You have this huge shock to the system. That has led congress to say that we need to do something of a skill we have not done before. Now, the democrats in congress and republicans in congress and white house are all negotiating. Ofy want to do the same set things. There is an argument about the detail and the scale. For instance, the administration came out with a proposal that would, among other things, would give checks to every family. They wanted to do it with 1200 for each adult and 500 for each child. An just a one off of infusion of cash. Democrats wanted to do something much larger. They were talking about 2000 for each donor, maybe 2500 and doing it repeatedly over the course of however long this recession lasts. There is also a big question about unemployment insurance. You will have this gigantic infusion of people needing unemployment. It is already happening. And so, that is something the democrats have been pushing for. We need to put a large amount of money into the unemployment system and remove some of the bureaucratic areas that existed in ordinary times. There are waiting periods. Things like that that they want to get rid of because there will be literally millions of people who, suddenly in the next week or two, are going to need to get unemployment insurance. There are a lot of people who are not part of that system because their employers, other people who are not eligible under ordinary circumstances. You have to find a way to get them in too because they are losing their hours. They suddenly have no income at all. You can since this is a problem of unprecedented scale. There is a lot of complexities involved if we want to really address it. I dont think there is any serious person who thinks we will be able to stop the recession at this point. But, the question is can we mitigate it to the point where it is not as bad as it might be . Host washington post, putting the blame on congress. And the present. Guest this is something everyone has seen. From the begin, the president has been intent on having talks. He was worried there could be bad effects on the stock market and that has come to pass. It was inevitable. From the beginning, he said it was no big deal. We only have a few cases, it will be fine. We are doing a great job. The reports we have gotten from inside the white house showed he was getting intelligence briefings, raising the alarm as early as january about how bad this was going to be. It is clear that what he wants to hear his performance and the good news and people around him are very reluctant to tell him bad news. You can see that when you watch these daily briefings. You have career professionals, like anthony fell treat anthony fauci, who tell us what is going on trade and then they turned to Vice President pence and tend to make sure every other sentence they say is praise of President Trumps leadership and telling him how great he years he is. That is what he wants to hear. It is becoming obvious that his desire to minimize the political damage and hear the good news and not the bad news has perhaps colored the decisions he has made as this has progressed. Host my guest is paul waldman. We are practicing social distancing as the cdc is recommending. There is this, in terms of 2020 politics, Bernie Sanders believes america misjudged him. Did he misjudge america . In the washington post, you wrote the following about Bernie Sanders. You said senator sanders was not twoavorite among the contenders or even in my top three or four. He has done extraordinary things. He helped reshape the Democratic Party, widen the policy debate in america and inspired millions of followers to a feverish devotion. Speight lacking the charisma charisma ofing the politicians, it is hardly something you could expect from a rumpled, grumpy, 70 something jewish socialist. Guest it is an extreme area compliment. Dating back to the 2016 campaign and now this campaign, sanders has been an outsider, someone who had the same views all along but could not get much of a hearing for them. He was banging on the door. He pushed himself into the center of the american political debate. He fell short because there were some flaws in his theory of how he could become president. He said he could inspire an extraordinary Grassroots Movement that would basically tear down the walls that separated him from the white house. It turned out that he has a following that was passionate and was very large but it was not quite large enough. In the end, what happened to him in 2020 was not that different to what happened to him in 2016. There were more democrats deciding to vote for joe biden. Just as there were more democrats in 2016 who decided to vote for hillary clinton. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary achievement. If you look where the policy debate is now, we never, in american history, had a full and vigorous debate bout the merit of singlepayer health care. We have one now. I think Bernie Sanders deserves a lot of the credit for that. Maybe most of the credit for that, by pushing that into the debate. As it turned out, there were limits on the support singlepayer could get. A lot of people are interested in something may be less threatening and does not change as dramatically, as fast. I have 100 opinions about that. I have to give him credit for the fact that we have that debate at all. There are a lot of ways in which Bernie Sanders has been one of the most important political figures, shaping this moment in our political history. He was not your candidate, you have to give him credit for that. Host how has the coronavirus changed this race . We have not heard from the candidates. They have been doing virtual town halls and virtual fundraisers. No public appearances by either joe biden or senator sanders. Was almostrace decided before things got really bad with the coronavirus. It had become obvious that biden was the almost inevitable nominee, even before they stopped campaigning, it would be necessary for sanders to win almost every primary term that point forward in order to become the nominee. That just wasnt really possible. Thatn that sense, the fact the race got frozen from a political standpoint, and from the standpoint of democratic voters who were hoping to have their opportunity to choose a nominee, it was sort of good that everything had fallen out and so many candidates have left the race. It looked like biden was the inevitable nominee. I think there is a center which the kind of calculations that led people to come to joe bidens candidacy are only reinforced by what is happening now. He was never the person who inspired the most passion. It was always about, for so many voters, i think that biden is the kind of person other people will want to vote for. That is what the electability is all about. It is not about who i like, it is about who other people might like. I spent a lot of time writing about why that is a bad way to decide who your candidate is but that ended up being the grounds on which a lot of people gravitated to joe biden. And now, we are in this moment of economic crisis and Public Health crisis and i think, for biden, he is a somewhat reassuring figure. He has been around for a long time. Ways. Safe in many him, this sortor of reinforces the grounds on which he wanted to be an appealing candidate. He was never saying i will be the guy who gets you the most excited. He was running what i think is a campaign of restoration. Saying if we can just turn back the clock for years, lets get back to when things were calm and we did not have all of this craziness. We will get rid of donald trump and then we will all be able to calm down and maybe republicans will agree with me on a few things and our policies will not be so manic, all the time. At a time when we are in a moment of crisis, that may have more appeal than it did six months ago. Host this is a tweet from will henry who said bernie fell short because socialism is a known, proven loser. Former senator Claire Mccaskill on morning joe with the following in terms of where this race is and where it is heading, saying i think it will quickly turn to how and when does Bernie Sanders unite the Democratic Party. I think the pressure is going to mount, especially in this time of crisis in this country. To uniterats are behind clearly the for the democrats to clearly unite behind the voters preference. For people who watch cspan, those of us who are immersed in the political world, we understand how those pieces fit together. Most americans who dont really spend their time worrying about politics, they dont necessarily have a real firm grasp on that. If you look at the things Bernie Sanders supports, most of them are quite popular. Peoplet to want to have higher minimum wage. A is when you wrap it up into thing called socialism and give it a name, then you can invoke negative association. We have no idea how that will play out in the general had no idea how that will play out in the general election. You can ask what people think of socialism and get an answer in a bowl. You wont know until you get into an election because people dont vote for an idea, they vote for a person. We will know if the public would have rejected socialism and would we know if the public would have rejected socialism is somethingthat we may never know on a president ial level. Att you can send us a tweet cspan to bj cease plan cspan wj. We will go to carla in new york city. Good morning. I just wanted to say thank you to your guest. I just want to say, listening to your previous calls this morning, i dont understand why the Trump Supporters have to tiptoe around the president every time he gets an allegedly inappropriate question from the press when we have a president whom maligned people on a daily basis. I think people need to wake up. He goes to being a concert constant coward when he doesnt like the way the situation reflect on how he is dealing with things. Host this is marion, who is joining us from lakewood, new jersey. Go ahead. Caller i hope you listen to me like you listen to all of the democrats. I am so tired of cspan dont hang up on me. Can you hear me . Host we sure can. Go ahead. Caller listen to these democrats, these ponies, that calling. In. Honies, that call let me tell you this. Obama ran away from the serious problem of Chemical Warfare with his tail between his legs and did nothing. Who to care of it took care of it . Trump. Dear god. Let me get back to trump. As he found out, he stopped people coming in from china that were going out. What did the democrats do . They called him a racist. When he asked for help for the border down in mexico, they said it was a phony crisis. A made up crisis. These democrats make me sick host thank you for the call. Those two different perspectives, paul waldman as you hear from two different viewers. Guest i think the first viewer was making a reference to this thing that happened on friday with peter alexander. He asked president the president in one of these briefings what he would say to heple who were scared and said i would say you are a terrible reporter. One of the things that is highlighted for me is what we expect of a president in times like this. We want them to be good administrators and make good decisions. There are certain moments when the public really needs a kind of emotional support. When we look back at president s in times of crisis. What they did was, when they are successful, they channeled our emotions, gave us the understanding that they understood what we were feeling and some reassurance about what was going to happen in the future. If you think back to Ronald Reagan after the challenger disaster, giving a moving speech in the oval office or barack obama after the newtown massacre, wiping away a tear and talking about how he and michelle were going to hug their children tighter and every American Family was or torched of you bush at ground zero, zero, w. Bush at ground those were moments when the president channeled what we felt and made it feel as though it was going to be all right. I think this is something that President Trump has really struggled to do. That moment in the white house crystallized it. He was given an opportunity when he was asked what do you say to people who are scared. Interpret it as an attack on him and he attacked the reporter back. This is something we are all very used to from President Trump. He says openly when he was criticized, he will attack back twice as hard. In moment of crisis when there is something that American People have a natural hunger for that we want from our leaders and it is beyond the administered of stuff, that, i think is something President Trump is just not capable of doing. It is just not part of his toolbelt that he brings to any kind of moment, especially a moment of crisis like this one. Host those moments, including president Ronald Reagan and on our podcast, weekly. A halfhour conversation that we taped on the phone, she was in boston to talk about leadership in turbulent times. Joining us from quincy, michigan, good morning. Caller hello. Host good morning, brent. Caller hello, do you hear me . Host yes. Caller just a response to your republican caller. I fail to see how [indiscernible] obama did this and some of the ousted that, i just dont get that. That is not my question. Comment, it has a stigma except when we are sending subsidies to oil companies. It is all fine and good then. Airlines, like delta and theyht back stocks reward corporate executives. Bellow baila out from the taxpayers. Money to see how pretty is going to solve this problem. Host thanks for the call. And it is a bailout that could total up to 50 million for the Airline Industry prayed they have about 750,000 employees. Guest the color makes a good point. We have a debate going on all the time about how far the government should go in helping people. Who it should help, what safety nets should look like and what kind of Government Spending is good and bad. But now, we are in this moment of crisis where both democrats and republicans are saying that there is no choice but to have the Government Act and act extremely aggressively. They will argue about how aggressively to act. The democrats, and republicans both want to take every step that that government can to try to basically save the economy and have this huge infusion of cash. But, this is one of the key questions. Who is the money going to go to . How is it going to be distributed . There are lobbyists on capitol trying to make a corner for the industry that people will not notice. The airlines have made huge profits in recent years and are coming for a bailout. There are lots of other industries that want their piece of the pie. It is in a moment of crisis when everybody suddenly becomes a socialist. That is the question all of time, if we are going to agree. O have socialism there is no question, when you think about how this relates to a political question, there is the reality that this Public Health crisis and this recession have the potential to make it impossible for donald trump to get reelected. Democrats are on capitol hill asking for more money than republicans want, to be more aggressive. Even though that could potentially save his presidency. Situation was reversed and barack obama got elected in 2009, during the worst economic crisis since the great depression, republicans were not so eager at that time. The recovery act, 787 billion, the biggest thing anybody could remember and it pales to what we are doing now. That got zero republican votes in the house and three republican votes in the senate. Now, mccright want to be more aggressive than republicans do. Democratst, want to be more aggressive than republicans do. At this moment, whether that constitute socialism and the conversation about that has disappeared. Host in host the senate nationally host the senate will gavel act in at 2 00. Back in at 2 00. Reported as close to two choi in dollars as a close to two choi in dollar stimulus plan. Trillion dollar stimulus plan. Nancy has been patient. Morning. Caller i want to bring up the issues, which we should be doing more of. I heard the president put down the reporter for asking a very logical question in these times. Defense, he does it because that is his personality and he does not like the press. Things thatt probably are true and he is not always truthful, as we know. So, what i want to say is i just listened to a mayor of new york and he is trying to get the military involved to get more supplies, to get ventilators and things we need in this crisis time, which we are hearing is not going to be ending too soon. He repeatedly asked President Trump to help get to his home state. It was one of the main places and areas that has more cases. They need these things. Every place needs them. And he refuses to get them involved. He just does not think of the whole picture. I dont believe he is as smart as he thinks he is. He has no logical reasoning. It is all about what he thinks will get him elected. And that is why he is doing what he is doing now. He is listening to people more than he ever has. Because it is out of his hands and he knows that he is looking like not the president that brought the economy up. He is listening more than ever in this crisis but not enough. That what do i want to say that character that he is the chief and knows more than the people that are trying to conquer this crisis and save lives. I am just are tired of hearing about the parties. I want the issues of what is going on in this crisis right now. Anything he does, like not entering answering that Mental Health question. Host we will leave it there. Paul waldman, your response. Guest one of the things that happens during an ordinary president ial campaign, you can say that and to a certain ree, party andatic Republican Party has a set of things they want to do when they get in the right house. White house. We know republicans will cut taxes and will move to deregulate. Democrats will do the opposite of those things. Individualy of the and the personality traits they bring to the office are still extremely important,