Patrick Gaspard

speaker

119 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 18 Dec

Patrick Gaspard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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The Bulwark Daily · S2 Ep1018: Andrew Weissmann and Patrick Gaspard: Naked Corruption · 10 Apr 2025 podcast

I disagree. So I'm going to disagree with you. I'm going to totally disagree. I'm going to invite you to do a thing. Go back and watch Donald Trump's speeches in that 2016 campaign, 2015, 2016, and to that whole run. I lived them, man. I know. But if you watch that stuff and listen to him carefully, what did that guy always do? He conducted focus groups in real time. He'd come out there.

That's true. And he would throw six things out to his audiences. And sometimes some of those things would get booed. And he would never bring them up again. He would listen to the things that people rally towards.

He was always a foe.

That's like the one I'm saying. I'm agreeing with you on that front. But I am saying that this is also, as for Klein's point, it is also a definitional moment. And you can't beat something with nothing. And I would take us back to what my friend, the senator from New Jersey, did.

A couple of days ago, that kind of seized the public political imagination, but Senator Booker stood up there for 25 hours, and he gave us a kind of moral language for the moment that we're in, and he ran down all that shit that is, you know... coming downstream from the sewer of Donald Trump.

But he also kind of owned up to a number of failings and said, we didn't do our part in this way, in this way, in this way. He kind of elucidated that and said, we've got to do better on these fronts. And he kind of pushed up some North stores on the values front and on the policy front and on substance, while also being really clear about who the bad guys and gals are in this moment.

You can do both things at once. And we got to be caught both listening, but moving into a kind of pugilistic mode on this stuff quicker, faster now.

Well, housing we didn't even talk about, right? It wasn't until Kamala Harris becomes the nominee and then around the Democratic Convention, you know, a plan is thrown up. that doesn't really have an opportunity to bleed through because we weren't driving it successfully, but a plan is still not there.

In all the polling that we were conducting in Center for American Progress, we kept seeing that the stubborn metric in people's experiences about the economy was housing, housing, housing, whether they were rural, suburban, or urban Americans, whether they were home buyers or aspiring to buy a home or aspiring to just be able to rent reasonably in a market.

Housing was the thing that they were concerned about overwhelmingly. And we weren't talking about it. We didn't have a plan for it. Imagine for a second, Tim, that the infrastructure plan that we passed had been a housing infrastructure plan.

How might Americans that viewed us differently in that moment, how might they have said, oh, they hear it, they see it, and they are responding in a way that I can vote for and I can rally for. We were not caught listening on that and speaking to it.

Uh, and then on immigration, you know, I think that a lot of my friends on this issue thought that we had a messaging problem and didn't recognize that we had a policy problem actually. And we should have been saying much earlier and a, and a much more robust way that the asylum system wasn't be broken. And that, um,

Not only did we need more resources at the border, but an entirely different approach on the question of asylum. And I think we waited way too long to address that. We kept saying there was no crisis at the border.

And that's not what people were experiencing far away from the border, even in blue cities, where folks were feeling a downward pressure on public goods, more people waiting in the hospital emergency room, more kids in my kids' classroom. What's going on here now? And why isn't anyone talking about it at

addressing it at a time when we're feeling economically squeezed, but it feels as if we're allowing other people to jump the queue and get work rights and permissions. So we were narrating it badly, but we had a bad set of policies there. And there's got to be a way for the broad center left tent to

to take up a really different approach on immigration that, yes, speaks to our values and speaks to our history of what it means to be able to grow our prosperity in our country and improve our economic outcomes as a consequence of the parole every year we get from immigration, but speaks to the real consequences of having a broken, fractured asylum system. And we just didn't do that well.

And we had the challenge of incumbency, Tim.

What do you think about that discourse about the groups? Here's what I think about that discourse. Here's what I think. And Tim, you understand, of course, that I've been not only part of the groups, but I was once the president of the Open Society Foundation. So I helped to fund the groups, right? Strategically. But here's the thing. I'm also somebody who's working politics.

I've worked on local city council elections. I've worked on gubernatorial elections, congressional elections. I've worked on presidential elections. And guess what I learned about politicians, Jim? They don't listen to the groups. You know what they listen to? Listen to polling. Overwhelmingly, politicians listen to polling.

I don't know a single politician who's ever taken a significant issue into their boat that hasn't been over-polled and over-focused groups.

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