Special: Bernie Sanders leaves the 2020 race

ROBERT COSTA: Welcome to the Washington Week Extra. I’m Robert Costa.

Senator Bernie Sanders, he’s out, and former Vice President Joe Biden is now the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. Sanders spoke to his supporters on Wednesday.

SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT): (From video.) If I believed that we had a feasible path to the nomination I would certainly continue the campaign, but it’s just not there. I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour.

MR. COSTA: Joining me to discuss this story, Yasmeen Abutaleb, health policy reporter for The Washington Post; Carl Hulse, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times; Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News and author of Front Row at the Trump Show, now a New York Times bestseller.

Senator Sanders, he’s out. Carl, you’ve covered him for a long time down by those Senate trains at the Capitol. He’s a hustler. I’ve always seen him almost run from the Capitol, from the votes, over to the Senate trains, and he’s a(n) energetic lawmaker, an energetic campaigner. Does he embrace Vice President Biden at this moment and really give him that left wing of the Democratic Party to work with in the coming months?

CARL HULSE: Yeah, I think that Senator Sanders bought himself a lot of goodwill with the way that he did this. In the middle of this health crisis, the Biden campaign is struggling to break through. He knew it was over for him, and I think it was a really tough decision. You know, he’d been at this for a long time. He’d really made an impact. I think you have to give him credit for his success at becoming such an essential part of the conversation of a party to which he still doesn’t belong, by the way, and I think he’s going to have a big impact going forward. And you saw Senator Biden, he’s moving a little bit towards Senator Sanders with – on college debt and lowering the Medicare age, and that’s a very different thing for Democratic presidential nominees. As you know, they usually go to the right after they get the nomination; in this case, President – or Vice President Biden is going to the left to try and secure the Bernie wing. I think Senator Sanders will be a force in the campaign, and his colleagues are very happy that he made this decision and did it the way he did.

MR. COSTA: Carl, you called Biden Senator Biden. Once a senator, always a senator, right?

MR. HULSE: (Laughs.) Yeah. Yeah, to me, I guess, that’s for sure.

MR. COSTA: You’re a creature of the Capitol and I love it. But, hey, Yasmeen, Carl brought up an important point here. He talked about how Vice President Biden feels pressure to move to the left because the Democratic Party on issues like health care in the last five years since Senator Sanders launched his first campaign has moved to the left on health care, many more people embracing Medicare for All. How do you see Medicare for All now in the Democratic Party, in the nation? Has it gained traction as a viable idea?

YASMEEN ABUTALEB: I think it has. You know, earlier in the campaign when you had more candidates in the race you saw Elizabeth Warren embracing Medicare for All. Earlier, when you had about two dozen candidates, you had a couple of people who were sort of on the Medicare for All side. When he introduced his single-payer bill in the Senate a couple of years ago you saw, I think, 16 Democratic senators sign on, including Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, you know, people who eventually moderated their positions as they launched their bids for president but signed on nonetheless. And I think it’s really changed the conversation in the Democratic Party. You know, you haven’t seen it result in much action on the Hill despite sort of conversations about equity in access to health care and health insurance, but it’s definitely changed the conversation, and I think you saw Vice President Biden make a sort of albeit modest overture to Bernie Sanders supporters yesterday when he proposed lowering the Medicare age to 60. And you know, every Democratic candidate, including Vice President Biden, has endorsed the idea of a public option, which during the Obama administration was considered too liberal to be put as part of the Affordable Care Act.

MR. COSTA: Jonathan Karl, jump in here.

JONATHAN KARL: Well, look, he’s not going to – I don’t think Biden’s ever going to be a Medicare for All person, but it – now he has endorsed Medicare for more. But coming back to the point Carl made, this was a – this was a major sacrifice for Bernie Sanders. This was a(n) incredibly difficult decision. He got into this race to become president of the United States, but he actually had a greater goal than that; he got into this race to lead a revolution in American politics. And his plan would have been, I promise you, if we weren’t in this health-care crisis, Bernie Sanders would have taken that campaign right into the convention and would have worked to amass every delegate that he could possibly get to fight at the convention to move the party in the direction of that revolution that he so – that he has worked so hard to lead. So this was a big decision, and I think he deserves a lot of credit. He made it because he knew that if you continue to compete in these primaries that people – you’d face a situation where people would get sick and maybe people would die in – you know, for the sake of a campaign that was not going to end no matter what with Bernie Sanders getting the nomination. But even so, this was – this was a hugely difficult decision for Bernie Sanders.

MR. COSTA: Carl, Jon just spoke about the Sanders movement. And you think about politics long term in history, someone like Senator Barry Goldwater in ’64 as the Republican nominee, he gets crushed by LBJ in that election yet long term the Goldwater influence on the Republican Party remained, yanked the GOP to the right on many issues. Is Sanders that type of figure? Are people going to be talking about Sanders as someone who brought the party to the left, you think, in 40 years? I know we don’t like to predict too much, but just your own – your own view.

MR. HULSE: Yeah, no, but I think – I think he – I think he was an important figure, and I think we’re going to see this play out with the disparities in the way this virus is affecting people. And I think, you know, in some ways Sanders was the person for that moment. If you remember when they were having the fight over phase three and at the end the Republicans started to balk at this extra $600 for unemployment benefits, Senator Sanders went to the floor and he basically ridiculed them and made them sound ridiculous for putting all this money into corporate America and denying these low-wage workers a possibility of an extra hundred or $200 a week. I think that his impact on the party will go on for a long time. And it’s – if you think about Ted Kennedy – you can think about it this way, too – you know, Ted Kennedy lost his attempt for the presidency and stuck around the Senate and had a much bigger impact than he ever would have been if he’d been president. So I think Senator Sanders can really be proud of what he’s done. But, you know, he’s a super tenacious person. He is not going to let go now. And I think, you know, he’s going to be pounding – this is part of the reason the Democrats are negotiating so hard in these – the recovery efforts, because Senator Sanders and also Senator Warren, are saying: We can’t just do what we did in 2008, take care of the banks and leave everybody else high and dry.

MR. COSTA: I was thinking about that Teddy Kennedy speech the other day. I watched it on YouTube. The dream will never die, a line similar to that. Written by Bob Shrum, I believe, in 1980, when Kennedy was challenging Carter.

Yasmeen, when you step back and you look at this Democratic presidential race, it ends with a candidate who’s pushing for a public option on health care in Vice President Biden, with the debate about Medicare for All throughout the entire process. What can you tell us about VP Biden’s position on health care? What makes it different than the ACA as is in the current law?

MS. ABUTALEB: Vice President Biden’s basically endorsing an expansion of the ACA, and the ACA as it was initially proposed. So you have this public option, which is a huge change. I mean, experts have said, you know, even though it’s maybe the most moderate position that the Democrats put forward this year of all the candidates that were running for office at one point, it is still a huge change to the health system. You know, experts said you should not discount how much it could disrupt the system. You know, it basically allows people to buy into Medicare. He proposed lowering the age. That’s millions of people who will suddenly become eligible who are not.

And I think the other thing to keep in mind is, I think there was a realization of – or, with Vice President Biden sort of running on a more pragmatic platform, you’ve seen Congress try to take up surprise billing over and over, over the last few months. And that’s an issue with bipartisan support. It’s really not that hard to fix policy-wise. And they still can’t agree on it. So even though a public option seems like a pretty modest position compared to single payer or completely overhauling the system, it is something that will still have a very hard time passing if it passes at all, especially if Republicans retain control of the Senate.

MR. COSTA: Jonathan Karl, when you think about president Trump and report on him, he’s been tweeting a lot about Senator Sanders and about Vice President Biden, of course. What does it mean for the White House, this whole development, the Sanders exit?

MR. KARL: Well, it gives an opportunity for President Trump to try to create some mischief within the Democratic Party, talking up, you know, Sanders was cheated, it was rigged. You know, he doesn’t necessarily believe any of that, but he wants to rile up the Sanders supporters, to remind them why they don’t like Joe Biden and why they don’t like the Democratic establishment. Although I don’t know that the left of the Democratic Party really takes its cues from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. But that is obviously what he’s trying to do.

The bigger question, though, is what happens in a campaign where Joe Biden can’t go out and get on the campaign trail. He is basically self-isolating. He can go and do his events online, but he isn’t breaking through at all. And it’s hard to see how he breaks through when you’re in the middle of this crisis. And that’s a – you know, how does – how does a campaign play out where basically, you know, there is no even semblance of equal time between a president who has the spotlight, who has his daily briefings, who is dominating the news, and a Democratic challenger who really can’t get a word in edgewise?

MR. COSTA: Smart point from Jonathan Karl. And I’ll just finish with a little memory. Six years ago, 2014, I had breakfast with Senator Sanders, who was then pretty – he was in the Senate, but he was pretty unknown on the national political scene. 2014, and he started to say he was thinking about running for president. No one was taking him seriously then. People said he was too old, even in 2014. But here we are, six years later, two presidential campaigns. He’s moved much of the Democratic Party to the left. It just reminds me in politics: Assume nothing. You never know where it’s going to go.

That’s it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on our website. While you’re there, check out our Washington Week-ly News Quiz. I’m Robert Costa. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.