The Barefoot Accountant of Accountants CPA Hartford, Connecticut, LLC, presents the video and transcript of an interview of Chuck Todd conducted by Andrea Mitchell on Andrea Mitchell Reports on May 29, 2015.
Andrea Mitchell: Let’s talk about the democrats because to be counter-intuitive contrary to what has been written recently in the New York Times front page about Bernie Sanders and older folks, I am hearing more and more from young people who are really intrigued by Bernie Sanders.
Chuck Todd: That’s right, and I think it’s more of, you know, Hillary Clinton’s reputation is very cautious; okay, she’s risk-averse. When she finally takes a position, just watch her. And look at how she’s campaigned: everything’s been very risk-averse. You know, God forbid, she would ever take a question from you. You know, that type of thing. It is very risk averse.
Bernie and the young millenials, they’re not risk averse. And so I think they’re going to gravitate to a candidate that might be a little more rambunctious, and certainly Bernie Sanders is.
And I think the fascinating thing is three months ago the talk was, is Martin O’Malley going to be enough and how could he be the chief challenger. I’m wondering now how does Martin O’Malley get past Bernie Sanders. And I don’t know if he can. Will he ever be seen as a true blue progressive to those who really want a progressive to send a message. I don’t think they don’t necessarily think that a progressive would beat her in the primary but I think some progressives would like Bernie Sanders to force Hillary Clinton to answer to the left a little bit more.
Andrea Mitchell: And a couple of quick points about Hillary Clinton. They say that they want to raise a hundred million dollars this year for primary money only; [they say] the things that have been written about two billion dollars is crazy. [They say] It will be a hundred million–the same as Barack Obama in both cycles, that’s excluding super PACs. So that’s twenty seven hundred dollar contributions.
They say they have a fifty-state track strategy; they are serious about fighting in the primaries; they’re serious about Iowa; they are trying to lower expectations, saying that, well, nobody except Tom Harkin and the sitting president running has gotten more than 50 percent in the Iowa caucuses. They are trying to low-ball that when she came in third last time around.
And in South Carolina it is really interesting the way she tried to take on both the race and the gender issue. She was campaigning among African-American women and other women as well trying to fix what Bill Clinton messed up so badly in a race where he got accused by many including Jim Clayburn of playing the race card.
Chuck Todd: And this is to me the big gap for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders in his announcement speech, you know, if you were somebody who cared about civil rights issues, cared about immigration, you didn’t hear much out of Bernie Sanders.
Part of that is he’s a Vermont politician, and he’s never really had to campaign for African-American vote, campaign for Hispanic vote. And this is probably easily like, if things go really bad with the progressive wing for Hillary Clinton on economics and all these things, you know, she still has this. And I think if you look at the way Sanders is running and you’re saying he can intellectually give her a run for her money with sort of liberal white elites but the rank-and-file where the Democratic primary voter is, he is not as disconnected yet to African-American voters or Hispanic voters, and I don’t know how he gets there.
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