Bridget Mulcahy/POLITICO Off Message Full transcript: POLITICO's Glenn Thrush interviews Jeff Weaver

GLENN THRUSH: Hey, Jeff. How you doing? Thanks for popping by.

JEFF WEAVER: I'm doing very well. Glad to be here.


THRUSH: I kind of grabbed you on the fly. I want to start with something that has nothing to do with politics. The most fascinating part of your biography, to me, is the comic book store. Everybody asks you about this. But, like, how did you get into that stuff?

WEAVER: Well, I was a long-time comic book fan and I worked with Bernie for many, many years. I left his Senate office in 2009, decided to leave politics and do something different. So I opened a comic book store and I have a convention business. And then I got called back for special duty.

THRUSH: What's a convention--so you go, like, to Comic-Con and stuff?

WEAVER: Yeah, right. It's old books, you know, vintage comic books.

THRUSH: What got you--like, what is your--what was the first comic you had and what got you into it?

WEAVER: Well, I remember buying a comic of an old spinner rack. My grandmother bought it for me.

THRUSH: Really?

WEAVER: Oh yeah. It was an early Justice League issue, so that's where we got me. I was hooked immediately.

THRUSH: What do you think hooked you about that?

WEAVER: I don't know. I grew up in a small town.

THRUSH: This is in--tell everybody where.

WEAVER: In St. Alban's, Vermont, and, you know, it took you--they took you to another place.

THRUSH: Really? And if you were to sort of identify two or three of your favorite comic books?

WEAVER: Well, you know, I mean, it's a bunch of older books now since I have more money and can afford older stuff. But, you know, I do like some of the early first appearances are pretty fascinating.

THRUSH: Why? Just the way they evolved?

WEAVER: Yeah, because if you look at them now, I mean, at the time they were fantastic and now they look pretty simplistic in terms of the art.

THRUSH: Give me an example.

WEAVER: Well, if you look at Spiderman #1 there's not a lot of background. It's just--it's very--you know, Steve Ditko was a master artist, but a lot of it is very basic.

THRUSH: Wow. So do you like--I mean, I've read graphic novels and stuff.

WEAVER: Sure.

THRUSH: I mean, what about kind of the transition from kind of leaping from comic books to graphic novels? Have you--do you--are you into that stuff or do you pretty much stick with the early stuff?

WEAVER: Well, I'm mostly into the early stuff, but, you know, some of the other stuff was good. I mean, certainly the Walking Dead material, which is the foundation material for the show, is very, very good.

THRUSH: My kids love--what's the one that they did the movie on? Come on. The--the one with the Bob Dylan song, "The Times They Are a-Changin'" at the beginning of it. Oh--we'll cut this out.

So in terms of--so you started doing the comic book store, and it's in Virginia, right?

WEAVER: It is. It's in Falls Church, Virginia.

THRUSH: What's it like running a small business after working as long as you did in kind of government and politics and stuff?

WEAVER: It's a challenge, really. I mean, you have payroll and you have rent and you have electric bills and you've got to make it happen. You've got to get people in the store. So it's pretty successful.

THRUSH: Yeah. And it is--how many employees do you have?

WEAVER: I have seven employees.

THRUSH: That's a lot.

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: And do these convention things--I can't‑‑I don't picture you as the kind of guy to put on like a Spiderman outfit--

WEAVER: No.

[Laughter]

WEAVER: No. I don't think that would be good for anybody, frankly.

THRUSH: So you're telling me you don't own any outfits?

WEAVER: I don't. I do. I do--well, I will make my confession on this show.

THRUSH: Yes.

WEAVER: I do own a screen-worn Beneath the Planet of the Apes gorilla uniform.

THRUSH: Have you ever worn it?

WEAVER: I have not worn it. No, no. It's made for a much smaller person than me.

THRUSH: I would pay you a substantial amount of money if you got Bernie to get it to--[Laughs]. Does Bernie--what does Bernie think of this? Does Bernie like comic books?

WEAVER: I don't know. I think he read them as a kid but he doesn't have any great interest in comic books.

THRUSH: Just not really into it. You know what I used to like as a kid? Sgt. Rock.

THRUSH: Sgt. Rock was really good, and what's the other one? But Sgt. Rock, in particular, they were a bloody mess, man.

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: So in terms--let's talk a little bit about how you got into politics. We have a mutual friend, Kurt Ehrenberg, who I'm going to see later today, who I guess was part of the Seabrook--like the Seabrook protest. But it's my understanding, if I'm remembering correctly, didn't you get active in politics and protests really early on in your life?

WEAVER: I did. I did. I became first involved in politics in the anti-apartheid movement in Boston when I was at BU, so I was arrested at a shantytown construction site, thrown out of school.

THRUSH: You got thrown out of school?

WEAVER: I got thrown out of school, yeah.

THRUSH: Let's have some details here.

WEAVER: So this was a time when a guy named John Silber was running Boston University.

THRUSH: Sure.

WEAVER: He was sort of a notorious right-wing Democrat. I guess he's a Democrat. You know, BU had a lot of controversy under his rule.

THRUSH: Wasn't Silber tied to Rusty--to the--

WEAVER: He was tied to--well, you know, his international relations department--

THRUSH: --to Whitey.

[Overlapping speakers 0:04:16]

THRUSH: To Whitey, Whitey Bulger.

WEAVER: --with the Contra rebels, and then there was a scandal involving the communications school there, which was highly regarded at the time. They were training foreign journalists to go back and essentially be CIA journalists in foreign countries. The dean resigned, at the time.

THRUSH: Wow.

WEAVER: Anyway, so it was quite a controversial place. So apartheid was a big issue, obviously, in the '80s, and I became involved in the anti‑apartheid.

THRUSH: The Sun City stuff?

WEAVER: Yeah, yeah.

THRUSH: But, yeah--because you and I are not that far apart in age, so I will say you look far, far older than I do. It was a big deal. I was at Brandeis for a short period of time and it was a big, big deal there. So when you--how long did you last before you got booted, and what did you major in, and--

WEAVER: Well, I was a--sort of economics and Russian area studies major, and I was there, it was my junior year, I was booted.

THRUSH: Wow. So you literally, because of the protests, they brought you up on charges and kicked you out of school?

WEAVER: Well, we--yeah, well, we started erecting a shantytown in front of the Student Union Building, and then some people were arrested and some of us who blocked police cars were also arrested and taken off to the Boston police station, where they really didn't want much to do with us because they didn't really look at it as all that serious. So, you know, eventually the charges were dismissed, but--

THRUSH: Did you--so did you ever go back and finish school, or was that it?

WEAVER: I did. I finished at University of Vermont.

THRUSH: So in terms of--not to get too deep‑divey on this stuff, but, like, when I was a kid I read a lot of--you know, I was reading Norman Mailer--

[Phone rings]

THRUSH: Whoops. Radiohead, so fuck them. We will cut that out. When I was a kid I read, like, Eldridge Cleaver, and I read Armies of the Night and all that same stuff. What kind of--well, first of all, is there a history of protest in your family? Like, tell me a little about--

WEAVER: No, not really. Not really. You know, I think I was just moved by the sort of--you know, I mean, at BU there was a lot of sort of suppressed activism. I was also involved in a--

[Phone rings]

THRUSH: Sorry, man.

WEAVER: At BU I was also involved in a sort of First Amendment lawsuit against BU, where they tried to throw some of us out of housing for having sort of political signs in our dorm windows, a case we ultimately won.

THRUSH: But just give me a sense as to how you came about this. Like, what was it about, in terms of the grievance, in terms of the protest? What was it--tell me a little about your parents' politics. Like where did this all sort of come from, when you look back?

WEAVER: Well, I don't really know where it comes from, but it was--you know, clearly what was going on at BU was wrong, and I sort of felt compelled to become involved.

THRUSH: What did your folks do?

WEAVER: My father is--who is passed now, was--he had a pet store. He was an animal dealer, mostly, when I was growing up.

THRUSH: Wow.

WEAVER: My mother was in business, with various insurance agents, and things like that.

THRUSH: So the small business thing.

WEAVER: Yeah, yeah.

THRUSH: The small business thing kind of comes naturally to you--

WEAVER: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

THRUSH: --going back what it was that you were doing. So--and what was--and when did you first--paint the picture for me when you first met Bernard Sanders?

WEAVER: So I came back--after I was kicked out of BU I came back to Vermont, to the small town where we lived, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, and Bernie, at that time, was mayor of Burlington and running for governor as a third-party candidate. And I called his campaign and I met him, actually, at a local parade. He was coming up to be in the parade so I met him at that parade.

THRUSH: Do you hang out in parades normally? Is that kind of your thing?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, I was at--you know--

THRUSH: [Laughs]

WEAVER: --someone has to staff him at the parade, although the staffing back then was much more lean than what it is--than what he has now. So, anyway, I met him at this parade and we sort of hit it off, actually, and he called me a day or two later and said, "Do you want to come down and work in Burlington?" And so I went down and drove him around for the rest of the campaign.

THRUSH: So you were kind of a driver, which everybody has done, right?

WEAVER: Sure.

THRUSH: That is the foundation--people don't realize that about politics, the foundational job in politics. You know, I talked with Jerry Brown, probably six months ago, and he was talking about driving around for his dad, when his dad was running for governor.

WEAVER: It's a great way to get the know the candidate.

THRUSH: Totally, right?

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: Well, how did you--tell me what you got to know about Bernie.

WEAVER: Oh, I mean, you know, the way it would work is I would pick him up at--I lived about a half an hour north of Burlington, so I would pick him up at 7 in the morning and then I would drop him off about 1:00 at night, and then drive home, and then come back the next morning. So we spent a lot of time in the car together.

THRUSH: That's a lot of Bernie, though.

WEAVER: That's a lot of Bernie.

THRUSH: [Laughs] Well, and kind of--what did you guys talk about? Well, first of all, he's got a reputation--I know from people who know him--for being--he can be occasionally cranky, right? [Laughs]

WEAVER: I've heard that.

THRUSH: Was he--did you drive too fast? Did you drive too slow?

WEAVER: No, no. I think I drove--can be a fast driver but I only drive as fast as the law allows. But‑‑

THRUSH: I have trouble believing that.

WEAVER: But we--no, we get along quite well. We have for years and years.

THRUSH: Well, come on. What was--what did you guys talk about? Clearly you guys had all that time. Do you remember anything, like, that really connected you to him early on? Did you have any sort of common interests?

WEAVER: No. We would talk about--you know, Bernie is--politics is really his life, so we talked a lot about politics, a lot about the campaign. You know, occasionally baseball. He likes baseball.

THRUSH: I didn't know that.

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: Really?

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: He's--what kind of fan is he?

WEAVER: He's a Red Sox fan.

THRUSH: That is--you know, I'm from Brooklyn.

WEAVER: I know. Well--

THRUSH: Well, I guess he doesn't have any Dodgers left.

WEAVER: Right. Right. Right. Well, that was a very moving part of his life, I think, when they lost the Dodgers.

THRUSH: Did he really? He really felt it?

WEAVER: Yeah, he did, yeah.

THRUSH: That's kind of the Doris Kearns Goodwin route, right, going from a Brooklyn Dodgers fan to a Boston Red Sox fan, because it's just loser to loser for that period of time, right?

WEAVER: Wow.

THRUSH: Sorry, man. So you're a Red--you're a life-long Red Sox fan?

WEAVER: No. I'm a Nats fan.

THRUSH: You're a Nats fan?

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: Boy, you really--for somebody who has a reputation as being steadfast and holding your allegiances, that's kind of a--

WEAVER: Well, that's the Expos. Those are the old Expos.

THRUSH: You liked the Expos?

WEAVER: You know, when I was growing up, you know--where I grew up the closest city was 60 miles--was 60 minutes away, was Montreal, Quebec.

THRUSH: Oh, wow. So you went to the hold--

WEAVER: I grew up way up north.

THRUSH: Park--Jarry Park, right? Park Jarry?

WEAVER: Yep, way up north. Yes. I've been there.

THRUSH: Gary Carter--

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: --Andre Dawson.

WEAVER: And their names actually are in that stadium.

THRUSH: Really?

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: Very cool. So you come about this honestly. This isn't bullshit.

WEAVER: See?

THRUSH: So early on with--do you consider him to be--was he always an insurgent? I mean, obviously when he ran Burlington he was a very meat-and-potatoes kind of mayor, right? I mean, he really dealt with stuff. Tell me the transition that you've seen in him. You knew him from a very early age. How have you, kind of, like, seen him change over the years?

WEAVER: Well, he was. I mean, as mayor of Burlington he was very much--you know, they used to--as a pejorative--you know, people on the ultra-left would call him a sewer socialist, right, because he was concerned about picking up garbage and plowing the streets and all those kinds of things. But he knew, you know, if you want to have a progressive government you've got to be able to deliver. You have to deliver, right? People want--

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: --I mean, those are things people care about.

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: And, at the same time, you know, Burlington was one of the only cities with its own foreign policy.

THRUSH: Tacoma Park being the other one.

WEAVER: Right, right. But people--but that was fine with people as long as he was able to, you know, to deliver on the municipal services that they needed. I mean, what's changed about him? I mean, you know, he's much more--he is, you know, much better, I think, now, as a negotiator and as someone who can navigate sort of power centers than he was as a, you know, insurgent mayor in Burlington, where it was much easier just to--you know, I mean, basically what they did is they electorally bludgeoned their opponents to death by slowly but surely defeating them at the polls. But, you know, you can't do that in the Congress.

THRUSH: What did you call that? We just had a panel‑‑I should just say we just had a panel where you went to war with Mark Penn, which is highly entertaining. We'll put it on the Internet so you guys can see. We'll link to it in this thing--where you used the term "Leninist discipline," right?

WEAVER: Leninist party discipline.

THRUSH: Right. So that's kind of Burlington model, right?

WEAVER: Well, I wouldn't--I mean, actually, I used that to describe the Clinton platform.

THRUSH: I'm aware of how you used it.

WEAVER: Yes. Yes.

THRUSH: So--yours more Trotsky-ite, right? But the--so in terms of--so he was--so you didn't really have to cut deals back then, and--so you watched him‑‑watched this evolve when he was in the House.

WEAVER: Yes.

THRUSH: That is kind of the paradox about this guy, right? There is--you know, it was really funny. For as much as ACA is a huge issue and his advocacy of the public option is a big part of who he is, he was not, when I covered that story in the Senate, he was never considered a vote that they were going to lose, right?

WEAVER: Right. Right.

THRUSH: He was always--so talk about that a little bit. There was a core of accommodation--not accommodation; that's probably a pejorative--but there's a core of compromise in this guy.

WEAVER: Well, look. So what he understands is how do you move the ball forward as far as you can, as fast as you can.

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: And he never passes up an opportunity to move the ball forward.

THRUSH: And then, when was the first time you really saw--like, what was a formative experience in terms of negotiating either in the Senate or the House, that you saw him really learn these lessons on how to do this?

WEAVER: Well, the ACA was certainly one of those times, and I remember in the House, you know, he was--you know, we were in the minority pretty quickly because the Republicans took over in '94. He came down in '90, well, '91, I guess, technically. But, you know, in '94 we quickly became a part of the minority. And, you know, being in the U.S. House and a minority is not fun.

THRUSH: No. Not at all.

WEAVER: Being in the majority is not fun sometimes either, especially as a junior member, just because it's such a top-down institution, and the majority always wins, or almost always wins. But, you know, he learned to negotiate. I mean, he would make these sort of right-left coalitions with--you know, with Ron Paul and Dana Rohrabacher and a rogues' gallery of people on the sort of far, far right.

THRUSH: The cranky caucus.

WEAVER: The cranky--right.

THRUSH: [Laughs]

WEAVER: You know, on his side he had people like Pete DeFazio or Dennis Kucinich, and, you know, they would craft these amendments and they would manage to win, you know, on the floor of the House.

THRUSH: He doesn't--he can be contentious. He's not an enemy-maker, right? I mean, the guy is like--it's an interesting component because, like, you look at him--the same thing about you, by the way. That's a characteristic you have. Like when--I think when people first meet you, you could be somewhat intimidating, right? But then you kind of--but you're not--well, to me anyway. But he's not somebody who people really make long-term--is he a guy who keeps, like--who has--do you think he's a guy who actually has enemies?

WEAVER: Well, he doesn't take cheap shots, you know, and he fights on--you know, he's very ideological, obviously. I mean, he's committed to his principles and issues that he fights for, and people know that. And he doesn't take cheap shots or cheap partisan shots at people. They know when they're fighting him that he's fighting for a reason.

THRUSH: And he doesn't tend to get--that was a--

WEAVER: He's not personal at all. He's really not interested in sort of personal politics or politics of personal destruction. That's not his thing at all.

THRUSH: Let's move ahead into the more relevant present. One of the things that really struck me--you know, it's so funny. People have kind of a very fixed view of him, and I think the reality of Bernie Sanders is somewhat different than what people observe. One of the things--I think he's an extraordinarily--one of the most disciplined politicians I've ever covered, right.

WEAVER: Yes, absolutely.

THRUSH: And one of the things I thought was extraordinary about the other night in the Wells Fargo Center was he showed some real personal emotion. Like there was--obviously, at the reading of the roll call, there was--clearly he views this as moving the ball forward in terms of the issues that he cares about, and you guys had these victories on the platform. But for, I think, a 10-, 20-minute period there, he was really feeling what it meant personally, right? Did you perceive that too?

WEAVER: Yes.

THRUSH: Was that a big moment for you guys?

WEAVER: No, no. No, absolutely. I mean, to start where he--I mean, if you look at the film clips of him announcing his presidential campaign--

THRUSH: Like rushing out there--

WEAVER: Right, right, in the Senate, swamped, right, with, like, I think Michael Briggs might have been with him, his communications director. But, I mean, there was no backdrop, no placard--

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: --no crowd, no nothing, right? And it was like, Senate swamp, a few reporters, skeptical reporters I'm sure, and to be standing there in front of the--you know, the Democratic Convention, you know, with a sea of people with Bernie signs, really sort of validating what he has been talking about for the last 15 months in this campaign but the last-

THRUSH: Forty years.

WEAVER: --40 years of his life.

THRUSH: He got--the word I would use--

WEAVER: Fifty years.

THRUSH: --verklempt. He got really--not to get Yiddish--but, like, he really was sitting there--does he feel--I mean, yes, he's loathe to express this stuff in personal terms. This is not his shtick.

WEAVER: He's not--yes, it is not about him.

THRUSH: But does--come on. But isn't this a personally deeply gratifying thing, when your entire life's work is rewarded there on the floor?

WEAVER: Of course, validated. Well, I mean, I would say less rewarded but validated--

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: --right? I mean, because even people in that hall who didn't vote for him, you know what I mean, when we polled people, I mean, we obviously did a lot of polling in the campaign--

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: --even people who supported Hillary Clinton, a huge swath of those people actually agreed more with him on the issues and they were voting for her for some other reason besides, you know, being aligned on the issues. So, you know, what he is talking about, and we talked about this in the panel we just had, you know, the party has--the rank and file of the party has really moved sharply--

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: --in his direction.

THRUSH: Right, and, you know, having--the juxtaposition of you and Penn was really interesting, because Penn really represents where that place was. The question is, you know, will it revert back, and do you think it will revert back?

WEAVER: No, and I, actually--we wrote about this in an e-mail that Bernie sent out. You know, in 1980, when Reagan became president, you know, not only did he move the Republican Party to the right but the whole country to the right, and really, it was his election, that movement to the right, which allowed this sort of corporate takeover of the party in the '90s. So I think we're back now more into the historic trajectory of the Democratic Party, more towards sort of the social Democratic Party, and I think it's heading in that direction. I think the '90s were really an aberration.

THRUSH: This combination of a pragmatist and a persuader, which Bernie is a persuader. I mean, he was really able to energize people. Were you--obviously we have Tim Kaine. Bernie has said a couple of things about Tim Kaine. I mean, what do you generally think about the Kaine pick, personally?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, you know, I voted--I live in Virginia. I personally voted for Tim Kaine for Senate. So--and, you know, he is obviously more conservative than Bernie is and probably more conservative than Hillary Clinton is. So, you know, I would have hoped for a more progressive pick, but, you know, when you're the presidential nominee you really get to pick who you want to pick. I mean, I really do believe that.

THRUSH: Bernie was--I don't think he was ever really serious under consideration. Warren really wasn't under very serious consideration. Do you think that was a mistake?

WEAVER: Well, we'll see, obviously. I mean, I do think that--I think, as time goes on, more and more people will sort of take in what it really means to have a President Trump. I mean, if you think about what Reagan did to the country with his tenure, you know, what would a Trump presidency do to us for generations, really?

THRUSH: But do--I mean, in general, do you think the ticket would be stronger with Bernie on it?

WEAVER: My personal view?

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: Yeah, sure. Of course. I do. Absolutely.

THRUSH: Do you think Bernie feels that way?

WEAVER: No, we really haven't talked about it. He was never really that interested in being vice president.

THRUSH: Why?

WEAVER: Because it's not--because he's a fierce advocate for what he believes, and, you know, often the role of vice president is to stand behind the president, nodding.

THRUSH: So he wants the freedom of movement, essentially.

WEAVER: Yeah. No, I think that's right. So in that way I think--I mean, even from her standpoint, in terms of governing, you know, might not have been the best pick for him, right?

THRUSH: Right. How about Warren? I mean--

WEAVER: Well, I don't know her as well, personally. I don't know, you know, to be able to assume that role. I mean, Joe Biden sort of epitomizes the sort of dutiful vice president who, you know, supports the president regardless--I mean, I don't know what disagreements they had on policy but I'm sure they did.

THRUSH: Gay rights. Gay marriage.

WEAVER: Yeah.

THRUSH: They actually had a ton of differences--I mean, they had a ton of disagreements. I just wrote a piece where you play--you have a funny cameo in it, talking about how Plouffe and Obama essentially forced Biden out of the race, right?

WEAVER: Right. Right. Right.

THRUSH: They moved him right out of the way.

Well, let's talk a little bit about that, this notion, because a lot of people--there's still a lot of people running around, and they're all over my Twitter feed and they're all over me, talking about how rigged this thing is, the DNC e-mails indicate a certain level of coordination, or at least a presumption of coordination.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: Well, first of all, what do you think it says about the DNC's relationship with the Clinton campaign, and what do you think the thing that I wrote about, the coordination between Obama and Clinton during the course of this whole campaign?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, I have to say, frankly, that the president and vice president, I thought, were very disciplined in staying out of the race, frankly, in a public way, and I know the senator appreciates it and so do I. You know, the president indicated that he would stay out, and he did, and I think it was best that the voters, you know, in the Democratic primaries and caucuses ultimately make the decision about who they wanted to be the nominee. So I think they did the right thing, frankly, for the party and for the country.

You know, in terms of the DNC, I mean, clearly we had complained loudly and often about the DNC's bias toward the Clinton campaign. You know, these e-mails certainly brought it out in black and white, right before the convention, and I think it was really sort of the law straw in terms of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

THRUSH: Well, look. You know, I mean, the other reporting that I did earlier this week was, you know--and it's something I've known forever--there were a bunch of Obama people, senior Obama people, who wanted her gone. I wrote about this in 2012, man. You know, they wanted her out. Messina wanted her out. Patrick Gaspard wanted her out. And then there was a bunch of Clinton people. I reported that Podesta, a year ago, went to the White House and wanted her gone.

Do you think that, in the larger sense, in terms of the real interaction between the DNC and Clinton, do you think there really was--I mean, do you think--I guess my question is, was Debbie really that big a player? Was the DNC that big a player?

WEAVER: Well, I don't know. I mean, it certainly was not a determinant in the race but I would say that, you know, in things like the debate schedule, clearly that was a problem. You know, we ultimately went to court on this data dispute, where they showed up for our data, not long before the Iowa caucuses. You know, we went to court‑‑

THRUSH: Which really was going to kill you.

WEAVER: Oh, it would--it was killing us.

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: I mean we were without 48 hours. We were sending volunteers home in Iowa, because--

THRUSH: And we are referring, of course, to the incident in which two or three staffers of yours took a peek inside of the data file. You guys claimed that there was nothing pernicious about it. The Clinton people went nuts.

WEAVER: Right. We fired the person involved.

THRUSH: Yep.

WEAVER: And, you know, there was a subsequent investigation, paid for by us and the DNC, which bore out exactly what we said, that there was nothing taken from them. So, yeah, but what happened is, you know, the way campaigns are run these days, they're very data-driven, and information about voters or these voter files that have information about voters and their past voting history, you know, without that information you can't run a campaign. And so we would have volunteers come to our Iowa offices and we had to send them home, because we didn't have access to this data. It got to be a Friday night and I said, "We just can't go the whole weekend," because weekends, obviously, you have a lot of volunteers coming in. So we ultimately went to federal court and the DNC, you know, caved at that point and gave us back our data.

But even during that time period, you know, I had senior people at the DNC calling me and saying, "Look, we're trying to get Debbie to change her mind and she's adamant about not doing it." So, you know, a lot of this was personality-driven, really.

THRUSH: She hung around Philly after she--I mean, you know, you can't--yeah, I don't--she has the right to do whatever she wants to do but a lot of people in the party thought that wasn't necessarily constructive, as a party-building--

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: Pretty ironic, however, that like Sanders and you, people who were viewed as setting the place on fire, in the end turned out to be more constructive in party-building than the chairman--chairwoman of the party herself, right?

WEAVER: Well, look. You know, we fought this race. We fought it hard, but I think we fought it cleanly. You know, it doesn't always look that way when you're on the receiving end of it.

THRUSH: [Laughs]

WEAVER: But I think in hindsight people on the other side realize that that's the case.

THRUSH: So I asked you kind of a question half in jest, at this panel, which was--and it had been suggested to me by a bunch of people--doesn't it make a lot of sense for your organization, insofar as it still exists, to plug and play in the DNC? You are the energy of this party right now, right? You are--and even the Clinton people. The other thing that I don't think people fully realize, Jeff, is how you guys revolutionized the game in terms of online fundraising--

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: --and also the creation of this content that Tad and other folks had a hand in. Why not have the Sanders folks kind of just take over the Democrat--you know, you guys are bitching about how the game was rigged against you on this stuff. Why not just, you know, take the--storm the castle and just take it?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, we're happy to play whatever role we can that's constructive. I mean, obviously there are people in the DNC now--I don't know what you mean by "storming the castle." It's not like we're going to race the Ivy Street gates at the DNC headquarters.

THRUSH: Why not? No, I'm kidding.

WEAVER: That was Glenn.

THRUSH: That was me, not him.

WEAVER: But, you know, I know Donna Brazile. I've had conversations with her in the last couple of days and I'll have conversations with her in the next few days, so I think this she's very interesting, in reorienting the party.

THRUSH: Do you think she gets it?

WEAVER: I do think she get is. Yes, absolutely.

THRUSH: And you do think a lot of the Sanders folks, and the modalities that you guys invented, are going to be transferrable to the DNC.

WEAVER: I do if it is willing to transform itself. I mean, if you just try to overlay these over the current DNC I think they'll fall flat.

THRUSH: Well, I guess the open-and-close primary thing is the really seminal argument here, right?

WEAVER: Well, that's really one of the arguments, yes. I mean, you know, the Democratic Party has to come to grips with the sort of modern reality that, you know, young people are increasingly aligning themselves as independents, even though they may consistently vote Democratic, and to sort of shut those people out of the nominating process, I think, is a mistake.

THRUSH: And sort of identifying yourself with being more liberal, not in the political sense but more liberal in the practical sense, of letting as many people in the room as possible is good for branding, right?

WEAVER: Exactly right. I mean, the more you participate with, you know, in your words, a brand, the more comfortable you become with it and the more sort of aligned you become with it.

THRUSH: I guess I don't know this. Are you a registered Democrat or are you an independent?

WEAVER: I'm in Virginia. We don't register by party.

THRUSH: Oh. That's right. Damn it. It keeps--the V-states, man.

If you could register, would you register as a Democrat?

WEAVER: Yeah, I'd register as a--yes, I would.

THRUSH: And would you have done that in Vermont, if you had been given the option, when you were up there?

WEAVER: At one point I would've, yes.

THRUSH: [Laughs] What was that point?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, when I was younger I would've--I was an independent.

THRUSH: How long--just in general, in terms of the spectrum, how long--when would you have registered as a Democrat in Virginia if you had the opportunity? I mean, like--

WEAVER: Well, I've been in Virginia since '94 or '95. I don't know. Probably in that time period.

THRUSH: Okay. So you are capital-D Democrat.

WEAVER: Yeah. Yeah.

THRUSH: Do you think Bernie now is a capital-D Democrat?

WEAVER: In some ways, yeah.

THRUSH: [Laughs]

WEAVER: I mean, he was elected as an independent.

THRUSH: Right. When you say "in some ways," what are the ways he is and what are the ways he isn't?

WEAVER: Well, I think he's--I think his connection to the Democratic Party now is extremely strong. I think he has an institutional interest in reforming the party and making it a grassroots, broad-based party. So, in that sense, I think he has created a personal connection between himself and the party infrastructure. So it is an institution that he wants to see succeed. But, you know, he was elected as an independent.

THRUSH: And he still has that ethos.

WEAVER: He does. I would call him an independent Democrat.

THRUSH: An independent Democrat. Well put, as opposed to a socialist Democrat--Democratic socialist. I'm sorry.

So his role that he's going to play--we've talked about him--obviously he's somebody she really needs to get young people.

WEAVER: Yes.

THRUSH: Like it's really fun. I don't know--I think I did a story on this, where I quoted somebody saying, and it may be on the record, "What's your youth strategy?" to a senior Clinton advisor, and they were like, "Bernie Sanders." [Laughs]

So how does he--(a) how is that transferrable? How do you transfer what I saw when there were 18,000 people--was it in the Bronx? No, it was on the West Side--to a woman who sometimes has trouble getting 500 people to come into a parking lot?

WEAVER: Well, I mean, first of all, he's going to go on the campaign trail and the stump, and I think it will be aided a lot by the fact that she has moved--the secretary has moved tremendously on a number of issues, including this issue of free tuition in public college and universities, which was a tremendously popular plank that the senator ran on. You know, one of the problems that the Clinton people have, which is more of a process problem than a substance problem, is that their packaging often is very wonky and not, you know, clear enough, I think.

THRUSH: That's a great point. So explain to me how that can--because we're speaking a couple of hours before she gives her big speech. I ran into one of her senior people at a bar last night, and I asked him, "How's the speech going?" and the person said, "Long."

WEAVER: Right. Right. Although Bernie's speeches, you know, his stump speech was an hour and 45. So--

THRUSH: But I don't know. It moves. It's got a rhythm to it, right?

WEAVER: That's a--

[Overlapping speakers 0:29:40]

THRUSH: Hers does not have a--hers is like a Bruckner symphony, right, as opposed to cha-cha-cha. But the--we will take that out. [Laughs]

No, but, like, how do you think--because her people, or the people in her policy shop, dismiss that as bumper-sticker stuff. How do you kind of get what she represents into a more pithy--

WEAVER: Well, but you have to be able to talk about your 20-page policy in a bumper sticker. Do you know what I mean?

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: It doesn't mean you don't have the 20-page policy, because we have elaborate policies as well.

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: But, you know, some of it was legislation. Some of it was, you know, white papers. But you have to be able to describe it to people in, you know, a very short time period or amount of space.

THRUSH: And, by the way, lights just went out.

WEAVER: Thank goodness it's radio.

THRUSH: It might be from the storm.

WEAVER: Thank goodness it's a podcast. You're not a--

Technical break]

THRUSH: So in terms of this issue that she has with kind of expressing this pithily, Sanders has an intuitive sense to this stuff, right?

WEAVER: Yes. Very much so.

THRUSH: So he--I mean, this is kind of an under-appreciated skill. So how does that kind of work, functionally? So if he's working on a complicated policy, is he talking this stuff through with you? Is he editing press releases? Tell me how, like, Bernie operationally does this?

WEAVER: Well, what he does is--what he often does is he thinks about it backwards. So he'll think about, what is the outcome that he wants, right? So if it was free, you know, free tuition of public colleges and universities, so that becomes the starting point and then you work backwards from there in terms of how you design the policy to fit the outcome that you want, as opposed to noodling around policy and then seeing what the outcome is.

THRUSH: Well, she's--and she sort of does it the other way around, right?

WEAVER: Well, I haven't been involved in their policy deliberations, but, you know, they do--I think they do it differently than we did it.

THRUSH: Is there any policy that she has, and that you were running, that you were proposing to her, that you kind of looked across the line and would be like, if we were advocating that, we would express it this way? Like was there anything that you saw that she could have done better? Like--

WEAVER: You know, her college plan--I mean, she did have a very good college plan. It wasn't as sort of simple as the senator's but, you know, it was a very sort of convoluted, you know, a lot of means-testing and tiers and different programs sort of interlocking, and I think they could have distilled that down to something much more simple than what they had.

THRUSH: So to a certain extent it's like not showing people--not lifting up the hood on the car, just showing them the car.

WEAVER: Right. Right. Right. Because I don't know that people--you know, once you get to the, you know, the cylinder and the pistons, you know, people sort of--you've lost them.

THRUSH: And Trump does have that gift, except Trump obviously doesn't have a policy to go along with the rhetoric.

WEAVER: Right. He doesn't have it. He only has the bumper stickers. Now that's what--you know, if people complain about bumper stickers with no policy, I mean, that's what Trump is. He's bumper stickers with no policy. We had policies but we also had a bumper sticker that represented that policy.

THRUSH: Let's talk, in the last couple of questions, about kind of the way that this ended and kind of looking forward. You guys--you know, the Clinton people, I think, were pretty, I wouldn't say upset, but they were impatient, I think, after California. What took--explain to me, like, California happens. Clearly there's a decisive result. What were you guys--you get together, what were you thinking? You talked about him being very objective-based. When you were having meetings, what did you want to achieve in the interim between June 7th and the endorsement?

WEAVER: Well, I think what we wanted to do is to try to move as much of the agenda that he articulated during the campaign--and that really was what sort of drove him this entire campaign--try to move that into sort of action, either in the platform, in the rules, or, you know, we negotiated these two separate pieces with the Clinton administration, one around college education and one around health care. So it was very important that we sort of--to try to push that progressive agenda as far as one could get it, between the time of California and the time of an enforcement.

THRUSH: Now was there, like, a memo, deliverables? Did you guys have a priority sheet?

WEAVER: We did. Sure.

THRUSH: And so the college one was number one, right?

WEAVER: Yeah, the college and health care. Well, there were both sort of paired.

THRUSH: Do you feel like you could get it from her, right? I mean, like, she wasn't that distant from you in terms of the general policy stuff, right?

WEAVER: Right. Well, there was nothing about it that was--I mean, her only objective--you know, we had this meeting with the secretary that I was at, you know, with Bernie and Secretary Clinton, in--on the night of the D.C. primary, so some of this was discussed at this meeting. And, you know, she had articulated during the campaign that concern about giving money to sort of rich people's kids--

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: --to go to public colleges and universities, which we really didn't think it was a concern because most kids don't usually go to public college and universities, first of all.

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: And we do--you know, certainly with high schools Donald Trump's kids want to go to public high school. People will pay for it, right?

THRUSH: [Laughs]

WEAVER: I mean, if it’s not going to happen, but that's true, right? Any rich person can send their kids to a public high school.

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: So, you know, Bernie is very much in favor of creating universal programs, you know, simple universal programs--

THRUSH: Oh, that's interesting.

WEAVER: --and then paying for them progressively, right.

THRUSH: Because that--so you get it on the back end. So you tax them, so you don't--you're not getting it as a fee, you're getting it as a larger equity.

WEAVER: Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, there's an old saying, programs for poor people are poor programs. So, you know, you create--I mean, Social Security is an example. You know, you create universal buy-in and then something is much more popular than if it's sort of means-tested or targeted to a small group of people.

THRUSH: That's actually kind of what the selling point failure of ACA was, is the fact that it really is kind of a--despite it being sold as a universal program, it's quite a narrow-casted program.

WEAVER: Right. Right.

THRUSH: You do not have an across-the-board buy-in. I guess that is the juxtaposition. That's why the public option is a more universal thing, right?

WEAVER: Right. Exactly. Exactly.

THRUSH: Well, you know, conceptually--it's so funny. It's just a simple idea and I had never really thought of it that way.

WEAVER: Yeah, and it makes things bureaucratically simpler as well.

THRUSH: But--okay. So how does she--so these two, and I know you don't want to--we're not re-litigating all of this stuff. But, like, how do they--they're very different people. How do they kind of--what are those conversations like? They're very business-like? They're very brisk? They're very agenda-oriented?

WEAVER: No, they're not brisk. You know, look, they do know each other and they have known each other for decades, right? So it's not like two people who have never talked before. They've obviously chit-chatted on the Senate floor when they were both in the Senate.

THRUSH: Right.

WEAVER: So there is a relationship. You know, obviously, coming off a hard-fought campaign is a little bit different than it will be, I'm sure even six months from now.

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: But, you know, it was a very sort of conversational tone, you know, between the two of them, and they discussed some of these issues and, you know, there were some things that were non-starters.

THRUSH: Like what?

WEAVER: Well, I'm not going to go--I'm not going to tell you--

THRUSH: [Laughs]

[Overlapping speakers]

WEAVER: Good try. Good try.

THRUSH: Well, we are sitting in the dark. This was all intentional.

WEAVER: Is that right? Where is the mood music?

THRUSH: Relax. [Laughs] Shaft.

So with the couple more minutes we've got, so in terms of these--so here's my question. Does he--well--

WEAVER: With this platform that came out--

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: --you know, everybody's like, oh, the platform is just like a piece of paper and no one ever listens to it, but that's not really the case in this. We haven't had a contested platform like this since the '80s. I think there are a lot of people on both sides who are committed to this platform as sort of a policy agenda going forward, in the event of--in the hopeful event of a Clinton presidency.

THRUSH: And she's got a--well, first of all, let's talk about that. Do you think she's going to win?

WEAVER: I certainly think she can win, yes. I think--look, I think it's going to be much closer than many people think and I think some people on the Democratic side who think that, you know, Trump is such a buffoon that it's already won--but I think he's a very dangerous opponent and I think he certainly has the ability to win as well.

THRUSH: Do you think--and isn't that sort of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan strategy?

WEAVER: Yes. Exactly.

THRUSH: Do you think there are people--do you think the Clinton camp is sufficiently worried about him?

WEAVER: I do. I do think they are. Yes, I do.

THRUSH: And what does she have to do--because she's going to be giving her speech. One of the really difficult issues, you talk with any of her people, is moving her positives up.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: You can drive him down. That is doable. But moving her positives up. How do you think--as somebody who was on the other side of this, who drove her negatives up, how do you think you can reverse-engineer this and move her positives up?

WEAVER: Yeah. I just think you're going to have to have more validators. You know, she--you know, the polling shows, rightly or wrongly, that, you know, she has a credibility problem with non-Democratic voters, so independent voters and Republican voters, and I think she's going to just need more validators, and I think some of those validators really have to be regular people who, in some way, have had some contact with her or been benefitted from, you know, from the work that she has done. I think that's the best way to do it is to have third parties validate her.

THRUSH: Like the gun mothers, I thought, were‑‑in Iowa, the most effective--and a lily-white state, by the way--the most effective validators she had were the African-American mothers of gun violence.

WEAVER: Yeah, and I think that's right. I think that's true. Absolutely.

THRUSH: Well, that gets to a larger thing, which is, you know, when I first covered her she was doing listening tours, and as a senator she was really down at the ground level, Jeff. She was out doing stuff.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: I remember her doing, like, you know, Medicare D stuff in Rochester, where people would come up and talk to her.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: She's not that person now.

WEAVER: Well, yes and now. I mean, I think--the truth of the matter is I think she does spend‑‑you know, when she goes to her meetings she does spend a lot of time talking to people who are in the room. I think she makes a point of trying to stay and talk to people which sometimes drives her advance people crazy because it throws her schedule off.

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: You know, but she's one of those people that wants to shake every hand in the room, more so even than Bernie.

So I do think that she tries to do that. It's just harder to do on such a big stage, you know, to have the same impact.

THRUSH: But she also doesn't project. Like the thing that Bernie does--you know, look. I don't know if it was the America video, the one where he emerges from the crowd, I just thought that image of Bernie, it was like--again, we're talking about sort of achieving a similar result from a different thematic set, where he was kind of rising from the crowd and the only thing you see in the end of that ad is him standing at the end of the podium, surrounded by people, right?

WEAVER: Right. Right.

THRUSH: And her first ad, the first web ad she did, where she's not in it at all, I thought was the most effective ad--

WEAVER: Yes.

THRUSH: --of the damn campaign. Getting her out of--to some extent, and we saw that in the first couple of days of the convention, it was like a Hillary convention without Hillary.

WEAVER: Right. Well, you know, the first advertising that they did, they started advertising in August, actually, were all, you know, direct-to-camera ads, where she spoke directly to the camera.

THRUSH: Yeah.

WEAVER: And I just didn't that was the most effective technique for her.

THRUSH: It doesn't work. So you think she should do more--she should just get out there and pound the flesh, talk with people, have regular people that she's working with?

WEAVER: Talk about her, and talk about, you know, how she's impacted their life. Because she does have--you know, she does have a long history as a public servant, and I think that, you know, if you could have people, real people, talking about what she's done for them, I think that would be the most effective thing.

THRUSH: In terms of the--and again, getting back to kind of the question of the way Bernie feels about this personally--it's really interesting that, like--well, whatever. He does pull emotion out of the equation on stuff, right? He doesn't--he almost tends to--is that actually a conscious effort, that he--he doesn't do a lot. I actually thought it hurt him in New York, and as you recall I was at war with you guys because I wanted you to sit down and talk about this stuff.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: And I drove Briggs crazy, and I apologize if I was mean to Briggs. But the--

WEAVER: I'll let him know.

THRUSH: [Laughs] But he was really almost loathe--like in New York I thought like talking about his personal experience as a kid, particularly on race, right, because we grew up in a--but the point I was making is we came from the same neighborhood and it was a segregated, god-damned neighborhood, right?

Is he sort of like just reluctant to talk about himself? Is there like a reticence, or is that strategic?

WEAVER: Yeah. No, no, no. It's very much‑‑he's--it's very much he doesn't not want to be--he doesn't really want it to be a culted [phonetic] personality. It's the ideas that he espouses is what he wants people to sort of coalesce around. So he always has been very reticent about talking about himself.

THRUSH: But guess what, man? That's what creates a culted personality.

WEAVER: What's that? The fact that he doesn't talk about himself?

THRUSH: Yeah. Don't you think--you're telling me that there's not people walking around the street in Bernie shirts, in a way--like, the Hillary people, I don't see a lot of Hillary shirts. People walk around with Bernie shirts. Like there are people at our event just now who were wearing Bernie shirts, right? People really identify with him as a person.

WEAVER: I don't know. I think he--I hear what you're saying and there are Bernie shirts, but I think he ends up personifying a set of ideals that they endorse.

THRUSH: Okay. This really will be the last question. I'm such a liar. So what are you going to do?

WEAVER: I don't know.

THRUSH: Oh, come on.

WEAVER: I don't.

THRUSH: Really?

WEAVER: I really don't know.

THRUSH: Are you going to go back to the comic book store?

WEAVER: That's one option. It sounds good sometimes, but I'll probably be involved, I'm sure, in some way, in the general election.

THRUSH: And do you feel--if you were to sort of‑‑okay, let me phrase this another way. What do you think you're best at and what would you like to do in the general? Like, what do you think your real skill set that you can bring to the team is?

WEAVER: Well, I think the skill set I can bring, I think, you know, what we managed to do in this campaign--and you and I have talked about this before--was to really put together a modern, integrated campaign around a set of progressive ideals that demonstrated it could be successful. So I don't think that's been done before, and I think it can be repeated with other progressive candidates.

THRUSH: And what we're talking about, again, is the online fundraising, the creation of content.

WEAVER: Right. I mean, coupled with, you know, modern television, radio, digital, polling, modeling. I mean, you know, this campaign that Bernie ran was unique in many ways, but one of the ways it was unique is that--was that it was the first sort of national progressive campaign that had the kind of resources one needs to engage all of the modern tools of political campaigning.

THRUSH: Well, I think one of the issues, and I think we really did see it in Iowa--it really came into play in Iowa, where you came just within an inch of winning that thing, was you just didn't start making money until kind of late in that process--

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: --so you couldn't get the organization. They had been there for six months.

WEAVER: Right.

THRUSH: And if you had had that money a little bit earlier, right?

WEAVER: Well, that may be, but, I mean, we did come within a hair of beating her, and, you know, I mean, we outspent her on the airwaves. You know, Tad and I--Tad Devine and I, who did our TV, you know, I called it Stalingrad, right? We just--everybody was just pushing, because they would up their TV buy, we would up our TV buy. Everybody was just pushing--people, resources--into Iowa. And so I called it Stalingrad. Tad said, "Are we the Germans or the Russians?" I said, "I'll let you know when we're done."

THRUSH: Stalingrad with decent wine. So, in general, how has this experience--was this the best experience of your life?

WEAVER: Yeah. Well, it was the most impactful of my life. That's for sure.

THRUSH: Well, here we are in the dark. I feel like some candlelight would be really appropriate.

[Laughs]

Jeff, thanks so much for doing this.

WEAVER: Oh, my pleasure. Any time.

