Were you a Bill Clinton fan at that time?
I had really appreciated a lot of the global-health work that he had done. And obviously he was the President of my childhood. I was twenty-two years old in 2007. I had not seen Barack Obama. I mean, I watched him give the 2004 D.N.C. floor speech, but I hadn’t seen him on the national stage. That was still an untested hypothesis. And, also, as much as I enjoyed politics, I never saw myself as a participant. I wanted to be a doctor’s doctor. I thought I wanted to be a surgeon. I thought I wanted to take care of kids with spinal malformations, working in underserved places, and probably doing research in the area.
So you didn’t feel yourself to be a person of the left then? You weren’t critiquing Clinton—and eventually even Obama—as “neoliberal,” as the critique often goes from the left. You were looking at politics as something that you were interested in, only in a kind of more narrow way. Is that what you’re telling me?
I was, but not in the sense that there was anything I could do about it. I was more likely to be the kid you saw in the stacks at 11 P.M. than the kid you saw at the protest. We did some protesting when I was in college, but for me it was always, like: The way I want to change the world is as a doctor, and by getting health care to people who don’t have it. And, in some respects, in so many ways as a government official, and now running for office, a lot of folks want to paint me as, Oh, he wants to burn down the systems. No, I don’t. I want to bring my screwdriver and systematically deconstruct the parts of the system that are malforming and working for the wrong people. And I want to take the parts that have been misused there, and I want to rebuild that whole system so that it works for the people it needs to work for. I’m not a “burn it down” kind of personality. I’m a lot more of a: study it, understand how it works, think about how you could rebuild it—and then rebuild it.
Now, are you getting advice telling you that you need to say that, too? Because some people, I think it’s fair to say, in the press that I’ve read, Abdul, do see you as a “burn it down” kind of guy. And, running in the state of Michigan, maybe that’s not of universal appeal.
I’ll tell you this, David. The best single way to caricature me, as someone who has qualms with the system, is to try to flatten my personality into what they say they want me to be. And there are parts of me that say, Look, when I come with my tool kit to try and deconstruct it, and you want to stop me from doing it and you get in my way, we’re going to have words. I’m not afraid of a fight. But I also am not the kind of person who’s just coming to destroy anything. I’m coming to build things that people need and deserve.
Obviously the narrative is what it is. When you get sixty million dollars spent against you, they’re going to “burn it to the ground.” I mean, they’ve tried to construct all kinds of narratives about me—as a function of my personality, as a function of my background, and as a set of tropes that are easily told about somebody like me. But the thing I have learned, after having run for office twice now, is that there’s going to be a narrative built around you. And the best thing that you can do is just to show up and be who you are.
You mentioned the Obama ascension, the Obama [convention] speech in 2004, and then his Presidency from 2008 onward. How do you look at that Presidency? What was constructive about it, and what’s your critique of it?
I don’t get to do what I’m doing without President Obama doing what he did. The parallels are kind of uncanny. And I remember watching that 2004 speech and just being, like, I didn’t know politics could look like that or sound like that. His dad emigrated from Africa. My dad emigrated from a different part of Africa. He had mixed parents. I was raised by my dad and my stepmom, Jackie, who’s a Daughter of the American Revolution. I mean, he had a funny name; I’ve got a funny name. The one place it doesn’t work is he’s tall and skinny, and I’m pretty short and thick. But I don’t get to do what I do without him.
At the same time, when you love somebody like that, you’re going to look at them and say, Could we do more? It’s kind of like the way you think about your parents. You know what I mean? You love and revere your parents, and you’re grateful for all they did to help you. And, look, my dad was a child of an illiterate homemaker who was the smartest person I ever met in my life, who lost two of her infant children. And his father, who had an eighth-grade education, sold vegetables in a fish market. My dad studied my life into existence. I’m so grateful for him. And, at the same time, anybody who watches their parents will always look and say, Hey, if I don’t build off of what I saw, then what am I even doing here? I kind of think about President Obama the same way.
I was in medical school during the Affordable Care Act fights. And the big frustration I had is, like, why are we not going all the way? Why are we accommodating the private-health-insurance industry? And that, to me, was a righteous kind of frustration. And, at the same time, I have had my career in the world of the A.C.A., and I can’t imagine just how much worse it would be had we not gotten that. So you can both say the A.C.A. was incredible, and, as the President said, this was a starter home. I think it’s about damn time we move out of the starter home. We’ve outgrown it.
I spent some time with Obama, in writing about him, and I had a very interesting experience with him once. I was asking him about race—we were in the Oval Office talking about that. And he was very hesitant to answer the questions I was asking him. I even asked him about Malcolm X. And it’s not that he got up and ran out of the room, but—he’s a gifted politician, and he knows how to not answer something while answering it. And then he left the Oval Office, was three-quarters of the way down the hall, and then came all the way back and said to me, “You know, no matter what I say about these things, it has an incredibly volcanic effect on the public, as President. No matter what.” Temperamentally, you can see he’s a very deliberative, careful guy. What about that do you admire, and what about that do you depart from?
