operation.

This is classic pushback. People elected Trump. This is exactly why, pushback against conventional wisdom.

The Democrats take every one of these minority groups' votes for granted and it's about time somebody pushed back against the real human misery.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: The pushback would be great if it was a policy proposal, if it was a Trump plan for urban America, not filth, rodents, crime- infested.

MATTINGLY: Yes, I'm going to shock you when I tell you that this is not the Kemp Republican party anymore, and many of his acolytes are no longer in the Republican Party or have made clear with their silence related to some of these comments that they're uncomfortable but unwilling to actually challenge the president.

I think it's interesting, like, I'm very reluctant to ascribe some three-dimensional chess political game here where the president is tweeting these things out. What's more interesting is he tweets it out, he sees the response and then everybody just slots in behind him and then it becomes part of the strategy, right?

KING: Right.

MATTINGLY: Like, I don't -- I don't know necessarily either with the four member -- four freshmen women that he tweeted about sending them back, or whether Congressman Elijah Cummings, whether in his head he was thinking, this is going to be a great strategy to rile up my base. But he does it, sees the response to it, and that's when everybody piles on that supports him on his side. And they tweet out videos of Baltimore, decrepit areas of Baltimore, things of that nature.

And I think what's most interesting is not that the president tweets these things out as if it's some grand political plan, but how quickly his supporters slot in behind him, turn it into a campaign issue and take whatever sliver of what he's saying may be true and decide that that is the thing we are going to focus on and attack with him that way.

KING: Right. Focus on that.

And you -- go ahead.

GERGEN: He's become our contemporary modern George Wallace. This was what Wallace was all about.

KING: Right.

GERGEN: And we've had demagogues like this in the past. John Meacham, a wonderful historian, has record this, going all the way back to Father Coflin (ph) and the depression, Huey Long (ph) in the depression, Joe McCarthy later on and then on to George Wallace. They normally get about 35 percent to 40 percent support in the country. The good news is, they haven't yet hit 50.

KING: Well, we'll see what happens. You mentioned the challenge facing the Democrats.

GERGEN: Yes.

KING: The president was among the topics of conversation yesterday with four undecided Democratic, African-American voters right here in Detroit. Our conversation was over a fabulous lunch at an iconic Detroit bakery, Sweet Potato Sensations. We'll share some of these voters' thoughts tomorrow on the 2020 Democrats.

But we begin our conversation by talking about why they think President Trump won here in Michigan in 2016 and how he conducts himself now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KING: I want to start with a little history. How did Trump win Michigan?

KAYLA KENNARD, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC VOTER: Just speaking for the younger generation that voted, I know for me I wasn't completely satisfied with Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. And when she ran, I believe that her campaign didn't really speak to the needs of the people. I believe she kind of ran with this idea that she was a shoo-in.

ERIN KEITH, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC VOTER: To that point, I also think, for your broader question of how did Trump win Michigan, I think Trump appealed to a lot of people in rural parts of Michigan. I think he appealed to a lot of people who are just fearful that they're not going to have jobs that, quote/unquote, want things to go back to the way they were when they felt more stable. And I think Trump kind of used those people and made false promises of what he would do. And that is why they came out in such high numbers.

[12:29:52] JAY ANDERSON, MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC VOTER: And I think that Detroiters -- well, voters, they're -- they're not coming out. They're not showing up. And those numbers could have made a bigger difference. And even now I think a lot of black people