This interview was conducted by the editorial board of The New York Times, which will announce its Democratic primary endorsement on Jan. 19.

As Senator Cory Booker ended his presidential campaign on Monday, many wondered why his message wasn’t able to break through to more voters. That was a major question the editorial board [Related: What Is an Editorial Board?] was trying to get at when they met with the senator Dec. 17. His response then: Polling isn’t everything.

The New Jersey senator also gave a detailed response on climate change and told a moving story of how his heart has been broken. We hope his “baby bonds” proposal will be the legacy of this campaign.

We’ve decided to still release the transcript because we thought, after the interview, that Senator Booker was an important voice in the race that had gotten lost on the debate stage.

Here is a transcript, with annotations in blue, of the 90-minute discussion, which was filmed for a special episode of “The Weekly,” The Times’s TV show on FX and Hulu. The transcript is unedited. [Related: Learn more about “The Choice”, or meet the editorial board members]

Kathleen Kingsbury: So Senator Booker, thank you so much for coming. We have heard, on the campaign trail and in the debates, you talk a lot about health care and climate and Middle East. So we’re trying to get at today some questions that we feel like haven’t been answered yet. I want to start — you’re running on a message of optimism and unity. Is the Democratic base just too fired up and angry right now to hear that message?

“Courageous empathy” and unity have been buzzwords of Senator Booker’s campaign. In an early campaign video ad, he called on Americans to “channel our common pain back into our common purpose.”

So one of my favorite moments in the campaign was at the very beginning when I told my staff that I wasn’t changing. This is what I believe was not the message for the campaign, but what our nation needed as a whole. I said, no polls, no nothing. I want to talk to this urgent crisis we have in our country that we need to come together. Our enemies literally are seeing our divisions as an advantage and trying to fire them up on social media.

And so one of my very first times I was in Iowa, I was so excited, there was hundreds of people there and I’m charging, trotting now toward the stage, and a big guy sees me. I’m a large man, former tight end for Stanford. The older I get, the better I was. And I hope there’s at least one gift question about my football days, which won’t be fact-checked, I hope.

But he puts his arm around me. He goes, “Dude, I want you to punch Donald Trump in the face.” I was sort of taken by it, and I just smiled at him and I go, “Dude, that’s a felony.” And then got on the stage and what has now been, what is my stump speech, which is, I make a lot of allusions to policy, but I think talk about why I’m running which is — I think this is a moment in America where Democrats will lose if we define ourselves by what we’re against and not what we’re for, that Democrats may get the White House but lose the nation if we talk about the end for us being beating Republicans as opposed to uniting Americans. I think it hurts in communities like mine. I made a decision with my life decades ago that I would live in inner-city, low-income neighborhoods.

The New Yorker’s Eric Lach wrote that Mr. Booker’s stump speech “has the tenor of a self-help seminar.” The senator has long been known for his soaring oratory — but among voters, it does not yet seem to be mobilizing support.

This is what I started my life purpose being when I was a college student and dreamed about being Marian Wright Edelman one day that that’s the communities I would help. And what I see right now is our inability even to get things done that we agree on as one of the things that are really undercutting our nation.

Marian Wright Edelman is an activist and lawyer who founded the Children’s Defense Fund.

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KK: Your campaign really hasn’t caught fire, though, yet. I apologize for all these strategic questions right up front. We have a lot of policy ones coming, but why do you feel like it hasn’t been resonating and what’s your path in Iowa at this point?

Senator Booker is polling around 2 percent nationally. He failed to qualify for the December Democratic debate because of his low poll numbers. Some of his Iowa supporters told The Washington Post that they are not worried about his low numbers or debate status because they feel he has built important relationships on the ground.

Well, I mean, this is where I fundamentally disagree with you and the only metric people are using of whether you caught fire or not is polls. And when polls have always, except for a few exceptions, proven to be wrong about the Democratic Party. There has never been a president from our party in the lifetime of anybody around this table who’s ever gone from polling ahead right now to being president of the United States. They have all been people, [Jimmy] Carter, [Bill] Clinton, single digits at this point, who go on — the young dynamic candidates who have actually had unifying messages that spoke more, not only to the Democratic base, but spoke to the hopes and aspirations of our nation. The Washington Post, forgive me for giving a competitor, has this wonderful Twitter feed to remind people who led at these points.

“For the last 50 years, Democrats have had a tendency to chew up and spit out their front-runners,” the pollster John Zogby has said.Mr. Only three Democratic candidates in the last half-century who were early front-runners went on to win the nomination: Walter Mondale, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton. None won the general election.

And literally right now, [Rudolph] Giuliani was leading in — Giuliani and Newt Gingrich were leading. Barack Obama was about 20 points behind Hillary Clinton. And maybe the best example of this is the 2003 primary, which had polling sixth and seventh in a crowded field, John Kerry and John Edwards, who then polling at 2 percent and 4 percent, who then went on to win. So where ——

Mr. Giuliani was an early front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2007, according to Gallup. In December 2007, Hillary Clinton was leading Barack Obama by 18 points in national polls, even as he made advances in Iowa.

KK: They won the nomination.

They won the nomination but not the White House; that’s why I made the point that our presidents usually are people who are much more in positions like I am. But it’s really important to understand that when I studied this, before I decided to make the decision, we asked everybody from Kerry all the way down to Carter people, what were the metrics that actually mattered to winning the nomination and the presidency? And when we talk about those metrics, my team is doing extraordinarily well. And so let me go through some of those metrics being that we are six weeks and six days from the Iowa caucuses. So the first metric is your just general popularity. Are you well liked in the state? The most recent poll that my team has showed me, because I try not to look at them, we’re about No. 3 in net favorability in the state of Iowa.

A November poll commissioned by End Citizens United found Senator Booker third in the ranking for net favorability in Iowa, behind Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

No. 2 is, it’s caucuses. And so you want to make sure that you have the influencers in those communities, activists, local leaders, the mayors of towns. In Iowa and New Hampshire, we lead the whole field in endorsements from local leaders.

As of late December, Mr. Booker had racked up 122 endorsements from influential Iowans, according to the running list from Iowa Starting Line. He has boasted of his long list of local endorsers since summer, but whether these endorsements hold real sway remains to be seen — Beto O’Rourke was leading in Iowa endorsements this summer before he dropped out.

No. 3, the quality of your organizing team. Barack Obama’s team, Kerry’s team, they out-organize on the ground. I beat a political machine in Newark by out-organizing them. We started doing strategic things to, should I decide to run in 2017 to make sure we were connecting to organizers and indeed The Des Moines Register, the Iowa Starting Line, local press there has been saying the two best organizations on the ground in Iowa are mine and Elizabeth Warren’s.

In early January, The Des Moines Register reported that Mr. Booker “rates his organizing team as one of the two best in Iowa (Warren is the other).”

The only metric that we don’t think we’re doing as well as the other teams are is money. And that is the challenge for us. But you know, people found ways to get that John Kerry was getting crushed. Pulled out of every other state, fired his campaign manager and did something I can’t do. He wrote himself a $5 million check.

Senator Kerry lent his campaign $850,000 and said he would mortgage his family’s house in December 2003, tapping into his own savings to fund his struggling campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

We, however, in this last month have had the best online surge that we’ve seen. We’re catching popularity. And so for those who worry about the polls since the last debate, which we consider one of our best, we got the biggest surge in fund-raising and there’s only been a handful of polls and this has been a poll desert between these two.

When Senator Booker put out a call to maintain diversity in the 2020 field in early December, donors listened. He raised more than $1 million between the Tuesday when Senator Kamala Harris dropped out and that Friday. That week, more than 50 percent of contributors were first-time donors.

But we had our first national qualifying poll where we hit the 4 percent threshold and we haven’t seen in South Carolina and Iowa — we’re now, because of the fund-raising surge, we’re starting to be able to do what everybody from [Pete] Buttigieg to [Tom] Steyer been able to do, which is starting to place those online ads. The more we can do that, the more we feel like we’re going to set ourselves up to win in the Iowa caucuses. Iowa is a place for upsets. They will belie conventional wisdom.

As of November, President Trump was in the lead for digital ad buys, Tom Steyer came in second with $13.4 million and Mr. Buttigieg was in third place at $9.3 million. New Hampshire voters recently told Politico they are overwhelmed by the number of digital ads they’ve seen for Mr. Steyer’s campaign.

And then the last thing I will say, going back to what I started with, with your first question, is we have now realized that people are hungering for this message once they realize that talking about unity and talking about putting more indivisible into this one nation under God doesn’t mean you don’t fight. I mean it’s the heroic people that are adorn my walls in my house are everybody from Malcolm X to Gandhi who were incredible fighters, but they talked about organizing and bringing people together.

And so I just think that we have the right message for the right time, that we are doing the things on the ground that the national media isn’t obsessed with, which is polls, which are much more difficult to do these days, that have margins of error rates that often make the differences between the candidates themselves.

And then finally, the big thing for me is, I just believe that this election, like the rest of them, are going to break really late going into the last weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

Michelle Cottle: Now at this point what do you see as the path to your nomination is? Like are you focusing on certain tactics, geographic areas, groups, appeals? You know, as you do that.

Well, I can tell you that the theory we’ve had of the case from the very beginning maintains the whole, our pathway to the nomination. And then the fact that I’m the best general election candidate in this field, and that I can make that case even easier. But our pathway is simple. Remember Barack Obama was way behind Hillary Clinton in African-American voters in South Carolina and elsewhere until he showed he could win in Iowa.

We finish in the top three, even four in Iowa, we’re going to be suddenly a front-runner that’s shown our ability to compete and we’ll start seeing what’s going to happen in the South start to shape up for us. We know that viability is important and we’ve got to prove that with the 250,000 to 300,000 caucusgoers. Coming down South, I’ll take on anybody. We are literally a party, with the exception of the years of Jesse Jackson, that has never had a nominee who hasn’t consolidated African-American support. I didn’t realize the critical nature of African-American voters until I started looking and studying presidential politics as thinking I was going to be a candidate.

Certain presidential years have seen the black vote play a particularly critical role; for example, black voters helped make Jesse Jackson a serious contender in 1984, and helped Bill Clinton secure the nomination in 1992.

And I just had no idea that if you start looking at the delegate math, in fact if I have it correct, Hillary Clinton lost to Bernie Sanders in white primary voters but the diversity of our party is what ushered in — in fact, she lost Michigan. Everybody made a big deal of that nationally. If you’re focusing on the numbers, she only lost one delegate because of Wayne County, where Detroit is. And then on that same night, which nobody really seemed to pay attention to, is she won Mississippi, a much smaller state, but she gained 30 delegates because of the massive African-American constituents there, and they consolidated around her.

Mrs. Clinton lost 12 counties in Michigan that Barack Obama won. In Wayne County, she had 75,000 fewer votes than President Obama in 2012.

So our theory is what’s helped us in New Jersey is we do incredibly well with suburban women especially, we do well with young voters and do really well with minority voters. If we show that we are a contender in Iowa, we think that that’s going to start the pathway for us just like it did for Obama, just like it did for Carter, who won in one of the early states and shocked everybody. And then the South fell in line that they supported him overwhelmingly.

Our pathway is very clear. It’s going to start six weeks and six days from now when we shock a lot of folks and say, “Oh my God.” Because by the way, the other thing I mentioned is, there’s not that many competitive campaigns on the ground in Iowa. There really isn’t. The people are actually running organizations there. Us finishing the top three we think is very achievable and we’re running our plan to do that and that’ll help us to win the nomination.

Jim Dao: Why do you think you’re trailing among African-American voters?

Senator Booker has predicted that he will see a shift in black support after Iowa, contending that black voters have rallied behind Joseph Biden because of familiarity.

Same reason Senator Obama was trailing among African-American voters. This is, right now ——

In October 2007, Hillary Clinton was leading Mr. Obama in black support. Senator Clinton’s support among black voters was 57 percent, and Mr. Obama’s was 33 percent.

Brent Staples: And that reason is?

What’s that?

BS: That reason is?

Is because No. 1, he wasn’t that well known. My humility has been handed to me time and time again. This is why I think this process that I used to decry is actually really good because it’s very humbling when you start out and you realize that barely 50 percent of African-Americans in the nation even know your name, which is what we found out. And then No. 2 is, like my family members who are traumatized by President Donald Trump, the safe brand is the brand that African-American voters are going to go with until you show you can win. And I think that’s when the shift happens and it happened again for previous candidates, most particularly Barack Obama.

When Senator Booker began his campaign, nearly half of respondents in one survey said they didn’t know who he was, while Mr. Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders were household names.

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KK: That’s certainly true for older African-American voters. It seems to be — I spent a bit of time talking with organizers in the African-American communities in the South this weekend. And one of the things that I heard is actually with younger voters, they’re very, very — there’s a lot of appeal of Bernie Sanders’s message. The idea of, it’s time for revolution, it’s time for something new. I mean, that kind of clashes a little bit, don’t you think, with your message around unity? Do you think that’s sort of a blip right now? I am curious what you think about kind of how to reach out to young voters specifically.

In the 2016 primaries held through April, Senator Sanders won 70 percent of voters under the age of 30. A September NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that a third of voters under 35 preferred Senator Sanders.

So look, I’ve spent my life working in black communities, not just talking to black voters, but black communities, going on black media. I’ve been immersed in it my whole life. And the change that my campaign is talking about is radical like Bernie Sanders and speaks to the concerns of my community dramatically.

We’re the only candidate talking about walking into office and putting 17,000 prisoners on a pathway to clemency. I mean, nobody is talking about criminal justice in the way that we’re doing it. Talking about the deaths of black people and the murders of black bodies. Half of our homicides are African-American men. And overwhelmingly, your chance of being killed as a black man by police is 20 times higher.

Senator Booker has promised to offer a chance at clemency to 17,000 inmates on the first day of his presidency, which would be the broadest clemency initiative since the Civil War. The initiative would not result in immediate release, but would prompt a review process by a newly formed executive clemency panel.

Nobody’s talking about black entrepreneurialism, which is if you stand in a black barbershop or my church and ask how many people actually want to start a business, you’ll get 50 percent of the hands there go up. And people understand that they have job lock because of their jobs and health care concerns. They understand that they don’t get access to capital the same ways.

4 When you start talking about through lived experience, the kind of issues that go on in my neighborhood, which are very similar to Chicago, to Detroit, to Los Angeles. I have no worries about speaking to young black voters in a way that nobody else could speak to in this field about the urgencies and the things that we will achieve. And I have a proven record of creating what was considered impossible changes in one of the most difficult political landscapes in our country. And in a matter of a decade in the city of Newark, N.J., we went from a school system that was under state takeover and considered one of the worst urban performing districts in our state to now the No. 1-considered school district for kids in poverty, black and brown kids. In fact, if you’re a black kid in my city, your chances of going to a school that beats suburbs like Montclair went up 400 percent.

The legacy of Mr. Booker’s major school reform effort as Newark’s mayor is complex. On the one hand, a study by the Harvard professor Tom Kane found that math and reading achievement growth fell in the years immediately after his large-scale reforms. On the other, in the 2015-2016 school year, English achievement growth outpaced pre-reform levels. Newark’s school district now ranks in the top quarter of schools among its socioeconomic-peer districts, and graduation rates have risen.

I could take you on a walk around my neighborhood and show you black businesses that we started. I could take you in my community and show you what we’ve done for — just access to housing. So my lived experience, my decades of staying rooted in a black and brown community, fighting on issues that don’t get talked about. Your paper writes about them on occasion. I have no worries about going down South when Super Tuesday starts opening up and talking to the issues that have been in my family for generations, going back to slavery.

The Times has a weekly newsletter focused on issues of race and identity, Race/Related, among many other sections and reporters focused on the intersections of race and society.

KK: So I want to get down to some of those priorities. Maybe we can start on a couple of issues, right?

Lauren Kelley: Sure. Senator, wanted to ask you about reproductive rights. The plan that I’ve heard you discuss the most often on the campaign trail is to codify Roe v. Wade with a federal law and that you want to sign that law as president. But of course we don’t know what the Senate is going to look like. And so I’m just wondering what other plans you have if you’re not able to see such a bill passed through Congress, what else would you do to protect reproductive rights?

A number of Democratic candidates have proposed federal protections for reproductive rights with Roe v. Wade’s future called into question. Senator Warren has proposed federal legislation, as has Senator Booker, who said a new office of reproductive freedom would help protect reproductive health access on the executive side.

So this has been a multifront attack on women’s reproductive rights that we’ve seen been going on since the 1980s. And this is not going to be solved by just codifying Roe v. Wade. We have to have a multiprong attack. And whoever our president is, they must be willing to take executive action on a number of fronts. And that means the gag — both global and domestic gag rules.

The global gag rule prohibits nongovernment organizations receiving American aid from offering abortion services or referrals. Domestically, the Trump administration has undermined access to reproductive health services by blocking Title X funds for organizations that refer patients to doctors performing abortions. The Times editorial board weighed in on this in a September editorial, “The G.O.P.’s War on Women’s Health Gets Results.”

That means making sure we’re fully funding Planned Parenthood. That means, frankly, elevating this to a White House-level priority and urgency. Because this is an attack not on all women, it’s an attack particularly — because women of privilege can move to other states and often get access. This is an attack on low-income women, rural women, women of color. And so for me, I see this as a fundamental urgency of my administration and that’s why I’ll do what other presidents have done with priorities that have reached that level, the White House office [inaudible] for example, H.I.V. and AIDS.

I’m going [inaudible] to the White House level an office of reproductive freedom and rights and begin to coordinate our actions between multiple federal executive agencies to make sure we’re advancing the cause of women’s reproductive rights.

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LK: So another of those fronts that you spoke of is the Supreme Court, of course. I’m just wondering if you’ve been following the Louisiana case that the Supreme Court is going to hear in the spring, and what your sort of biggest concerns are about that abortion case.

The Louisiana law that the Supreme Court is reviewing requires any doctor performing an abortion to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital.

I’ve not been following it as closely, but clearly I know that this case, Texas case, others are quickly approaching the Supreme Court and pose existential threats to the ability of human beings to control their own bodies. This is why I think the Supreme Court is — and frankly, the federal courts are a battleground that we must begin to better focus on those who — I wouldn’t even say on the left, but those who just believe in the sanctity of a human being to control their own body. This is why I make no bones about putting people on the Supreme Court who passed that litmus test of saying that Roe v. Wade was rightly decided.

The Louisiana case is nearly identical to a 2016 Texas case which found that the restrictions requiring doctors to have admitting privileges violated precedent prohibiting an “undue burden” on the ability to obtain an abortion.

Jesse Wegman: Would you give us any names?

What’s that?

JW: Names?

Absolutely not. Come on.

KK: Donald Trump did.

Mr. Trump’s list of potential Supreme Court nominees, released in May 2016 when he was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was criticized because it had only white people and just three women among 11 names. In September 2016 he released a longer and more diverse list.

I understand that’s because——

BS: It helped him win too.

It definitely helped him win. And that’s because Donald Trump and the things that come out of his mouth and his relative comfort with lies made it something that he needed to do to fire up a very important part of our base. I don’t think we have that trust issue. And I’ll be frank with you, with any of my colleagues in this race that I know well, I am not concerned overly with the kind of people they appoint. I am concerned though with diversity on the bench. I have a real problem that we continue to put on the bench people with the same lived experiences, with the same Ivy League degrees, and that is really problematic. I think we need to start talking about people who’ve lived their lives as public defenders.

I think we need to start talking about more rich set of diversity in terms of lived experiences, in terms of race, in terms of more gender diversity. I think that — I could show you Harvard case studies that show diverse teams are better teams and if there’s anything that I’ve seen in Washington that should be called out is when I got there from the — my purview was Congress is the one of the least diverse places I’d ever worked.

And I want to give credit to Chuck Schumer because Brian Schatz and I went to them and said for the Democratic Party to rely on diverse communities to be elected. And I couldn’t find people of color, black people on the Senate Judiciary staff. And so I said to Chuck, and again, he’s an incredible leader, that we have to take real accountability measures to start diversifying the Senate. And he agreed to have — every single senator now has to publish the diversity statistics of their staffs.

And since that’s happened, guess what? We’d seen a lot more diversity and the Senate’s gotten better. The Supreme Court is woefully lacking diversity. And to have the highest body in the land not have the kind of lived experience or connectivity to the diversity of our country is unacceptable to be, that’s not ——

In the 2018 midterms, Americans voted in the most diverse congressional class including 117 women (15 in the Senate). Twenty-three freshmen House members are people of color. All but six of the country’s Supreme Court justices have been white men.

JW: It’s not just diversity, it’s the importance of the court to the country. As Lauren is talking about, one case that’s going to have an impact on millions of women. One thing Donald Trump did understand was how the issue of the court excited the electorate and it’s something Democrats have really struggled, I think, to instill in their own voters. How do you get the electorate to understand how important the court is and the makeup of the diversity of the court and the makeup of the court more generally?

So in the next — between now and November, I’m really hoping that this becomes a major rallying cry. And unfortunately, fear is a great motivator and the cases that you’re discussing and I wouldn’t limit it to reproductive rights. I mean, we’ve seen a Supreme Court that has rolled back voting rights, civil rights, affirmative action. I can go through the things that will have a fundamental ——

LK: Is fear enough of a motivator, though? I mean, because I think we see on the left that fear and that buildup of emotion doesn’t quite animate voters the same way it has on their right.

I agree with you. I’m not disagreeing with anything, but I think that — God, our nominee for president has to be someone that is good at capturing the moral imagination of this country and motivating people, not just by the negative, but by motivating them.

BS: Can we dwell on the negative for just a second? I remember sitting across ——

Your attitude makes me think you’re just upset I didn’t hug you, man.

BS: It’s cool. It’s cool.

All right.

BS: I remember sitting across the table from Barack Obama in 2008 and also talking to some of his staff people, and you will recall that Obama staff made a decision that he would never use the word “racism” in the campaign ever, and just let somebody else take care of that. We’re coming off an administration in which the president ran the most racist campaign in American history, in my — excuse me, in my lifetime except for George Wallace, and there are a lot of younger people who were acutely aware of that and young black people are acutely aware of that. And I don’t know how you campaign — how Democrats campaign without directing that, without dealing with that head on. I mean the message of — the actual, the message of unity itself is itself — it’s a chestnut really. And it’s also off point where we are now. So I think you have to really, and how do — and I put this way. A nice as a — remember Biden when he’s talking to Obama. It’s a nice sort of clean guy who spoke really well. As a nice clean guy like yourself ——

Mr. Biden drew criticism in 2007 when he referred to Mr. Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

I’ve been called well-spoken before.

BS: Yes, exactly. Who’s trying to appeal to the white suburbanites — how can you talk honestly about racism and still appeal to those white voters that you’re trying to get? Have you any interest to talking candidly about that?

I feel like one of the most driving challenges of America is what Du Bois talked about when he wrote “The Souls of Black Folk.” And we have still not dealt with it. It is Langston Hughes’s “Does it explode?” because it’s now been crusted over the scars and the wounds of race in this country. I live in a community that was racially designed for poverty, for exclusion of opportunity by overtly racist laws. You cannot deal with these issues by niceties. You have to have a candor about the wretchedness of our past. And this doesn’t weaken America. In fact, it’s a —

“The Souls of Black Folk” is a 1903 work by W.E.B. Du Bois that argues “the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the color line.”

BS: But you see, Senator Booker, it’s not really about the past. What Trump has showed is that — and I wrote this on the eve of the election, what Trump has showed is that racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny have broad constituencies in the United States. And you watch these rallies in Virginia, you watch these swastikas. It’s not about the past. I mean, for politicians it’s always safe to tuck racism into the past because people can feel good about the present. But it’s not about that. It’s about the present.

Read Mr. Staples’s Editorial Observer essay “The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms” here.

And look, forgive me for not — you didn’t allow me to finish.

BS: I’m sorry.

Because the reality is, there is a direct line from our past to the continued cancer of racism that infects everything in this country, from a criminal justice system that is profoundly racial in its impact all the way to the provision of health care that has black women’s maternal mortality rates being four times higher. And yet we have a racist demagogue in the White House.

I thought you’re asking a bigger question. I don’t mind talking about these. First of all, I have no illusions on the racial realities of our nation and the urgency to confront them. I ran an entire Senate campaign where my campaign counseled me to “stop making the center of every one of your stump speeches around the state criminal justice reform,” because as my pollster said, it didn’t even rank in the top 10. And I said the criminal justice reform manifest and its racism is a cancer on the soul of our nation when you have more African-Americans right now under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.

This is not technically accurate. There were 3.2 million slaves in the South in 1850 and 2.3 million African-Americans in prison or on parole or probation in 2014.

Jeneen Interlandi: I want to actually move to criminal justice right now. Sorry to interrupt. You’ve spoken a lot about it on the campaign trail, particularly as it pertains to the war on drugs. And so I have two questions for you. One is, I’m wondering how you see the D.E.A.’s role in that work. Is it an agency that’s outlived its usefulness? Should it be abolished, and as president, would you support that or would you want to retool it in some way?

Some have argued for abolishing the Drug Enforcement Administration, a nexus in the war on drugs, which was formed in 1973 through a merger of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, the Office of National Narcotics and elements of Customs Enforcement.

So the war on drugs has been a catastrophic attack on the safety, security and well-being of our country. Blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for a drug crime than somebody that’s white. And there’s no difference between blacks and whites. And as a guy who has navigated from the Ivy League to the community I live in right now, it’s ridiculous how people flout drug laws in one context with no fears whatsoever. And children’s lives are destroyed in another context. And so this urgency to end the drug war, which has increased our national prison population 500 percent is absolutely urgent.

And you’re asking specifically about the D.E.A. We need to stop illegal drugs coming into our country. We need to deal with these large-scale drug operations. But you have to remember that what’s getting driven into our criminal justice system or not what we imagine the large drug kingpins that are causing so much. Right now we have overwhelmingly — in 2017 there were more marijuana arrests for possession, low-level marijuana crimes than all the violent crimes in our country combined.

JI: An article just this week from The Washington Post found they did — I think it was an investigative piece — 179 arrests made by the D.E.A. over the past decade, not a single one was white.

A December article in The Post reported none of the 179 defendants arrested in D.E.A. cases in the Southern District of New York from 2009 to 2019 were white. Read the investigation here.

And so my point is, the D.E.A. has to be reformed and it has to be focused on what the on being a part of the solution. But so much of the end of the drug war is going to have to be about stopping the churning of so much of humanity into our criminal justice system. One out of every three incarcerated women on the planet earth are here in the United States of America and we’re not screaming about this. And then when we put women into prison, we do things that other countries call human rights violations, shackling pregnant women, putting young women into — children into solitary confinement. I mean, there is a crisis in our country that we use our jails to persecute people that need our help. The mentally ill, the folks with addictions. It’s insanity. And so we need serious reforms to all of law enforcement, especially on the issues of accountability.

We need serious reforms to our laws, to prosecutorial conduct. You can go through the whole entire criminal justice system and show that we are not reflecting the highest and best values of our country. And the irony of this all is this system has made us dramatically less safe, has hurt our economy. I mean, between the time I was in law school, the time I was mayor of the city of Newark, we were building a new jail or prison every 10 days.

JI: So I’m interpreting your answer to mean, you see a place for the D.E.A., but you agree it needs serious reforms.

Yeah. Absolutely.

JI: And then I just want to follow up. I’m hoping you can talk a bit more about your own evolution with respect to criminal justice as mayor. You really pushed for broken windows policing and that led to some pretty aggressive policing tactics and in the Senate you seem to have taken kind of an opposite approach. And as you’re saying now called for aggressive reforms. Can you just talk about what you learned in Newark and how you brought that into the Senate? 6

When Mr. Booker was elected mayor of Newark, the city was still considered one of the most dangerous in America. He hired as his police director Garry McCarthy, who was known as an architect of so-called broken windows policies, in which minor crimes are aggressively policed.

Yes. So let’s clarify. I did not go around talking up broken windows policing. But when I got in to become mayor of the city of Newark, I inherited a police department with decades of pattern and practice abuses and we set out to reform it and we set out to reform it in partnership with reform organizations who began to be very impatient with the pace in which we were adopting reforms. I thought they were wrong. They turn out to be right, especially because like many small, like many — excuse me, city to police departments, we did not have the sophisticated measures to start pulling data to begin to have transparency into exactly what our practices were doing. And so when the D.O.J. came in, I quickly learned before they even officiated report that we needed the support to transform our system a lot quicker. So we didn’t go around talking about broken-windows policing, stop-and-frisk.

7 In fact, we were working with John Jay College and others to do innovative reforms. And it wasn’t an evolution when I got to the Senate. By the time I was in my second term as mayor, we were adopting, in partnership with the A.C.L.U., national standards setting models for transparency into our police department. In fact, the head of the A.C.L.U. said we were embracing reforms, not just in word, but in actual deed in the city of Newark.

Murder rates fluctuated during Mr. Booker’s mayoral administration but residents of Newark’s predominantly black wards complained of racial profiling and excessive force by the police. When the A.C.L.U. asked that the Justice Department investigate, Mayor Booker responded sharply: “We don’t need people who are going to frustrate, undermine and mischaracterize our agency,” he said. Read The Times’s look into Senator Booker’s evolution on criminal justice here.

It was an incredible process which equipped me to go to Washington and begin to be the pre-eminent champion in the Senate for talking about police accountability as a guy who actually experienced the urgencies and also knows how local police departments need federal support to create better systems of accountability, especially those police departments that aren’t large enough to often have the resources necessary to do the evidence or the data collection that I think is essential now in policing.

7 KK: O.K. Well, what do you make of Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg’s recent conversion on stop-and-frisk?

The editorial board member Mara Gay weighed in on Mayor Bloomberg’s conversion on stop-and-frisk in an Editorial Observer essay, “Bloomberg Apologizes for Stop-and-Frisk at Just the Right Time.”

He’ll have to discuss that with you. I thought the practice was wrong. Even when I was a mayor of the city of Newark, it was, the evidence was plain in the city. You all wrote about it as did many other groups. Yeah, it was a wrong practice.

When Mr. Booker was mayor, Newark’s police department had a stop-and-frisk policy that allowed officers to pat down pedestrians if they had “reasonable suspicion” of a crime.

KK: Aisha.

BS: Did you have to — excuse me. Just my recollection. I remember towards the end of your time as mayor talking to you about how difficult it was to actually tame your police department. And I remember that there were personnel changes that were happening to hide bad guys in the system. And my sense toward the end was that they had defeated you. Is that a misrecollection?

That’s definitely a misrecollection. The first part is I just — and this is really important. There’s a number of mayors running in this race. None of them inherited what I inherited. I mean, you guys have written and documented the legendary corruption that was going on, the broken systems.

Mr. Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Mr. Bloomberg are the other contenders for president with mayoral experience. Both inherited cities with high crime rates, and both have been challenged on their policing records: Mr. Bloomberg for stop-and-frisk, which subjected millions of black and Latino men to police profiling, and Mr. Buttigieg for his firing of a popular black police chief.

8 Not only that, but I was mayor with a Republican governor during a global recession when our city was an economic free fall and the police department was — I mean, I could just tell you stories. I mean the union contracts that we had just did not fit with the urgencies of the moment. Crime was spiking, we had a structural budget deficit that meant we couldn’t hire up. I mean the problems we faced were legion and that’s why I keep telling people two terms later working with outside agencies, bringing in historic public-private partnerships. We suddenly took a city that had 60 years of declining population, now is growing in population again, the biggest economic development period there is.

The Republican Chris Christie was governor during the Booker administration; the two men famously forged a close friendship.

And the current mayor inherited a financial ship that has enabled him to significantly improve this police department and put more people on the street. Crime is at a 50-year low now in the city of Newark. And so I didn’t leave my last law school and jump into problems that were easy. We jumped into an environment that was incredibly difficult and reforming a police department that has been written about since the rise of 1967 patterns and practices. It was a challenge to do it at the same time that your crime is a major situation. And then achieve things like the longest period without a murder in our city in generations, to achieve things like across-the-board drops in crime in a city that was yearning for — heck, I made a decision when I became mayor and moved into the sector of our city with some of the most shootings and homicides.

So I was dealing with this, living with this. So I knew the urgencies of my residents who live in a community where the Fourth of July spikes police calls to the police department. Till this day they do because of the traumatizing of local communities by gun violence. So we had a hell of a lot of problems.

But at the end of the day, look, my last couple of years as mayor showed me what the payoff of, of years of work could do in terms of reforming agencies and making them work in a way that makes you proud. And we got help. And this is why I say mayors are extraordinary. I mean we got help from — I mean O’Malley gave me — I stole a management system from him that helped to — We reduced the size of our government 25 percent and were able to, this was out of necessity, was able to massively increase efficiency in departments.

Mayor Booker eliminated 25 percent of Newark’s government jobs. The move angered local labor groups but helped narrow an $83 million gap in the budget.

This is not sexy stuff that you guys write about. But I mean I used to brag and maybe one of the reasons why I was single as a mayor is because I thought great dinner conversation was about how we increase parking meter efficiency or how we increased inspections per inspector almost 100 percent, 98 percent. This was the kind of stuff that we were able to transform because we found ways out of “no way” because we inherited problems that literally the consultants we pulled in when we came in said there is no way you can deal with the challenges in this department, this department, this department. But we found creative ways and when I mentioned moral imagination to you, going back to reproductive justice, let’s step back here. The differences between us as candidates is small on some of these issues and I’m proud of that.

I’m really proud that on reproductive justice you’re seeing much more alignment and a sense of urgency. So the test isn’t the best 15-point policy plan, which is a lot more about the executive actions I can take on reproductive justice. We’ve lost by having better 15-point policy plans with other folks. That is not the test at this moment. And I’ll tell you as mayor, I wasn’t the smartest person ever around the table. I knew how to find smart people. I knew how to build teams. I learned how to find the best ideas in the country and bring them to our country.

JI: I wanted to ——

Mara Gay: I’m sorry, I actually just wanted to ask about Amazon —

And can I get back to moral imagination at one point [cross talk] —

MG: Sorry. Yeah. Let me just get this question to you.

Please.

JI: Given all that transformation both in the city of Newark and in the state of New Jersey and then I believe New Jersey offered Amazon something like $5 billion in incentives to come. Why do you think New Jersey, I’m just curious for your thoughts. Why do you think New Jersey failed to make the case that Amazon should come? And do you think it was ultimately a good or bad thing that they didn’t choose to build their headquarters in ——

New Jersey offered Amazon $7 billion in incentives to build a satellite headquarters in the state.

So the short answer is you have to ask Amazon. I mean, we know when they came to Newark to do their tour, and I’ll get to the second part of the question next. We were blown away at how much they were blown away. I mean you just had people shaking their heads and saying, “We didn’t know.” In other words, they didn’t know that Newark was as it is. Why I was able to attract Panasonic’s North American headquarters back while we got another Amazon division, Audible, to move their company there is because Newark we knew can compete with any other city and so was it a good thing or a bad thing? Look, we — and I say “we” because the next generation of Newark leaders, myself, Ras Baraka, Don Payne, who was junior, who was the head of the City Council, we had very specific conversations about not wanting to be in this like we’re seeing in Brooklyn or Harlem. We did not want to see our city gentrified in a way that really hurt indigenous Newarkers who had been loyal to our city when everybody else left.

Panasonic moved its headquarters from Secaucus, N.J., to Newark in 2011. Audible moved to Newark in 2006, explaining that it. wanted to be part of the city’s “renaissance.”

And so gentrification — heck, Ras Baraka had a national conference on it in Newark where we brought people from all around, and so we knew that we could get Amazon to come and we spoke explicitly with them in their visit. But how to do this in a way that created growth on our terms and not in a way that you’re seeing in some of the other places? And Amazon was and had very explicit plans from education to housing and other things to prevent that. It helps though that we’re a city that lost half its population and has entire areas where we can build new neighborhoods. It’s why when I was a mayor, because of the things I was able to leverage, I could get agreements from new housing developers to make 50 percent affordable housing.

MG: Do you think that Amazon is too big?

I think that we are at a crisis in this country because we don’t enforce antitrust laws against everybody from the farm industry to the pharma industry. And when I am president of the United States, I will enforce antitrust and have a D.O.J., F.T.C. and others that will enforce antitrust laws.

JI: Let me circle back ——

MG: Are you an Amazon Prime member?

I am an Amazon Prime member.

Binyamin Appelbaum: Because the antitrust laws in this country currently are based on consumer pricing. If prices are going down, basically nothing you can do. If prices are going up, then that’s a problem. When you say that you’ll enforce the laws, do you mean you’ll keep that standard or you’ll change it to something else?

I think the standard is not what it was originally conceived and I think antitrust laws, it’s not just pricing. I think that you have to incorporate other important aspects to what’s the impacts on communities, what’s the impacts on labor. And I think that this should be part of antitrust law and I will appoint judges that fall into that school of thought and not this sort of [Judge Robert] Bork or the school of thought that’s evolved over the years.

BA: So in addition to Bork, several of the liberal members of the court have sided regularly with the idea that consumer welfare should be the standard. Would you appoint judges who differ with, say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg on that issue?

I would appoint judges who have a more holistic view of antitrust laws. I think we are now at a point — You guys have written and I should say, in the news side, written some great articles about how large corporate consolidation is really undermining well-being of our overall economy and included in that well-being has to be workers, communities, the hollowing out of entire regions of our country. And so, yeah, I’m going to look for people out from a legal standpoint, they have a broader view than just consumer prices.

The Times editorial board, too, has covered the Trump administration’s antitrust controversies, including in a recent editorial, “Why Is the Justice Department Treating T-Mobile Like a Client?”

BA: Can I ask you about the broader economy? The economy is growing, been growing for a while now. Unemployment’s at a very low level; the average median household income has been rising. How do you convince voters that you’ll be better for them economically speaking than the current president?

Well, again, I challenge you to — and I’m sure there indicators as I’ve read that show you that the average American does not feel that this economy is serving them. And so the question is, is who’s the economy benefiting? And again, I would walk you through my neighborhood, through areas in the states I’ve been campaigning in and just ask people, is this economy working for you? We need to make sure that we ——

BA: So take like a home health care worker in Newark, what is your administration going to do to make her life better?

I mean, first of all, a lot — those are folks that live on my block, who make ridiculously too little money because we are a nation that doesn’t value their work. And so let’s just go through, tick off some things that will benefit that worker. So first of all, we will double the earned-income tax credit, which will give 150 million Americans a pay increase. That is a significant step in right sizing our economy. That work will pay. No. 2 is that home health care worker, I imagine, has children. The ones that I know in my community actually do, and we are going to significantly increase the child tax credit as well, which will give a significant [cross talk].

No. 3 is we are going to raise the minimum wage. Many home health care workers make below the minimum wage. We will do things that will give, again, the majority of Americans more money in their pocket, not to mention doing things that will lower their expenses, like driving down the cost of prescription drugs and their health care, like driving down the cost of child care in this country. Like making sure that they have simple basic rights that most of the Western world does, like paid family leave. So there’ll be lots of things that the average worker in America will have that will not only improve their lives but frankly will improve the economy as well.

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BA: I’m surprised you didn’t mention baby bonds on that list.

Senator Booker’s baby bonds proposal would give every child born in the United States a $1,000 savings account, with additional deposits every year depending on the family’s income. The proposal aims to close the wealth gap.

I so appreciate you and now you sound like you’re on my team because my staff tells me that one of our best ideas that’s been embraced by both sides of the political aisle, that I don’t mention it enough and I do want to mention it and I appreciate that you know about it. I’m not sure if the rest of your team does, but the beauty of baby bonds is, I can tell you very conservative Republican senators have proposed something similar. But this is the idea that we use our tax code right now already to drive wealth up, to help people with money to have more money. And I’m in favor of some of those things, like the mortgage interest deduction, but that overwhelmingly goes to wealthier Americans making $200-plus thousand a year. This is an idea, just simply use a tax code to help people without wealth gain what is necessary in a capitalist system, which is, helps you control your destiny, helps you have agency in life, which is wealth.

And so baby bonds, which is one of the ideas that most excites me that could be bipartisan, and I think we will get done, is to give every child born in America an interest-bearing account with $1,000 in it. Social scientists show that just by having an account with less money than that will increase a child’s chance of going to college threefold. But that actually every year of the child’s life, depending on the wealth of their parents getting upwards of $2,000 deposit into that account, the lowest-income kids, remember we’re in a nation that has one in five, one in six kids living in poverty, would have upwards of $50,000 of wealth.

This is one of the reasons why everybody from the Home Builders’ Association to other activist groups support this, is because it would have a transformative effect. It would give them, nearly the majority of Americans, the ability to put a down payment on a home or kids that are struggling to afford college. I have a lot of other things in college affordability, now having resources to afford college.

So the average worker, and when I say the average worker, the majority of American workers on common-sense changes that we’re going to do through the tax code, by just becoming a nation with affordable child care, paid family leave, universal preschool, will have their — and driving down the costs of — and the expenses that drive Americans insane. You’re going to have a materially much better-off life under our job. And by the way, those people in the wealthiest Americans, it’s going to take some sacrifice, but not the kind of sacrifice that won’t benefit our economy overall, and make this nation thrive, and be what it needs to be, which is a light to Western democracies or to all democracies of what’s possible.

BA: I want to ask you to reflect on a program you supported, and more broadly on the difficulty of addressing inequality. You backed “opportunity zones” as a program that you said would bring development to neighborhoods that needed it. It’s becoming increasingly clear that that program is substantially just benefiting billionaires building the things they would have built anyways. Was it a mistake to support that program?

The Times editorial board recently wrote that opportunity zones, a federal tax break program intended to promote investment in low-income areas, had been manipulated to benefit the wealthy. The law allows people to avoid capital gains taxes by investing in projects in certain areas. It has been used, for example, at a “superyacht” marina in Florida. Read “Opportunity Zones — for Billionaires” here.

Oh, God bless America. Substantially, I mean, I just came from a mayors' conference where I was getting more pats on the backs and more testimony. And I can go through the dozens and dozens of things, in which they’re building affordable housing, laying broadband down, bringing supermarkets into areas. From Stockton, Calif., to Heflin, Ala., where they’re building a memory care center. There are definitely abuses to that program that outraged me. I designed the program under Barack Obama, never imagining that it would be a corrupt administration of Donald Trump influencing it, but please, if you believe substantially the program’s wrong, understand that there are dozens and dozens of mayors.

Half the H.B.C.U.s [historically black colleges and universities] now fall into opportunity zones. And there’s a front started just to help H.B.C.U.s. The idea behind this is one of the ideas that helped us reform Newark, which is capital is lazy in this country. It is not — Every area of our nation has worth. But people with wealth don’t see our worth. This is Newark. And we had to do things to attract capital investment to build our first hotel in 40 years, to build affordable housing. This was an idea that is a solid idea if governed and regulated right to get capital off the sidelines and to invest in areas. And so many mayors, Mayor [Eric] Garcetti in Los Angeles is leading mayors around this country to embrace it, to get development on their terms. And there are dozens of examples producing thousands of jobs in this country, creating transformative change in some areas.

So when I’m president of the United States, yeah, I’m going to better regulate this program to stop the abuses, which do exist. I’ve got legislation right now to correct the abuses in it. But I understand, I’ve been a mayor of a city that was losing jobs and investment and I couldn’t get people in this town to even pay attention to it. I couldn’t get developers from around the country to even come. It wasn’t until I marshaled through some legislation in our state that created a tax, brought our tax breaks.

I was able to get people to the table and then negotiate on my terms and fight for apprenticeship programs for inner-city kids, to fight for a significant number of the jobs going to people in my community, to fight for affordable housing and other things. In fact, there’s a guy right now using opportunity zones in Newark to put another addition to a major project that we did that created tremendous opportunity for our country.

Newark has been central to the push for opportunity zones: The city hosted a national conference on the program, its skyline is featured on the New Jersey's website about the program and it received a $920,000 grant from Prudential Financial and the Rockefeller Foundation to encourage responsible management of opportunity zones.

So I am not regretful about the legislation I wrote. I’m regretful that Donald Trump is president and is corrupting the program. But as a guy who actually understands how to create jobs, who actually has a record for doing it in low-income areas, this is a real, could be a really good tool under the right president to create change in rural America, in inner-city poor America, and to give the mayors, and I can give you a long list of mayors that have great testimonies to how this is created. In fact, one group from, I think it was Erie, Pa., came to my office to tell me that their city was like — they felt like it was flatlining until they got this tool in their toolbox. And now we’re starting to get some pretty significant things done.

And this is one example as a freshman senator of many bipartisan things, bills from opportunity zones to criminal justice reform to the bill that’s about to pass, which I hope this doesn’t ruin it, to “ban the box,” basically, for lack of a better word, of things I’ve been able to get across the line in a place where people told me big things can’t get done.

Aisha Harris: Senator, just brief me referring to the question of attacking racism, confronting it head on. Your campaign has proposed the office of white supremacy and hate crimes. Could you explain a little bit about what that would do and how that would be funded?

Yeah. Look, since 9/11, the majority of our terrorist attacks in this country have been homegrown right-wing extremists, the majority of whom had been white supremacists. This is an ongoing reality we just had in Jersey City, the targeting of Jewish community by two actors who were acting on hate. And the fear that’s in America right now is corrupting the well-being of our country. And I believe this should also be something that is elevated to a national threat.

If you think of what we’re doing to fight international terrorism in our borders and not to recognize this for what it is, this needs to be a White House priority and it will be. And so we will use the White House to coordinate amongst the various agencies that should be responsible for not just investigating, preventing or apprehending hate criminals, but also beginning to understand why this evil’s growing within our country.

And then what can we can do to stop even its growth and its spread. I do not think this is a significant budget expenditure. A lot of the resources are there. They’re just not being coordinated and that’s why I think a White House office is urgently needed.

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Charlie Warzel: Can I follow up just about how you think about the online component of that? I mean, we’re seeing a lot of message boards in places where hatred is incubated in a way it never really seen before. And when people can seek out communities with the needs that that didn’t exist, I mean, how do you personally view that sort of -internet-enabled part of the rise of these types of hate crimes and what specifically do you feel needs to be done about that?

I think it’s fire and gasoline. The internet is allowing this to spread in ways that are disastrous and if we are not equipping ourselves, you know, when I got to Washington, I could not believe how backwards the Senate was in technology and innovation and then how many of the senators were bragging about not having email. And for us to even understand that this is the new playing field. And so I just think that there’s a lot of work that my administration is going to do in pushing regulations on these platforms that are not doing everything they should be doing to stop these kinds of ills from spreading.

We have a lot of work to do on hate crimes, on national security issues and just basic privacy to meet the growth of this challenge that’s coming about it because of the internet.

AH: If this was a — the office was in place while this attack which happened last week or a couple weeks ago were taking place, what exactly would the office do? Like what — Could you walk us through sort of what the actions would be after another El Paso?

In August, a gunman killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, in an attack aimed at Hispanic immigrants.

So look, there are agencies in place, it should be invested in and they’re on the ground in New Jersey doing a lot of work. But this office should be looking at this. It will be looking at this from a holistic, broad way. So first of all, we do not do enough for in the aftermath of these attacks, we don’t do enough for victims assistance. What this means to the ripping of the fabric of our communities. What this is doing to relations in general. Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence. We just do not do enough for victims assistance and understanding community impacts of these things. And that’s one whole element that’s just not being done right now. But coordinating amongst law enforcement, ensuring the investigations are being done. This is obviously, and this is a complicated issue and I don’t want it in this forum get into the nature of the hate group involved. But there is a lot of work to be done in understanding the nature of this, diffusing it, ending it, arresting it and stopping it.

And so having an office that is not just reactive like you’re asking me in this case, but it’s proactively looking at this in a holistic manner. That’s what we’re going to be doing.

KK: Part of your stump speech on — I want to follow up on a related matter. Part of your stump speech is to say that more Americans have been killed in your lifetime by guns than all of the nation’s wars combined. I’m paraphrasing, but that conflates suicide, which are about 60 percent of those deaths, with homicides. Do you think that conflating the causes risks the wrong solution?

Mass shootings represent a small fraction of the country’s gun violence. About two-thirds of the 96 Americans a day who die from gun violence are suicides. Read the editorial board’s take, “On an Average Day, 96 Americans Die by Firearms.”

No, I think the problem we have, first of all we don’t talk about suicides enough in this country. This is a — I think we’re one of the few of only campaigns has an independent pillar to deal with suicides by guns. The ease of access to weapons is one of the driving forces of suicides in our country. And states that have done things like Connecticut’s gun licensing have dramatically lowered the rates of suicides. I think in that state by 15 percent, and so it’s, it’s perfectly to me, reasonable for us to talk about the totality of gun violence in our country, especially us not talking about suicides.

A number of 2020 contenders have put a specific focus on veteran suicide — the Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns all have plans focused on the issue. Senator Amy Klobuchar has focused on issues targeting mental health, while Senator Booker’s response to suicide has focused more on restricting gun access.

It leads me to another issue, which is it’s often what we’re not talking about in America that is often the threats to our well-being and our safety. And so mental illness is an issue we just do not talk about. And when we talk about health care, it’s not an inclusive way. Addiction, we do not talk about it. It’s not in an inclusive way.

There are so many issues that are often left out that — From the time I was working on a crisis hotline to the time I was mayor of a city, when you see really what is challenging the safety and well-being of communities and we’re just not discussing and needs to be discussed.

KK: So I want to take the last half-hour to talk about foreign policy and climate a little bit, but I do want to return to your time in as mayor. We had one question around ——

JI: Yeah, thank you so much. When you were answering Brent’s question, you talked about the value of public-private partnerships and how one of the things that you pride yourself on as mayor was getting the best teams together. I wanted to ask you about the lead water contamination crisis that Newark is facing now. Your campaign has said pretty emphatically and repeatedly that there’s no link between the corruption that unfolded at the [Newark] watershed agency during your tenure and the current crisis that the city is now facing. But your critics say, including a Comptroller’s report from 2014, that it was precisely a lack of leadership during that time that laid the groundwork for what we’re seeing now. So I want to know, one, how you respond to that criticism and then, two, more broadly in retrospect, is there anything you would’ve done differently there?

Last summer, tens of thousands of Newark residents were cautioned not to drink tap water because of lead contamination. The crisis raised comparisons to the lead contamination in Flint, Mich. Read The Times’s coverage here.

Look, my one big political defeat was trying to end the watershed. I did a frontal assault, so I’m not sure what anybody can criticize. We saw it as a problematic —

JI: You were an ex officio chairman of the agency, but never attended meetings nor sent anybody in your stead to oversee those meetings. And from my understanding at those meetings, it was laid out that there were problems, particularly in the watersheds that we’re having the problems now.

Mr. Booker’s mayoral tenure ended before lead levels spiked. When news of the crisis broke last summer, he wrote to the Environmental Protection Agency requesting “immediate assistance.”

Yeah. What that doesn’t mention is the fact that yeah, we didn’t send [anyone] to be there. We demanded them to regularly come to the city offices and put them through grillings on a regular basis that they had never experienced before. We started cracking down on them and seeing their inadequate ability to deal with the crisis we have at Newark. So I’m actually very proud that we strive to do everything, including ending their very existence to make sure that we had the resources to actually deal with the problems.

AH: Do you have any regrets or specific comments over the leadership of the agency? Because my understanding is also the woman who is now serving time in jail for the corruption that unfolded was someone that worked closely with you as a volunteer when you were campaigning et cetera.

Linda Watkins-Brashear was a donor and vocal supporter of Mr. Booker’s who was the head of the watershed agency. Ms. Watkins-Brashear was sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison for accepting nearly $1 million in bribes and kickbacks.

I knew Linda for years. Linda suffered from an addiction, a gambling addiction, and her gambling addiction led her to be a criminal and she hid her criminal activity from everybody, from lawyers there, from accountants there. So it’s awful. It’s awful what she did. And she’s serving time in jail for it. And God willing, her addiction will be treated.

JI: The decisions like — O.K., sorry, just one last follow-up on this and I’ll let it go. Decisions regarding corrosion control — like corrosion control [in water supply pipes] became a problem in 2013, 2014 as you were leaving office. But that’s because of decisions that were made during your time. So again, I just have to come back to this question. I understand that you fought to kind of dismantle that agency and to change it, but things were going on there that if they had been corrected at that point we might’ve avoided what we see now.

I know more about ——

JI: Is there any reflection or anything you wish you had done different?

I know more about corrosion control than I probably want to know.

JI: O.K., but this still happened.

Hold on. There was no problems with corrosion control in 2013 and 2014. The water was being tested regularly. In fact, it was being tested adamantly and there was no evidence of any corrosion control [problems]. What there is a problem with is that these lead pipes are in the ground in the first place and Newark, N.J., is not the only place that has these lead pipes.

Now we put forth a plan to get rid of all the lead pipes in our city. It was the one [inaudible] in the City Council that I lost and so the urgency that exists not just for Newark because you’re absolutely right. Corrosion control is a — it should not necessitate the science that it does because there are cities all across America that are having to watch their corrosion control because of the existence of lead pipes. It’s why as president of the United States, I’d call for a plan to get every one of these pipes out of the ground. Preschools, schools, low-income communities, they should be out of the ground.

As mayor, we fought to get these pipes. We knew they were a problem. We fought to have the resources get these pipes out of the ground. In the United States of America, there are over 3,000 jurisdictions where children have more than twice the blood lead levels of Flint, Mich. And so we fought this battle.

I gave tremendous amount of political capital trying to end that agency and our plan to end it would have given us tens of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars to begin to invest in the security and safety of our water because the E.P.A. was mandating things like covering our reservoirs and doing other things that the agency did not have the resources to do. Water security was something we dealt with all the time. That’s why we recognize, again, a problem that we pulled that agency in on a regular basis to go up and down because we did not want to see a water crisis in Newark, not on my watch. And we didn’t have one on my watch.

JI: Just right after.

BA: You just said we tried and we were defeated and so I’m not sure how anyone can criticize. Isn’t that the measure of a politician? Aren’t you running on your ability to win those fights?

Absolutely. And this gets me back to the larger point of moral imagination, which I hope I can finish. We took on lots of impossible fights in the city of Newark, and what we learned was we had to find ways to win an unwinnable situations. And I want to say my record in Newark of winning unwinnable situations is pretty darn good. And so you get into the arena, in the most difficult political environment in a city known for crime and corruption in the middle of a recession when all chips are stacked against you. I don’t know if anybody else in this field ever faced the kind of challenges we faced in a difficult environment and pulled off win after win after win that people said couldn’t be done. I declared to my team let’s think of impossible ways out of impossible problems.

9 So we were able to double our production of affordable housing in a global housing recession, finding creative ways to do it. We had no authority over our schools. I don’t know if anybody knows that, not one formal lever whatsoever to affect any aspect of public education. And yet we were able to drive massive reforms that created substantial change for our schools. We were able to reform and literally create out of thin air new court systems for juveniles to prevent people from going in, the New Jersey’s first office of re-entry to help people coming out of prison. So yeah, we had wins for our city that have shown dramatic change and I did not have 100 percent victories, but I’ll take 99 out of a 100.

Newark’s Youth Court hears low-level crimes and offers sentencing options like community service and group counseling to reduce recidivism.

Jim Dao: Can I get you to talk about moral imagination in another part of the world?

Internationally.

JD: If the Chinese government were to send troops and tanks into Hong Kong to violently put down peaceful protesters, how would you handle that?

So I wouldn’t do it like this president is doing. This president seems to think that the way to take on China is to do the effect of me when we played Notre Dame telling my entire offense to stay on the sidelines, I’ll take on this defense all alone. Donald Trump’s America First policy is really an America isolated and an America alone policy. And while he’s trying to take on a trade war with China, he’s also using a national security waiver, for example, or to put tariffs on Canada who is not a national security threat. No matter how nice [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau’s hair is, I find it threatening, but not a national security threat. And so to deal with China doing that kind of action, and by the way, you’re using that, I imagined for drama, but what they’re doing to the Uighurs, I could go through the horrific human rights violations that are going on right now in China without having to use something like tanks going in to do such a repressive action.

More than 400 pages of Chinese government documents shared with The Times in November revealed in new detail a merciless crackdown on Muslim ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

China is a serious human rights violator and there are people in internment camps, people disappearing in ways that are unacceptable in the international stage. And it’s even bigger than that. If I can just take a moment to expand on China: There is a contest on the planet earth right now that is between the authoritarian governments and free democracies. When I was — I served as the Democratic head of the Africa subcommittee and when [Senator] Jeff Flake and I went on this really, one of my favorite missions was to fly to Zimbabwe and meet with [President Robert] Mugabe’s, I don’t want to call it successor — Mugabe was driven out and Emmerson Mnangagwa assumed power. We flew in with a bipartisan group of senators to drive a message about human rights violations, free and fair elections and other things to try to pressure them with sanctions that we were prepared to increase to push them into doing what’s right.

Senator Booker is a member of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy. He visited Zimbabwe in 2018 as part of a congressional delegation and met with government officials there to stress the importance of credible elections. In 2019, Senator Booker released a statement urging Zimbabwean officials to respect the rights of protesters demonstrating over the country’s economic crisis.

And as we landed, we saw reports that the new leader was coming in from China, getting a very different message from the Chinese, which was we don’t care what you do on human rights, we don’t care what you do on free and fair elections. This is the contest. And by the way, the scorecard right now for the last five, 10 years, Hungary, Turkey, I can go through the countries there are slipping towards authoritarianism. Even China got rid of term limits. Now we have effectively a leader for life. And so when you talk about China, I see this in the larger global context right now, which is how are we dealing with the erosion of democracy in ways that I think threaten the world order.

JD: But then what should our relationship with China be? Is it — some national security experts would virtually advocate something like a new Cold War with China? Should we be looking to that sort of policy?

Look, as someone who expects to be the next president of the United States, I’m not locking myself into language like a new Cold War, but we must hold the Chinese accountable for everything from human rights to global security. There has to be a strategy. This president has presented no comprehensive strategy, and the elements of that strategy must start with repairing our alliances with other critical allies because collectively when it comes to economic sanctions, having the E.U., having Canada, Mexico, all of us together on a strategy is a lot more impactful than this country going at it alone.

Serge Schmemann: Senator, you mentioned Turkey slipping into authoritarianism, and Hungary. With specifically Turkey, what would you do? Does it still belong in NATO? How do you treat an ally that’s no longer an ally?

Listen, Ataturk is rolling over in his grave with what’s happening in Turkey right now and the abuses of human rights — I’m sitting around with journalists, the jailing of journalists literally on charges of fake news. This is really problematic and I think that what you’ve seen from other NATO leaders is right. Turkey is increasingly becoming a problem. Their recent arrangements with the Russians show you that these aren’t just complications, these are threats to global security. And so I think we have to have a strategy with Turkey where have done things in the past, not even willing to stand up and call past atrocities, what they were genocides. So I just will take a very strong tack with [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan when it comes to critical protection and security issues —

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Republic of Turkey and was its president from 1923 to 38.

KK: Do you feel comfortable ——

SS: Would you try to ease him out of NATO?

Again, I am not going to sit here as, God willing the next president of the United States and make a pronouncement like that. I think there has to be accountability to NATO members and they are a NATO member that must be held accountable.

10 KK: Do you feel comfortable with American nuclear weapons being in Turkey?

The United States military has about 50 nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey, which gained more attention after Turkey’s offensive into Syria in October.

At this point I feel comfortable with American nuclear weapons being in Turkey, but I do believe, especially under this president that he is a president that seems to precipitate crises or worsen crises.

KK: Are you talking about Erdogan or Trump?

Touché. But in this case I was talking about Donald Trump.

John Broder: I have a climate question, but first I wanted to get you your football question. All right.

Thank you.

JB: I’m not a Stanford guy, I’m a Michigan guy, but we have Jim Harbaugh in common. When is Coach Harbaugh going to beat Ohio State?

Oh God. That, first of all ——

JB: Man, you’re the football ——

I know, I know. But you’re just like pulling me into one of the worst two very important states to win as a presidential candidate. I will just say, I’ll go all in and insulting the whole area that I would say the best conference in all the football is the Pac 12.

That was the most disdainful [inaudible] I’ve ever ——

JB: That wasn’t even close.

Alex Kingsbury: Can I ask another quick question about football? You mentioned it a couple of times now. The connection between serious brain injury and young people playing football is pretty well established. You see a lot of richer neighborhoods banning their kids from playing. A lot of poor kids play football. A lot of rich kids don’t, and it looks like it might be trending in that direction as a sport. Is football safe for people to play?

Scientific studies have found conclusive evidence that repeated slams to the head cause long-term damage to the brain. A recent study published in Science Advances and reported in The Times found this happens even in cases where concussions aren’t sustained.

So I want you to know I’m the only candidate has a very big area of sports, a policy that I put out there because I think that there are things going on, particularly in football that are just exploitative to athletes, to cheerleaders and others. But should kids play football? Look, I got into Stanford because of a 4.0-1600: 4.0 yards per carry, 1,600 receiving yards. It would be very difficult for me to sit here and tell you that I think football should not exist. It’s been my pathway in life. So many of the lessons and the leadership that I’m now exhibiting to you was forged first and foremost on a football field. 12

Senator Booker has also called for an expansion of a California law allowing college athletes to profit from sponsorships.

So I think that we need to be taking a lot of steps to make the sport safer. And I’m glad to see the N.F.L. is slowly moving in that direction, but they’re not doing what they should be doing to support and compensate athletes that have sustained injuries in terms of awareness, in terms of evaluating them for traumatic brain injury and more.

I think there are still rule changes that we could be doing that could be more aggressively enforced and I do worry about the safety of all kids. Look, there are now — As a kid who also played soccer in their life, there are people that now are worried about heading footballs and other things. This is not just a football-related issue. We are now learning a lot about our brains and how a lot of the things that we do for leisure are real threats to our brain health. And I think it’s an area where we need a lot more government research as well as regulation.

BA: If you had kids, you would let them play tackle football?

Listen, I am — That first part of that question would thrill my mom beyond no point. This is, God willing that I make that choice. I pray for that. And to those of you who are people of faith, keep me in prayer as well.

Senator Booker has long been known for his bachelor status, though he is now dating the actress Rosario Dawson.

KK: But would you let them play football.

AK: So would you let them play football?

Yeah, the short answer is yes. I could literally see my child sitting before me and saying, “You are the biggest hypocrite in the world. You played the sport.” I love the sport and I want to preserve the sport and that’s why I’m going to do everything I can ——

Senator Booker went to Stanford as a heralded football recruit, but saw limited playing time. He later described his experience as “the first time in my life I ever felt like I failed at something.”

JW: People tell their kids not to do things all the time that they did. People stop smoking. They tell their kids not to smoke.

I never imagined —

JW: It’s not that hard.

— it would generate into a parenting issue. I’m going to bring — and I’m going to literally bring Rosario to the next time you guys invite me here for all questions about children to her and my mom would — I’d rather —

KK: So you’re saying women are [cross talk]. O.K. Sorry, I kind of [cross talk].

Exactly.

KK: I do you want to get back to foreign policy for a minute. I want to ask about Israel first maybe.

SS: Yeah. President Trump has taken several unilateral and controversial steps on Israel in the Golan Heights, in Jerusalem, in the West Bank. Are these things that you would try to roll back to get the playing field a little more even in Israel?

I will answer that question if you end the torture technique of not providing me water. “Can I get a refill?” is actually the question I’m about to ask. So look, this president has deeply eroded our nation’s commitment, bipartisan commitment to a two-state solution doing things that are making — in partnership with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu they’re making it very difficult for us to get back on track. My commitment is that Israel will continue to have a state, a right to exist, a right to defend itself. That is firm belief of mine. But I also firmly believe in the right to Palestinians to their own states, self-determination, human rights as well. And I will do everything in my presidency to preserve pathways to that end.

SS: But his specific steps, do you think that it’s possible to roll them back? For example, recognizing the legality of West Bank settlements?

I do think it’s possible.

SS: You do?

CB: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

SS: O.K.

---

KK: Can I ask you one last foreign policy question before we move on to climate? Have you read the Afghanistan [inaudible ] that has come up out in The Washington Post?

The Washington Post obtained a trove of government documents revealing that senior American officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan and hid evidence that the war could not be won.

Just summaries, these articles.

KK: Do you feel as if having a sense of those papers and what they show that Congress did enough in terms of its oversight of those wars?

No. I don’t.

KK: How would you do things differently?

Well, clearly the papers point to what is a real problem in war. It’s this drift you often get where the first casualty of war in the old saying is truth. And we are a nation that has been involved in the longest war of our civilization. And the way we’re conducting it is unfortunate in the sense that our society — we’re the first generation that allowed us to go to war and we said, “Hey, go to war. We’re going to give everybody a tax break.”

Well, my grandmother bragged to me to the day she died about our victory garden, about her buying war bonds, about everybody being connected to the sacrifices that our soldiers were making. And so it has become too easy for this nation to sustain these kinds of — I shouldn’t say easy because of the sacrifice and suffering, but we as a society must begin to understand the costs of war and the ability for presidents to drive us further and deeper into military conflict with no congressional accountability is unacceptable.

With the Trump administration’s decision to kill Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, foreign policy and the country's entanglement in war abroad has shifted to the forefront of the campaign. The editorial board weighed in: “Can Trump Make Foreign Policy a Democratic Campaign Issue?”

I am proud and I thought this was problematic under the Obama administration, that we were literally refueling Saudi planes, U.S. military planes, refueling Saudi planes to drop American bombs on Yemen. And Congress has never voted on the use of military force in Yemen. I mean, that is just one example of this drift we’ve had into not just a forever war, but an ever expanding war where there are no checks and balances. And so, yes, Congress has not provided enough of a check on that on the Afghan war.

But I would expand that right now to what is going on around the planet Earth and America’s engagements that are costing us trillions of dollars, the human lives of our children, of our sons and daughters and frankly often deepening the very holes we’re trying to dig out of. Do you think that the terroristic threat coming out of Yemen, from the Al Qaeda threats and others are growing worse or better when you create cholera outbreaks and the deaths of tens of thousands of children?

So I am going to very strongly and I’ll tell you, it was John McCain, the conversations I had with him, some of the ones I will treasure most in my time in the Senate, who talked about this problem we have in this country of spending more and more on our military, having less and less capabilities and not having Congress play the role that was intended by our founders, by surrendering those powers to the executive is causing the kind of nightmares that are evidenced in those papers.

JD: Senator, don’t you think it’s likely, though — We’ve heard other senators say similar things that when they’re in Congress, they feel Congress should be taking a bigger role in application of force? And yet presidents, including President Obama are always, don’t want their hands tied, want to have the freedom to act militarily around the globe when the moment strikes. Don’t you think you would be in the same position if you became president?

As a guy who was an executive before, I had the same thing said to me about other things. This is how it always happens. You’ll get elected and you forget. Now, when I became mayor of the city of Newark, I said I was going to pass a raft of ethics legislation. There had not been a mayor that wasn’t convicted of something going back to the 1960s and I said, I’m going to bring in this. Council refused to pass even some of them. So by executive order, I impose them on myself.

The very fundamental ideal of this country is checks and balance, balance of power. And we are seeing the erosion of that in the short span of our lifetimes and in this critical area, we’re … God, I think about just the Yemen campaign and what that could have done for this region and infrastructure for our economy, for our children, for the things that I talk about paying for. We are in a crisis in this country with our military involvements around this planet. And it has to stop. And the only way to do that as is for a president and Congress to rebalance the powers in accordance with what our founders said.

And as president of the United States, I will do that. And I will also, and I saw this question asked on a debate stage and I didn’t hear direct answer given is, “Would you shrink military spending?” Hell yes.

Numerous Democratic candidates have been outspoken in their criticisms of America’s military sending — but actually shrinking the budget could present a political challenge, possibly requiring the president to veto of a spending bill.

JD: Could you see using American force to stop ethnic cleansing in, say, the Balkans or somewhere in Africa?

So the short answer is yes, but does the Congress give authority to do that? That’s the question. That’s the question. Again, use of military strength has often been in our history. We have done interventions that have actually worked to help save lives. I mean, the U.S. military has done incredible things that we should all be proud of. But again, it is about the authorization of the use of military force, which Article I or Article II? And for me it’s Article I and that’s where the power lies.

JB: Like all of your democratic competitors you’ve vowed to re-enter the Paris climate accord, but we saw this weekend in Madrid, the shortcomings, in fact, failures of the U.N. Paris process. What can the United States do unilaterally? Both to reduce our own emissions, which are going up again under Trump, and to encourage other countries like Brazil, South Africa, India to cut back on their use?

In December, U.N. negotiators met in Madrid to discuss international climate change response.

So one of my lines that I say ——

JB: Don’t want lines I [inaudible ].

If I may give you a preamble.

JB: O.K., thank you.

One of the things I will say on the stump all the time is I will rejoin the Paris climate accord, raise my hand and ask people not to applaud that. Do not applaud what basically not only every Democrat would do in the country, but most Republicans would want us to do as well. That is not a badge of honor for anybody running. You asked the question that had a domestic side and a foreign policy side?

A national poll from the Yale Program on Climate Communication found that seven out of ten Americans favored staying in the Paris climate accord.

JB: Correct.

I’m going to start with the foreign policy side. So we need to rejoin and renegotiate and we need to provide American leadership to do so. We need to make sure that every aspect of our foreign policy is being done through the lens of the climate crisis, which is the existential threat [cross talk] not in 50 years. If you read the military reports, what about 20, 25 years when I’m the age of Donald Trump? What’s going to be going on on the planet Earth? The military reports are terrifying of the cost to this country, of the global migratory challenges, of the instability and more. We have to ignite a sense of urgency and we have to lead and we have to lead with strength. And that means using every aspect of our foreign policy, it means using our foreign aid to further leverage the change from recipient nations.

It means using our foreign alliances. It means using the soft power. So when you talk to a new foreign leader, you’re not talking about political favors, but you’re talking about what they’re doing and you’re leveraging that as well. It means that we as a country are reorganizing our foreign policy around the most pressing national security challenge over the next 20 years, which will be climate change.

BA: The new NAFTA does not include any binding commitments on climate change. Will you vote against it on those grounds?

I will not vote against it on those grounds. But this is another example. I think every trade deal should have workers and climate change at the center of it. And I’ve said this multiple times.

BA: I’m struggling to follow your logic. You said every aspect of our foreign policy should be bent to this urgent pressing issue, but not the next available instrument?

Well, I’m not the president of the United States. I’m a United States senator and before us will be a trade deal and I will evaluate that on its merits, but I do for the trade deals that I will negotiate as president of the United States, labor and the climate will be at the center of those trade deals.

BA: So you will vote for trade deals as a senator that you would not allow to be passed as president?

No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, given the facts before me of this particular deal, is it better than what we have now? I have a binary choice. I will make my choice on the merits. When I am leading as president of the United States, every action I take, and I’m not exaggerating, I did this when I was mayor. I’ve actually got proof points. When I was mayor and ——

BA: No, no, I want to understand this. You’ll forgive me because it sounds like that is what you’re saying. You’re saying that you will vote for a deal that would not pass your test as president.

I did not negotiate that deal.

BA: O.K., did not [cross talk] vote for?

I did not negotiate a deal. So I’ve a binary choice. And what I’m trying to explain to you is when I am the executive, as I was in the past, when [George W.] Bush would not join the Kyoto accords, I told my city as joined with other mayors that every decision we make from the cleaning supplies we use to the job programs we do, which turned out to be solar panel installation. Everything we do from jobs training to procurement, everything will be aligned towards us meeting our goals as a city for dealing with the climate crisis. I will do the same thing as president of the United States.

President George Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. A Times report from Peter Baker found that “even his top advisers came to regret the move.”

JB: Back to the domestic side of that equation. Which of President Trump’s actions on environment and climate would you reverse immediately?

Mr. Trump as rolled back more than 90 environmental rules and regulations since taking office.

I mean, there’s a very long list. I won’t be exhaustive, but methane rules, clean power rules, CAFE standards [for fuel economy in vehicles]. Everything from the issues dealing with — in the ag bill and the farm issues. This is a powerful executive office that I will use in every way to begin to bend the curve. And my plan, which I’ve laid out in considerable detail on our website, involves executive actions as well as legislative actions.

But it also goes back to this point. Look, the bid specs, just the way we do procurement, you know, the legislation that hopefully will pass my Ban the Box talks about the fact that the biggest employer in the country is a federal government and federal contractors. Here’s one way we’re going to exhibit our authority to help the many Americans who have a previous criminal conviction to get job opportunities. And so we’re going to use that same authority to put pressure if you’re going to qualify to bid on federal contracts. What are you doing?

I’ve seen Walmart when they changed their rules on antibiotics and chicken. It forces everybody, Tyson’s and other big packers and others, to change their policies. I will use my executive authority to change the way this country operates when it comes to climate change. And I will do what’s necessary to inspire the kind of public-private partnerships for us to make sure that as we talk about foreign policy, we’re leading by example.

MC: Man, you got a lot of ideas but politics, it’s about priorities. So as president, what would be the one or two issues you would spend early capital on?

And this is a common question I get even in town halls and I take deep breaths on that because I’ve been there before. When I was a chief executive of my city, you’d be asking me, is stopping the crime more important than dealing with my budget crisis, which meant I might not make payroll the next month. If you’re chief executive of a nation that is facing everything from an environmental crisis, to gun violence, you definitely have to have a strategy, but you’ve got to move quickly and affirmatively to drive change. And the executive actions, my left hand will be extraordinarily tired because everything from the Department of Education, Department of Agriculture to the Environmental Protection Agency, we’re going to do a lot of things very quickly. Immigration reform, policing, the Department of Justice protecting children, putting transgender Americans —

MC: However, you’re not prioritizing. Obama had to pick and he went with health care.

Priorities have been a sticking point for a number of the 2020 candidates in their endorsement interviews.

Well, again, as a guy who’s worked at the Congress for six years now, I am going to have a strategy to drive change in our country to make the lives of people better. And I can tell you my priorities in terms of the issues that are important to me, but I will pick up change everywhere we possibly can. And my priorities again, and my priority from the day I got into politics as a City Councilperson in the central ward of Newark is to every single day make the life of working people or people in this country better. And so I’m not going to show my cards when I have to negotiate with Congress in the editorial board meeting that might undermine my ability to strategically get things across the finish line. We are going to score big points in everything from climate change to gun violence, to a tax plan, which I can do through reconciliation that’s going to benefit over half of American workers and give them a pay raise.

KK: So we wanted to end on — We’re running out of time. I’d like to end on a couple of questions that we’ve been asking all of our candidates. Who has broken your heart?

Look, I have this firm belief that if America hasn’t broken your heart, you don’t love her enough. And living in Newark for the last 20 years, I mean, I’ve been broken, shattered, have moments where I wanted to give up. And a lot of them have just involved the deaths of the ones I remember most, the ones that still hurt me, that reflect on the deaths of young black men. And so it’s often been myself on my own screw-ups. And the one that I think a lot about every election, at time of an election, is Hassan Washington, who was my father, exact same kid, born in different generations. My dad in 1936, just like my dad, Hassan, both born to single mothers in poverty who couldn’t take care of them, both raised for a period by their grandparents, both had wicked wit and were just charismatic as all can be. And Hassan lived a few floors underneath me.

I lived for 10 years in the projects and one night I came home, I watched these kids grow up from 6, 7 years old. And I came home and the lobby of my building in the projects would smell like marijuana and something I’d smelled before in college, but these kids don’t have margins for error. And so I got to work.

I knew that there was a crisis and so I invited them out to the movies, to dinner. I started saying I was going to set up mentoring programs. I asked each of them what they want to do and they had such humble dreams for their lives that I knew I could help. But I got busy running for office and was suddenly running around the clock and couldn’t follow through on the things I said I would do. And they still were amazing when I would come home at night, they would promise me they would vote for me and they couldn’t because they were too young. But they would cheer me on. And I get elected to be mayor and have death threats on my life right away and was surrounded by police officers and federal authorities. Everybody’s afraid for my life.

And so the kids weren’t in the lobby anymore because that’s where police officers were now stationed and I lost track of them. And a month into my office I arrive on the scene of a murder and a body’s covered up and another one is being loaded in. This was my first weeks as mayor and I was showing up to every shooting and at this one I barely even acknowledged the humanity on the pavement and I minister to the living and talked about what we were going to do the site of this crisis. But I get home that night to steal a couple of hours of sleep and read through my BlackBerry and I will never forget that moment of being broken because the name on the BlackBerry of the kid that was murdered was Hassan Washington. And the shame — I felt that God put him right in front of me, that my dad lived because a community on multiple points in his life would not let him fail.

One family even took him into their home and I will never for the rest of my life, forget that feeling of suffocation in his funeral because everybody was there. It was packed at Perry’s Funeral Home in the basement and to me it felt like the bowels of a slave ship because we were piled on top of each other, chained together in grief, moaning and crying and wailing at what is a everyday reality in America is another boy in a box. And I ran away from his funeral. I didn’t even stay. And I ran back to a new mayor’s office and I sat on that couch and I wept because we were all there for his death, but we weren’t there for his life.

And so this campaign, I just took my mentees to the movies and I looked after as many kids as I can because what drives me every day is I love my nation. I love my nation. But there are too many kids like my dad in this country right now who have all the cards stacked against them. They may be brilliant, they may be charismatic, they may be more of a genius than me, but this nation does not live up to its promises yet and there’s too many Americans who realize that and are becoming angry and frustrated. And so I fight and I don’t care what title I have or what office I hold. I will try to honor the love that my father received by living a life of love like that.

KK: That’s probably the note to end on, right? Thank you.

Can I stop one sec? Moral imagination. I will not leave here unless I get to make this point.

LK: Go ahead.

I love a lot of the people that are in this campaign. They are some of my best friends in Washington. I’ve gotten upset that some of them have left the race like Kamala [Harris] and Kirsten [Gillibrand]. I’m running not because I don’t have respect and adoration or even have learned things from my colleagues. I’m running because I think the next leader of this country has to be able to awaken that moral imagination. We are good people, but we are tearing each other apart. And while we tear each other apart in last 50 years, the globe is catching up to us and passing us by.

My dad’s era, we had the best infrastructure on the planet Earth. We’re not even the top 10. Social mobility is a measurable indices. We used to be the best place to be born poor to make it out. That indices they’re catching past.

We used to be the best educators on the planet Earth. We’re not that anymore. We use to have the best immigration systems. Now we take the brightest minds in the world. We educate them. As soon as they’re done with their student visa, we kick them out, and we’re doing things to immigrants that violate our own values. I can go through the world economic forums, measures of the success of a society ——

KK: Please don’t.

— and we are falling behind. The next president is going to have to be whip-smart like my colleagues. They’re going to have to be able to build teams. But what we need right now is somebody who can best heal this country, who can revive ideals of civic grace, who could help us to actually see each other, not just the people that the media pays attention to, but the people that have been relegated too often to margins who need to be at the center of our focus.

I think we are so much more connected, intricately interwoven, than we care to understand. And from racism to sexism to the ills that we heap upon through our ignorance on people who are struggling with addiction or isolated, struggling with mental health. This is the test of our society right now is can we repair, can we reweave can we pull our country back together? That’s going to take after this president, the next one is going to have to be a healer. The next one is going to have to figure out ways to get us to again be the nation that can do things that humanity doesn’t think can get done.

I’m running for president because I believe that as a chief executive, I can lead. I believe I can build the teams. I believe I can drive us down the field. But most importantly, I’m running because I believe I can help be one of the key leaders in the next decade that can help inspire our nation, capture the moral imagination, and to help us to rise, to be not just a great nation, but in order to be a great nation we must be a good nation. I know that’s who we are, but our politics, our civic spaces need to begin to reflect the dignity and the divinity and the decency of the people of this nation.

This interview was conducted Dec. 17, 2019, and published Jan. 13, 2020. Illustrations by Jules Julien; Bryan Anselm for The New York Times