Jill Stein isn't the only Massachusetts politician who is part of a third party ticket. Former Republican Governor Bill Weld ( @GovBillWeld) is now running for vice president on the Libertarian Ticket, and he joined Jim from Philadelphia.
Weld on DNC (06/27/16)
Jim Braude: As Adam noted Jill Stein is not the only Massachusetts pol who is part of a third party ticked. Former Republican Governor Bill Weld is now running for Vice President on the Libertarian ticket, and I guess Philadelphia is the place to be regardless of your party affiliation because that's where we find Bill Weld tonight. Governor it’s good to see you. I assume you to be there because I know you to be a guy who just can’t resist a good party.
Bill Weld: Oh, it’s more to help mark the occasion for my old friend Hillary and her historic achievement.
JB: You know speaking of your old friend Hillary, when you were kind enough to join me on the show in February you said it was “possible” you could support Donald Trump and you mentioned your old friend Hillary, and you served on the Watergate committee with her. You implied that you might be able to support her too, what happened in those intervening months?
BW: You know things have changed a little bit. Gary Johnson called me up and asked me if I wanted to go on the libertarian ticket with him. He’s an old friend from when we served as governors together. We’re both fiscal conservatives, we’re both socially inclusive and tolerant so it seemed like a good idea to me. In the last few weeks we’ve been kind of making some progress, and I think we’re now likely to be included in the presidential and vice presidential debates in November and that makes us a dangerous commodity. When people talk to me now about “Why should I waste a vote?” I’m saying you shouldn’t. You should vote with who you agree with and that's us and don’t waste a vote on Trump or Clinton and I say that with deference, not throwing stone at anybody. That's just our political take.
JB: You know Governor for most of us libertarian means smaller government, more personal freedom. Is that a fair bumper sticker for what Libertarians stand for?
BW: Yeah, as I said in Houston at the Republican convention in 1992, I want the government out of your pocketbook and out of your bedroom.
JB: So let's apply that philosophy that are obviously center stage in this campaign. Both Trump and Clinton, at least now oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership. Where are you guys on a trade issue like that?
BW: We’re strongly in favor of free trade and the TPP. We think it's madness to, at the eleventh hour, turn against it. It gives us a trading platform, free trade, with eleven Asian nations, not including China. So it's like more than a beachhead economically in Asia. It’s a wonderful platform for us in Asia and it does the work of years of cultural diplomacy. It’s a masterstroke. The American Free Trade Agreement, you could have knocked me over with a feather when I heard that Mrs. Clinton is going the other way with that one. I remember being in the Clinton White House with President Bill Clinton, Speaker Gingrich and myself Bill Daily from Chicago who was the chief headcounter for the votes on that rustling up the votes for that to get it passed the next day. Bill Clinton was absolutely instrumental, he was the key guy on that. He got it done with more republican votes than democratic. I would hope that the Republicans in congress who are not necessarily bound by what Mr. Trump says on let's have a closed economy I would hope that the would continue their tradition of free trade.
JB: The place where the candidates differ is on raising the minimum wage on a federal level. Donald Trump lately has been saying leave it to the states. Hillary Clinton, as you know, has bought into the Bernie Sanders 15 bucks should be the national threshold. Where are you guys on this?
BW: You know I’m sympathetic, but beyond a certain point there's no such thing as government money, there’s only taxpayers money. We can’t say all these things are gonna be free. As you know Jim, because you and I worked on it in the 1990s, and Charlie Baker just did it in Massachusetts, I’m in favor of steeply increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit as a way of putting money in the pocket of the poor, the working poor if you will. The poor guy with a wife and two kids who’s making $32,500 a year. There is also a gap, and we have to be honest and say if we have globalization and free trade there is going to be some pain domestically, and I’m not one who thinks the government should stand back and do nothing when that happens. I think we can be aggressive about resettlement and retraining policies. I don’t want this to be a world like the world my father lived in where if you were 50 and you lost your job you were just plum out of luck and nobody so I think with an older workforce and with a workforce with dislocations we have to do everything we can to be proactive to make sure those dislocations are addressed. That's the answer to if you will, the Trump Voters who feel that things have been taken from them and they don’t really understand it. We can’t have a laissez faire attitude in the face of that suffering.
JB: Governor speaking of a different world from your fathers, the world of terrorism, ISIS. Donald Trump, and I’m not quite clear, is gonna wipe them out and quickly, whatever that means. Hillary Clinton supports an intelligence search. Quickly if you can, what’s the Johnson-Weld approach to international terror like ISIS?
BW: Well it’s not the same as Donald Trump’s. He’s gonna say no Muslims should come to this country. He perhaps doesn’t realize that most of the fighting against ISIS is done by majority Muslim countries. I do agree with President Obama that Donald Trump is doing a lot of recruiting work for ISIS. Domestically for the lone wolves I’ve called with a FBI task force, 1,000 agents with a like number of prosecutors to sift evidence to make sure we don’t have a repeat of the Omar Mateen situation where he was interviewed twice as a suspicious person by the FBI and then dropped off the list. Internationally it's tougher. I think Gary Johnson and I are not quite so interventionist, so regime change as perhaps Mrs. Clinton is. And where American blood on foreign soil is concerned, or American boots on the ground they’re really gonna have to show us that there's a strong national interest. Having said that I think we have to, not I, the ticket thinks we have to have an invisible defense and an demonstrated superiority, in fact supremacy in both air and naval power, that’s the best shield we have, and then have a smaller but mobile expeditionary force that could respond as needed to crises around the world but not in the absence of a crisis.
JB: Governor, last thing, you mentioned the debates. Obviously you need to reach that 15% threshold to be there. I’d argue, and I’d assume you’d agree, that's critical to any success for your campaign. So you have to increase your support by roughly 50%. You have to convince a lot of people who know virtually nothing about you to support you, and a guy who knows everything about you, and I’d say even loves you, your protege, Charlie Baker says he’s not voting for you. What message does that send to people you’re trying to bring into the Johnson-Weld Camp?
BW: I think it’s very smart of Governor Baker to stay in the national race, 100%, because as soon as he sticks his big toe in everybody is going to try and drag him down. The card in Washington says tell us what you think about this presidential race this year. You know we’re at 12 and 13% in the latest national polls, so we only have to raise it a couple more percentage points and I think we’ll get there. Both on the fundraising front and the media front there’s an increasing realization that we do represent a third way. Right between the two parties, and neither party speaks for us. They have a two party monopoly which I think has outlived it’s usefulness and seems to exist only to stick their finger in the eye of the other party. We like to think we’ve got a four lane highway going between the two parties. Gary Johnson, I think, is going to take the state of Utah where based on recent pollings, he’s within three or four points of Trump and Clinton. We’ll be influencing the Electoral College and I think we’ve got a potentially winning message of fiscal responsibility and social tolerance and inclusion. Put us in the debates and I think we pose a threat to the existing homogeneity of those two parties that exist just because they’re there.
JB: Governor I didn’t expect to see you there, but I’m really happy that I did. Thanks for your time.
