Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYES Date: April 8, 2016 Guest: Harry Siegel, Jelani Cobb, Lynn Sweet, Michelle Goldberg
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN --
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you the boss`s boss now?
HAYES: The man with the plan to save Donald Trump from a contested convention speaks.
PAUL MANAFORT, DONALD TRUMP CAMPAIGN: I work directly for the boss.
HAYES: As Colorado slips away.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We don`t expect even one delegate.
HAYES: And Trump gets back up in New York.
CARL PALADINO, TRUMP SUPPORTER: You have not heard the last of Carl Paladino.
HAYES: Then, as the former president backtracks.
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT: I almost want to apologize.
HAYES: And Bernie and Hillary sweep the unqualified talk under the rug.
REPORTER: She`s qualified?
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Of course.
HAYES: Tonight, a reminder that this Democratic race is a whole lot nicer than the last one.
BARACK OBAMA, THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blind.
HAYES: All that and Donald Trump`s courageous stand against pandering --
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: She hasn`t been in subway for 20 years, if she was ever in the subway. And it`s so bad -- and, you know, the picture of her riding around for -- it`s called pandering. It`s so bad.
HAYES: But ALL IN starts right now.
TRUMP: Nothing beats the bible.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.
And this state is now the center of the political universe, site of the next Republican primary and Democratic primary, on April 19th, with a whopping 95 delegates at stake on the GOP side.
And, boy, does Ted Cruz`s big triumph in Wisconsin on Tuesday feel like it happened a long, long time ago. In the mere three days since then, Cruz had been flipped off on the cover of "The New York Daily News", had to cancel a visit to a charter school after students threaten to walk out, got heckled and shouted down in the Bronx with people demanding his visa.
Donald Trump on the other hand, after getting trounced in Wisconsin and declared the political equivalent of mortally wounded, has been welcomed home as the favorite son.
And the perfect vessel for a distinctive brand of Northeast Republicanism. Trump has been hammering Cruz for his attack on so-called "New York values", casting himself as the defender of the state`s collective honor.
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TRUMP: Do you remember during the debate, when he started lecturing me on New York values like we`re no good, like we`re no good.
(BOOS)
And I started talking to him about the World Trade Center, the bravery, the incredible bravery of everybody -- our police, our firemen, our everybody.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Trump just rolled out his New York leadership team and local endorsements. Among three honorary co-chairs is 2010 candidate for governor, Carl Paladino, a guy who was basically Trump before Trump, bucking the state`s Republican establishment and beating its favorite candidate in the primary.
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PALADINO: I`ve never run for office before. I`m an outsider. I`m not politically correct, and I don`t want to be. I think you`re seeing the difference between me and my competitors. One wants to clean up Albany with a whisk broom. The other might even use a map. Me, I`ll clean out Albany with a baseball bat.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Paladino would claim baseball bat is metaphor for the people.
He ran into some trouble during his gubernatorial campaign against Democrat Andrew Cuomo when a local news site said reported he had a history of forwarding racist and sexual explicit e-mail chains, including one with a lewd image of the president and first lady, shown as `70s era pimp and sex worker.
Paladino went onto lose by 30 points but went out with a highly memorable concession speech.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALADINO: I promised to bring baseball bat to Albany, well, here it is.
(CHEERS)
And I have a message of Andrew Cuomo, the next governor of New York, you can grab this handle and bring the people with you to Albany. Or your can leave it untouched and run the risk of having it wielded against you, because make no mistake, you have not heard the last of Carl Paladino.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Fact check, true.
With Trump`s candidacy, that prediction is now being made a reality. Paladino has been drumming up support across New York state e-mailing Republican lawmakers last month, warning, quote, "This is our last request that you join Trump for president and try to preserve what`s left of your pathetic careers in government. The bus is leaving the station very soon. Get on or you`ll be left behind."
What New York is teaching Ted Cruz is that Trump`s law and order faux tough guy, not particularly pious, not especially ideologically version of conservatism, didn`t come out of a vacuum. There`s a very real constituency in this part of the country. Staten Island Congressman Peter King, no big fan -- Long Island Congressman Peter King, no big fan of Trump spelled out Cruz` challenge here in a radio interview yesterday.
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REP. PETER KING (R), NEW YORK: Any New Yorker who even thinks for voting for Ted Cruz should have their head examined. We`re tough, and to have some guy like Ted Cruz with his cowboy boots walking around criticizing us. So, listen, I hope he gets the cold shoulder and other things from every New Yorker. Send him back where he belongs.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
HAYES: The real problem for Cruz is that many of the states coming up on the primary calendar share a pretty similar profile in New York. In December, analysis of Trump supporters by "The Upshot" of "The New York Times" found that he`s strongest among Republicans who are less affluent, less educated, less likely to turn out the vote. His very best voters are self-identified Republicans who nonetheless are registered as Democrats. They put together a kind of heat map showing where Trump has the most support.
Many of the reddest areas have yet to hold a primary. Not only New York which votes on April 19th, April 26th, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island. May 10th, West Virginia, Trump`s best state, according to that "Times" analysis, and June 7th, New Jersey with a grand total of 352 delegates available. All those states mean Trump still has a real path to the nomination.
Joining me now, Harry Siegel, senior editor of "The Daily Beast", columnist for "The Daily Beast", and Josh Barro, senior editor for "Business Insider" and MSNBC contributor.
I feel, Josh, that there`s been so much head scratching about the ideology of Trumpism.
JOSH BARRO, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Yes.
HAYES: And I understand some of it. To me, who grew up in New York, it doesn`t seem that remote at all. In fact, it`s very certain kind of sort of Northeast big city Republicanism.
BARRO: Absolutely. What`s why you had Rudy Giuliani quasi-endorsement of Donald Trump this week. This weird thing where Giuliani said I support him. I`m voting for him. It`s not an endorsement. I want to go into the convention -- because Giuliani will be a delegate to the convention from New York, but it`s very much more about ethos than it is about ideology.
Rudy Giuliani was a very moderate Republican. Carl Paladino had this kind of heterodox approach to policy. And Donald Trump similarly is out there saying, I`ll protect Social Security and Medicare, it`s not the most right wing agenda you could come up with by any stretch. But this baseball bat ethos has a home.
HAYES: That`s exactly. It`s the baseball bat ethos. The Republicans I grew up, Bronx Republicans. It`s like you`re with the cops and not the thugs. You`re against the liberal elite as a sort of culture matter. You don`t like property tax or tax increases, but you don`t have any particular views on like the welfare state. Nor do you feel particularly animated about evangelical fervor or social issues. That`s what`s in his wheel house.
HARRY SIEGEL, COLUMNIST, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: It`s actually something weirdly European about that, about this sort of secular nationalism, comfortable in cities in a lot of ways, but who are these elite guys. We`re seeing all this New York values junk. Cruz throwing that out there. Trump objecting, Bill de Blasio objecting. This is all just wrestling stuff and everyone gets to be convenient foils for everyone else.
HAYES: Right.
SIEGEL: And, you know, there`s some people with real values, like the high school kids, who wrote this dignified letter saying, hey, if Ted Cruz is there, we`re not going to come to school that day. We accept the consequences.
HAYES: We accept the consequences.
SIEGEL: We respect you. We don`t want to be there and support him. That`s New York values.
HAYES: Those kids saying our parents are undocumented. We come from families that are undocumented.
You`ve also got the situation to me where part of what`s happening here, right, is there`s two things at play. One is, geography is momentum. Like the way that we talk about momentum is, were you just in state that`s good for you, right? Yes, Wisconsin was good for Cruz in many ways, frankly because of the strength of the establishment there rallying around. Now, he`s moving to a part where whatever momentum Cruz had, like there was no such thing.
BARRO: Well, it`s amazing how closely the results have followed that Upshot map that you shown. And it really shows why all the momentum discussion on the Republican side and on the Democratic side has been basically nonsense. The states have gone more or less as you would expect them to go demographically. Donald Trump does not do well in plain states, in nice Midwestern states. He does well in the South. He does well in Northeast. He does well where metrics of racial animus are high. That`s one of the key factors going into that upshot map. People Google racial slurs that correlates with people Donald Trump doing well in primaries.
HAYES: And part of connection to that is in places like Kansas and Utah, right, which are almost entirely white, Trump does poorly, in which racial animus and racial friction is not a defining feature of the politics. But let me tell you, in the Bronx in the 1980s, the racial animus is the defining feature of the politics.
And what`s also fascinating is the delegate rules of the Republican Party end up massively bumping up the value of the voters in districts like the 5,000 Republicans that might end up voting in the Bronx because that`s a congressional district the same way the Waukesha County is. So, Trump`s getting those voters and they`re worth more.
SIEGEL: Absolutely, and that`s why Ted Cruz is showing up in the Bronx, right?
HAYES: Like John Kasich, right?
SIEGEL: You have 11,000 Republicans there account for like 94,000 Republicans somewhere else, it`s insane.
(CROSSTALK)
HAYES: Eleven thousand there account for -- that`s exactly right, 94,000 somewhere else. BARRO: Yes, I thought that Ted Cruz in the Bronx was funny. He was there with Ruben Diaz, who`s a Democratic state senator, who is socially conservative, with evangelical Hispanics pastors, but the thing is those people are not registered Republicans. Even Ruben Diaz is not a registered Republican. He`s literally a Democratic member of the state senate of New York.
So, really, when you`re looking at these very diverse areas of New York, when you`re looking at the small Republican primary electorate, you`re looking largely at a white electorate. So, it doesn`t look at all like the Bronx. I don`t think Ted Cruz is likely to come anywhere close to carrying that Bronx congressional district.
But the thing with what he`s up to New York and letting himself have pies smashed in his face basically, the way the delegate rules in New York are structured, it matters a lot to get over 50 percent. The state turns winner take all to get over 50. The congressional districts turn winner take all if you get over 50.
So, Cruz doesn`t want to win New York. Knows he`s not going to win New York. If he and Kasich can combine for more than half the vote in the state or at least in the lot of the districts, they can deny Donald Trump delegates he very much needs. He needs to come close to sweeping New York to make his math work to get a majority before the convention.
SIEGEL: So, that senior is the minister who is there with Cruz with 75 other ministers and about ten Cruz supporters.
(LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: (INAUDIBLE) like this guy is appalling, Cruz, get him out of New York. I mean, there is just no place for that sort of politics you`re hearing.
HAYES: But here`s the thing that I think so surprising and confounding people, is that this guy Donald Trump has gone around talking about Mexico sending rapist and Muslim ban, who comes from the most diverse city in the country, he`s not getting the rude -- somehow he fits more in this very diverse cosmopolitan place than Cruz does.
SIEGEL: You said it, go to Long Island, the rally, I wish I could have been in the bars, because the after parties to that. Look, there`s a lot of people who don`t like the thugs, feel displaced, the thugs, who feel displaced, who feel frustrated, people call up sports talk radio, not for nothing Mike. And those are the people who talk about momentum, by the way, like that mean something. Those are the same people who love Trump and they`re not always the brightest bunch, but they`re full of resentment.
HAYES: Well, I wouldn`t generalize about them. There`s very bright individuals who call on sports radio and --
(LAUGHTER)
HAYES: And Long Island Republicans, I really say that.
Harry Siegel and Josh Barro, thank you much.
BARRO: Thanks.
HAYES: Still to come, is it possible that both parties on the way to nominating their least popular candidate.
Later, well, the last couple days of Democrat race has been the nastiest, thus far, the 2008 contest was way worse. We`ll play through some of the highlights, ahead.
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OBAMA: Hillary Clinton`s out there like she`s out in a duck blind every Sunday. She`s packing a six shooter.
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HAYES: There`s only one thing that matters when it comes down to who gets the Republican presidential nomination. It`s not how many people show up at your rallies. It`s not how many people vote for you. It`s how many delegates you can lock up. That is it.
And the hard work of locking up delegates is something Donald Trump`s DIY presidential campaign has struggled with. Now, finally, Trump has started to try to do something about it installing long time GOP operative Paul Manafort to manage the campaign`s delegate operation. Manafort appears to be asserting control of the campaign at the expense of Trump`s hard- charging and controversial campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
This morning, Manafort made clear he does not report to Lewandowski, the man ostensibly running Trump`s campaign.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you the boss`s boss now?
MANAFORT: I work directly for the boss.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: So, that`s it. You only have one guy you listen to and it`s Trump.
MANAFORT: I listen to everybody, but I have one man`s voice is louder than everybody else.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Trump currently has 756 delegates, more than anyone. But after his big loss in Wisconsin Tuesday, his path to the 1,237 he needs to secure the nomination before the convention is far from smooth. Manafort is confident Trump will get there.
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MANAFORT: This convention process will be over with sometime in June, probably June 7th. It will be apparent to the world that Trump is over the 1,237 number. At that point in time, when it is apparent, everything is going to come together.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You think Trump gets to 1,237?
MANAFORT: Absolutely.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Before the convention?
MANAFORT: Absolutely.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why the confidence?
MANAFORT: Because I know the votes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Maybe. But at least as of now, the Trump delegate operation isn`t helping. Today, Trump critic Tim Miller tweeted that Trump`s team is sending e-mails to their Washington, D.C. list asking people to be delegates in Washington state.
Just in case anyone from Trump team happens to be watching, here is a helpful map showing the difference between those two places. To add insult to injury, according to Miller, the Trump camp sent that delegate recruitment email, not just to the wrong people but two days past the deadline. As bad as that is, and it`s pretty bad, it`s nothing compared to the Trump failures in Colorado where all delegates are selected not by voters but by district and state conventions and with they have been badly out organized.
Cruz has won all of the 18 delegates allocated at district convention so far, and he may be poised for a clean sweep. The Trump operation in Colorado is being run by this guy, Patrick Davis, who just started on the job. That`s because, according to "Politico", Lewandowski fired a young operative named James Baker, who has been in charge of the Trump`s Colorado campaign. Because he had been commune indicating with Manafort after Lewandowski instructed him not to do so. Lewandowski deny that report.
All of this left Patrick Davis, the new guy, with a lot of to do in a very small amount of time.
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PATRICK DAVIS, TRUMP CAMPAIGN: Started in that role on Wednesday.
REPORTER: So, what`s it been like?
DAVIS: It`s been like drinking from a fire hose. Our expectations are very low. We don`t expect one delegate. If we get one, that`s a win for Trump in Colorado.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Joining me now from Colorado, MSNBC political reporter Benjy Sarlin.
And, Benjy, my sense from your reporting and the reporting on our air, is that those expectations are appropriate.
BENJY SARLIN, MSNBC POLITICAL REPORTER: Those are indeed very appropriate expectations. Now, I have attended five of those conventions. Now, there`s one last night. The key to winning the conventions is you try to submit a slate of three delegates and whip your supporters to voting for just those three.
So, they put forward a list of three delegates last night and two of them weren`t even on the ballot. They failed to pay the fees to get on there. So, it`s a pretty basic misunderstanding that meant there wasn`t a lot of potential to get any delegates. And sure enough, Cruz swept it.
Now, when I talked to some of the Trump would be delegates who were in the ballot, they pretty much all said the same thing. They`ve had next to no input. They don`t know who they`re talking to or dealing with. Some of them complain that Mr. Baker, who was fired earlier, had, as far as they knew, never set foot in the state. They had never met him or heard from him.
So, there`s a lot of problems throughout. It`s not as surprising that Cruz is sweeping the state, given that everything I`ve heard, not just from Cruz`s own organizers, but from neutral Republicans, county chairs, state chairmen, Cruz`s people have been at this for this months, as many as five to eight months, on the ground, getting ready, just to win this convention.
So, you see the scale of trying to start this late and the problems that arise. This is a problem not just in Colorado, but something that`s going to follow Trump in a lot of states, including places where he`s already won the delegates but he needs to make sure he selects loyal ones so they back him if we ended up in a contested convention. Big example is Arizona where Cruz is out organizing Trump and winning a lot of delegates. They`re going to pick the delegates to the convention.
So, Trump is trying to wake up late to this, get things back on track, but the challenge is pretty severe, Chris.
HAYES: Benjy, that`s a fascinating report from Colorado. Thank you very much, Benjy Sarlin.
Joining me now, MSNBC political analyst, "Washington Post" national political reporter, Robert Costa.
Robert, what do you make of the Manafort coming in and is this all starting too late?
ROBERT COSTA, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Manafort`s trying to do something very difficult at this state. He`s trying to get the Trump operation working effectively at the state conventions and moving forward into the Northeast and other states that are coming up in late April, May and June.
But the problem for Manafort is not just the organization within Trump tower and how he has to navigate that. He`s dealing with a different type of voter. Benjy`s report was spot-on. Cruz has an operation, but partly because Cruz`s base is highly organized and engaged, evangelical voters and movement conservative activist. Manafort has now to get disengaged populist Republicans organized in a short time frame.
HAYES: I got to say. One thing that struck me here is, this is the limitations of the unconventional campaign Donald Trump has run where they got, what, they have 100 employees compared to 800 for Hillary Clinton. They spent very little money comparatively. There`s not the basic infrastructure of an organization, and that is kind of what you get.
COSTA: There`s not even really an office. When I go to out to report at Trump Tower, it`s an old set of "The Apprentice", the NBC reality show, and it has a lot of dry wall and small desks, and it seems almost like a Senate campaign or gubernatorial campaign because Trump has been running a national promotional exercise, an advertising campaign that earned not so much through paid advertising.
Now, we turn to this game of inches versus this long game of yards, and that incremental game is why Manafort is coming in. He`s someone who`s closer to Trump in age, 66 years old, he was involved in `76. Close to Bob Doyle in the 1996 campaign. He`s someone who knows how this works and Lewandowski remains a confidant of the candidate, but he needs help on the delegate front.
HAYES: You know, there`s also the fact that the argument that Trump is making is that he`s a great CEO, he`s a great leader, he`s a great manager of things, well, he`s got a big management task in front of him, which is to be the CEO of campaign that needs to do x, y and z. Like get the right people in place the get the properly slated delegate group on a ballot in the Colorado congressional district.
They`re unable to do that. I mean, at center point, you wonder if this begins to affect the perception of the brand of Trump writ large.
COSTA: That is how you define the Trump brand. Mitt Romney was a wealthy businessman, but so different in his persona than Trump. Trump, when you talk to him and when you hear him talk bout the campaign, he is the strategist, he runs on instincts, on gut. This is a campaign that does not have a pollster. It did not have a real delegate operation for a long time.
The way Paul Manafort came out was not through some human resources search. It was through a conversation Trump had with Roger Stone, his former advisor. He recommended his long time friend to the job and said he`d be helpful to the task. And Trump, just on instinct went along with that in mid-March. And now, here we are, Paul Manafort in essence a co-manager of the campaign.
HAYES: This, I got to say, all the reporting thus far unless things change make me think the odds of Trump managing to come out of that convention with the nomination keep going down, because to the extent that the people -- it`s going to matter to be in the room where it happens. And to the extent the people in the room where it happen are folks who are not loyal to Donald Trump, it`s going to be hard to overcome that unless he can get to 1,237 outright.
COSTA: The only asterisk there, Chris, is that there`s a lot of time between now and the convention. Trump could have a strong late April with New York and then you go into states like Pennsylvania and Maryland. Maybe he does well in Indiana and in May, does well in California.
And he also, with having Manafort in his side and others, trying to build the relationships in Washington, it`s going to matter what the delegate number is for Trump if he`s not at 1,237, how close he is and that political capital within the party. Will he have friends on second and third ballot?
HAYES: Robert Costa, thanks for your time tonight.
Coming up, how it came to be that the front-runners of both parties for the presidential nomination are also the ones with the lowest favorability rating. That`s just ahead.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILL CLINTON, FORMER PRESIDENT: I don`t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they were good citizens. She didn`t. She didn`t. You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: In Philadelphia yesterday, former President Bill Clinton got pretty heated with some Black Lives Matter protester who were criticizing the Clinton, in particular, Bill Clinton`s 1990s crime bill.
Today, Clinton sounded remorseful or almost remorseful for yesterday`s remarks.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: I did something yesterday in Philadelphia, I almost want to apologize for it, but I want to use it as example of the danger threatening our country. I`d rather vigorously defend my wife as I`m one to do.
I realized, finally, I was talking past her the way she was talking past me. We got to stop that in this country. We got to listen to each other again.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, an entire movie could be made about Bill Clinton`s relationship to various Hillary Clinton political campaigns. Yesterday was not the first time he`s created some controversy in his role as surrogate for his wife.
Eight years ago, when Hillary Clinton was fighting for the nomination against Barack Obama, Bill Clinton portrayed Obama`s candidacy this way.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: It doesn`t matter that I started running for president less than a year after I got to the Senate from the Illinois state senate. I am a great speaker and a charismatic figure. This whole thing is a biggest fairy tale I`ve ever seen.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Those remarks hurt Hillary Clinton in South Carolina that held its primary a few weeks later. That is just a taste of the acrimony in the 2008 primary. If you think that Sanders/Clinton matchup is getting testy, a little historical reminder of what real nastiness looks like, ahead.
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HAYES: At one point in this campaign, there were 23 candidates. Think about that for a second, nearly two dozen people running for president, more than the number of NFL players, 22, allowed on a football field at one time during a game.
Today, there are five left, two Democrats, three Republicans, and only two of them have net favorable ratings in the polls: Bernie Sanders and John Kasich.
They are also the two candidates right now doing the best in general election matchups.
In the Real Clear Politics polling average, Kasich is the only Republican candidate beating Clinton head-to-head, Sanders is beating all three Republicans by wider margins than Clinton is.
Meanwhile, the other three candidates for president aren`t doing so well in terms of their favorability.
The a new Associate Press/GFK poll out just today, Trump has, quote, "unprecedented unpopularity with Americans of nearly race, gender, political persuasion and location." Polls show that 69 percent of the country views Trump unfavorably, making him possibly the least liked person running for president ever.
59 percent of those polls had an unfavorable view of Senator Ted Cruz, and 55 percent had an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton.
Now about a month ago the website Vox put together a chart looking at the net favorability of presidential candidate in March or April of the election year.
By far, the most on the chart is Donald Trump with a net favorability rating of at minus 39 percent.
Hillary Clinton is at minus 13 percent. Her husband was at minus 11 percent at this time in 1992 as was Mitt Romney in 2012.
If those favorability trends don`t change, and either of the front-runner end up winning the nomination, someone is going to set a very strange record in the fall.
Joining me now is Michelle Goldberg, columnist for Slate who wrote a piece back in February titled "Hard Choices." I used to hate Hillary, now I`m voting for her.
And I have to say that I find the Hillary Clinton favorability ratings confounding a bit.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, SLATE: Well, especially when you consider that they are lower than her husband`s, right. Because if you take the, you know, particularly the left-wing argument against Hillary, it`s all based on the compromises that her husband made, the triangulation, you know, the kind of 90s style Democratic politics that was constantly running against the left.
But somehow none of that sticks to Bill Clinton. It doesn`t stick to Joe Biden, who had a much worse record on a lot of these things. People hold things against Hillary Clinton that they don`t hold against any of the other Democrats who were sort of part of that milieu.
HAYES: There`s also the fact that her favorability ratings were extremely high as secretary of state at certain periods of time, particularly early in her secretary of state term.
They fluctuated kind of a bit. And I think it`s -- I think Rebecca Traister has pointed out that the closer she gets to contesting for political power, the more her favorability goes down.
GOLDBERG: And there`s a lot of research on this, right. There is a 2010 study out of Yale, I think it`s called the price of power, that people -- men and women -- react very badly to women who seem to be power hungry or seem -- for this study, they basically took a biography of a senator and changed just the gender kind of and asked people their opinions of it. And what they found -- I`m trying to remember the exact words, but when women seemed to be interested in power, it said that people experienced like moral revulsion, disgust and contempt, which are all I think terms that you would hear attached to Hillary Clinton from both the left and the right.
And so people like Hillary Clinton when she`s down. They liked her when she was crying or seemed to be crying in New Hampshire in 2008. They loved her when she was beat up for the 11 hours at the Benghazi hearing. And her favorability ratings had never been higher as they were during the Lewinski scandal.
And so I actually think that when she`s competing, when she seems to really -- especially against somebody has kind of seemingly pure and unsullied as Bernie Sanders, I think her favorability ratings are at a floor, because once she`s getting beat up by the misogynist Donald Trump I think people will like her a lot more.
HAYES: So, that`s the question, right. So, there`s two ways to interpret the Kasich-Sanders phenomenon, right. One is how weird that the people who are the most favorably viewed are at the back of the pack. The other is there`s a causal relationship, which is those people had not been front- runners and so they have not received the amount of incoming and negative invective.
GOLDBERG: And I think that`s especially true with Sanders. I mean, as far as I know, Sanders hasn`t had a single negative ad run against him, right? I mean, Hillary Clinton, like as you were saying before, people might think things have gotten nasty, Hillary Clinton has proceeded very gingerly in attacking Bernie Sanders in part because she`s trying to win over his supporters. And so there are just -- his favorability ratings would look a lot different...
HAYES: Well, that`s the question. And I think Clinton supporters tend to think that she`s at her sort of floor and he`s at his ceiling right now. But I do think -- I mean, there`s two issues, right, there`s the justness of people`s judgment of Hillary Clinton.
GOLDBERG: And the actuality of it.
HAYES: And the actuality of it, right. And so even if you say I concede that it`s unjust and wrong and weird and screwed up because of gender reasons that people have this, from a purely pragmatic one there are Sanders people who make the argument, look, the guy is actually more favorable. He`s more trust. He has better number. He`s more electable if that`s the purely pragmatic metric.
GOLDBERG: Right. And you honestly, and that`s true. And there`s times when I thought to myself, you know that maybe the future of the country and the kind of menace of the Republicans is too important to take a risk with a woman running for president. Because people don`t like Hillary.
HAYES: Have you actually thought that?
GOLDBERG: Yes. I have absolutely thought that. But I also -- I think that it comes back to I don`t believe that Sanders favorability ratings are robust, right.
HAYES: As a final thing, I don`t know either. One thing I will say, though is you know there`s head to head polling back in September. And it was like Ben Carson could beat Hillary Clinton. Like, clearly that was nonsense.
The further we get the more that they start to mean something to me, you know what I mean.
GOLDBERG: And I think they mean more when it comes to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump because people are very familiar with them and they`re very familiar with all their negatives.
HAYES: All right. Michelle Goldberg, thanks for joining us. That was good.
Coming up, the biggest thing to happen in a New York City subway station since pizza rat.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: With the campaign in full swing here in New York, the world watched earlier this week as Hillary Clinton attempted to get on an uptown four train in the Bronx and had some difficulty getting past the turnstile.
Now, this was a moment that literally every single New Yorker who rides the subway can relate to. This happens to all of us like all of the time. Hillary Clinton at the subway turnstile may have been the most relatable moment of this campaign, perhaps the most relatable moment of her entire political career.
There she was in front after a throng of cameras all focused on her the way that you are sometimes with a line of people in the commute behind you as she tried to properly swipe her metro card at the precisely the right speed. She needed to swipe that metro card five times before achieving success. The photo op, perhaps best summarized by this New York Times headline, Hillary Clinton`s metro card adventure: swipe, rise, repeat.
Predictably, some of Hillary`s eager critics have tried to turn the situation into a thing. These images tweeted 1988 Dukakis in a tank, 2016 Hillary in a turnstile, which is manifestly ridiculous.
Republicans not wasting an opportunity dispatching well known dyed in the whool New Yorker Michele Bachmann of Minnesota to demonstrate how it`s really done. Very, very believable.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, whose primary mode of transport in New York it`s reported is, of course, a limousine, just couldn`t help himself.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: It`s so bad. It`s so bad. When you think, is it not just horrible? I can`t even conceive of the whole thing. And she`s never been -- she hasn`t been in the subway in 20 years, if she was ever in the subway. And it`s so bad.
You know, the picture of her riding around for -- it`s called pandering. It`s so bad.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: So bad. So bad and sad. But hold the phone, was that Donald Trump accusing someone else of pandering? We have got a little something to play for you in 60 seconds.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: So, Donald Ttrump took a swipe at Hillary Clinton`s recent photo op in the New York City subway. It`s called pandering, he noted. Quote, "it`s so bad."
But if you`re keeping score in this campaign, Donald Trump, seen here lightly petting an American flag is the run away front-runner of pandering. He panders big league.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: And you know what I love? I`m leading with Tea Party, big. I love Tea Party. I love the Tea Party.
Where are the children?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: They`re off to the side.
TRUMP: Get them over here. That`s great. I love children. I love Iowa.
I mean, I love you people. I love Iowa.
We have Idaho. We love Idaho potatoes, right?
Florida, I love Florida.
I love Nashville.
I love the people of Mexico. I love the Hispanics. Nobody loves Hispanics like I do.
Israel, I love Israel, oh by the way.
Evangelicals, I love the evangelicals.
I love the evangelicals. I love them, they love me. The bible. Nothing beats the bible. Nothing beats the bible, not even The Art of the Deal, not even two close.
Two Corinthians, right, two Corinthians where the spirit of the lord -- right, two Corinthians, 3:17, that`s the whole ball game. Where the spirit of the lord is there is liberty. And here there is Liberty College. But Liberty University. But it is so true. You know when you think and that`s really -- is that one? Is that the one you like? I think that`s the one you like because I loved it.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: Over the past couple days the Democratic primary felt like it reached a new level of nastiness, but just a quick jog down memory lane is a good reminder that this has been pretty genial, all things considered.
At least compared to Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama during the last contested Democratic primary when, for example, then Senator Obama had to apologize after his campaign referred to Hillary Clinton D-Punjab in a memo criticizing Hillary Rodham Clinton`s financial ties to India.
There, things only got more contentious with Obama going after Clinton`s ties to corporate America.
(BIGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shipped overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board of Walmart. I was fighting these fights.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Then there was time that Obama famously said that some people cling to guns as a way to explain their frustrations prompting Clinton to tout her own experience with guns and Obama to mock her for doing that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: She knows better. Shame on her. Shame on her. She knows better. She`s running around talking about how this is an insult to sportsman, how she values the Second Amendment. She`s talking like she`s Annie Oakley.
Hillary Clinton`s out there like she`s out in a duck blind every Sunday, she`s packing a six shooter. Come on. She knows better. That`s some politics being played by Hillary Clinton. I want to see that picture of her out there in the duck blind.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was doing some mocking of her own going after Obama`s campaign rhetoric.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON; Now, I could stand up here and say let`s just get everybody together, let`s get unified. The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: And while the two candidates were going after each other in public, their campaigns oftentimes were doing much worse behind the scenes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now, the campaigns are sniping at each other over who leaked this picture of Obama in traditional garb two years ago on a trip to Kenya to the news and gossip website The Drudge Report. The Obama campaign accused the Clinton camp of fear mongering to make people think Obama is Muslim, which he is not.
The Clinton campaign said it did not leak the picture to the Drudge Report, but couldn`t say for sure someone on their team was not involved.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Things got so bad Hillary Clinton even suggested that Republican candidate John McCain was more ready to be commander-in-chief than Obama.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLINTON: I think that -- I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House, and Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Just three months after that harsh moment, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stood arm in arm in Unity, New Hampshire pledging a united front against Republicans.
How the two came together and what the 2008 primary tells us about today`s Democratic primary fight next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HAYES: All right, we have breaking news and an unexpected call to make in the presidential race on the Republican side. NBC News now projects Ted Cruz wins the Colorado Republican caucuses having now won a majority of delegates at state convention.
Cruz has won 21 delegates, sweeping all congressional district. Additional delegates will be decided at a state convention this weekend.
Turning now back to the Democratic race for president and what 2008 can tell us about 2016. Jelani Cobb, staff writer at The New York; and Lynn Sweet, Washington bureau chief at the Chicago Times. And Lynn, I know you covered both races. Do you agree that 2008 got nastier than this has gotten so far?
LYNN SWEET, CHICAGO TIMES: It is so different. This is not nasty. This is like going five miles over the speed limit, Chris, compared to 2008.
Remember, Jeremiah Wright? Remember Bill Ayers. It wasn`t just -- you know, there were a lot of allies of Clinton even if they weren`t directly linked to the campaign that were very involved in a lot of stories behind the scenes and then there`s the big acrimony you told a little bit about a few moments ago between the candidates.
This is nothing compared to 2008.
HAYES: Jelani, it strikes me that part of the reason for that, someone that watches the show that I -- that tweets along with the show just made the point that there are bigger politics gaps between Sanders and Clinton. I mean, there`s a real sort of like different political vision then there was than Clinton-Obama who -- the Iraq War was the biggest one.
But, on sort of domestic politics and all that stuff, they were not that far apart. Clinton and Sanders have pretty distinct different politics and visions.
JELANI COBB, NEW YORKER: Yeah, they do. And there`s also I think a big thing here, which is that Barack Obama was seen as an upstart then. And that was part of the cause for the acrimony.
And you remember the other big thing, really big thing was when Hillary Clinton made the comment about Bobby Kennedy and explaining why she was not going to drop out, she was going to go all the way.
HAYES: To California, because who knows what could happen.
Which I thought in context, was a sort of innocent remark in context like her being like you never know, but it...
COBB: And also bear in mind that even in writing his memoir, David Axelrod still was -- that book came out last year. He still was upset about that comment. So, it wasn`t something that the campaign just brushed off.
HAYES: I also think -- I also think, Lynn, that the obvious thing about 2008, the thing that I found about 2008 that was -- that made it so raw was you also had this intense battle of firsts. You had the woman who was going to possibly be the first woman president in the history of the United States and the man who was possibly going to be the first black president in the history of the United States, and it got so deep for that reason and understandably that that was always there just beneath the surface.
SWEET: Well, I think it got nasty and deep, not because -- let me -- I don`t disagree with you, that would have been the history. I think that these are two campaigns and two candidates that were hyper competitive and the staffs were incredibly aggressive.
The Bernie Sanders campaign is not -- it`s just not coming out with negative stuff about Hillary that they are discovering or bringing out, that she`s -- Wall Street, corporate donations, those are things that everyone has known about. He`s just choosing to make them center pieces of his campaign.
so, I think the aggressiveness of the staffs on both sides fed into the natural instincts of the candidates.
HAYES: This is an important point, neither camp, it seems to me -- and maybe I`m not the recipient of this, but I have been in the past in other contexts, are floating a ton of OPO (ph) about the other. So, it`s not like there`s someone who is sort of a little bit arm`s length connected to the campaign coming to you and being like have you seen this interview that Bernie Sanders gave in 1979? Have you seen this Clinton donor who was packaging?
That as far as I can tell is basically not happening.
SWEET: And remember that Bernie Sanders gave a big break to Hillary Clinton early on when he declined to go after her, even when invited, over emails and Benghazi.
HAYES: I want to play you a news montage of the PUMAS. Do you remember the PUMAS in 2008, Party unity my ass? I think I can say that. Well, it`s too late.
Take a look at the coverage of that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So, we refer to you all as PUMAS. We had heard that it stood for Party unity my beep.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: John David Overton is with the group PUMA, or Party unity my (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
UNIDENTIIFED MALE: Forget John McCain, the biggest pain in Obama`s you know what is maybe a group calling itself -- it`s what the group calls itself, Party unity my (EXPLETIVE DELETED). They are disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters and they are not jumping on the bandwagon.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: By the way, the bleeping there makes me realize I probably shouldn`t have said it.
But there was a lot of coverage of this that was so acrimonious. What we know is that...
COBB: At the convention -- I looked for those people in Denver, Chris. And there were eight.
HAYES: Right, exactly.
COBB: I saw eight of them in Denver. But I also realized that I now want to come up with my own profane acronym just to force you say it on air.
HAYES: But it also -- to me what it`s a testament to is, as acrimonious as that battle was, as much as there was coverage of the fact that these people are never going to vote for Barack Obama, the fact is they did. Barack Obama won and the Democrats were massively unified that fall, because at the end of the day, political party affinity and polarization is a powerful force.
COBB: Right, true.
And I`d also think that if you look back at some of the conversations behind closed doors in Denver, especially with Jimmy Carter, he was saying, look, I know what a divided convention does. And this had been a theme. People pressed really hard to say we do not want 1980 again.
HAYES: Lynn, I went back and I watched that Kennedy speech, the famous Kennedy speech in 1980. And what was struck by watching it yesterday was that there`s the peroration that everyone quotes, you know, the dream shall never die.
But it`s a really pretty nasty attack on Carter. I mean, it`s not a real embrace of Carter. It was divided in the last moment. And, you know, that probably hurt.
SWEET: It did. And it was in an era where there wasn`t this mass social media, cable networks. So, the impact of that was a little more one time only because it wasn`t saturated.
So, the damage I think was limited compared to attacks nowadays where they live on multiple platforms all the time.
But, you know, Clinton and Obama made up and got together a lot easily than their staffs did.
HAYES: That`s right, they did.
SWEET: Very raw.
HAYES: That`s right, they did and because they prioritized it ended up happening. Jelani Cobb, Lynn Sweet, thanks for joining me.
That is All In for this evening.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED. END