 Good afternoon, welcome to Global Report. I'm your host Lily, hosting All the Way Life from Singapore. Joining us today is Mr. Steve O'Koon, a former official in the Clinton administration. Steve is now based in Singapore as a senior advisor to Macquarie. Welcome to the show Steve. Great to be here. Thanks. Now Steve, here we are in Singapore. It's a Singapore election time. Just a couple of days ago, we had a candidate that was dropped from the super majority list because there were allegations that surfaced for him being snooty, about him being dishonest. Now we go from him to Donald Trump, who needs no introduction, and we see this ultra magnified version of the same characteristics, except in Trump's case, those allegations have actually been proven to be true time and again. So my first question to you is, is Trump invincible? Well, there's a big difference, right? Because what Donald Trump has to do is run on his record. It's not his reputation. It is his record. And his record right now is not great. The economy in the United States is doing badly from a health perspective. The United States is doing badly from how people feel whether or not we have a just society. The United States is doing badly. He is far from invincible. In fact, he's way behind and unless something changes, you would expect him to actually lose this November. He has to do something to change the narrative. Now you mentioned the economy. I don't think it's entirely fair to blame him for the state of the economy because this is a global pandemic. Everybody is suffering everywhere, not just the United States. Well, there's a difference between what's fair and what happens in politics. And in the United States, the president gets more credit for a good economy than he deserves. And he gets more credit or more blame for a bad economy than he might deserve. And that's the way it works. If you're a president running for reelection and there is a recession, you're going to lose. I mean, unless some miraculous thing changes about that and we're in a recession in the United States, he is the incumbent. He is going to get blamed for that. And that's just the way politics works in the U.S. and the way you have to expect it fairer otherwise. But what about in 2012 during Obama's reelection? I recall that was in the wake of the outbreak of a great recession too. And he was up against somebody who had a very astute business background. Yet he won. How do we explain that? Because if you, well, two things back in 2012, we weren't in a recession. So it's the direction the economy is going. Have you made, if you're running for reelection, is the economy improving? Is unemployment going down? Is consumer confidence going up? Is the stock market going up? All of the trends in 2012 for Obama's reelection were going in the right direction. People felt the country was on the right track. 2012 was a referendum on Barack Obama and he won that referendum. 2020 is going to be a referendum on Donald Trump and right now he is losing that referendum. Now, I think a few weeks ago the unemployment rate was 16%. And the last time I looked very recently was 13.3%. So it does look like the unemployment rate is going down. If it maintains a downward momentum, is there any redemption points for him? Well, it's an interesting question because what you're really looking at is momentum over the year before the election. People don't live what happened in one month to the next, but they look at where they were a year ago and where they are today. And if you compare the unemployment rate in the US in October of 2019, it is going to be way higher by a magnitude of whatever it's going to be in October of 2020. So you're looking at trends over time, not month-to-month, but really over a year. Now, will there be something that I'm going to call an epidemic exception, which is what you just mentioned? Will people say, well, look, Donald Trump wasn't at fault. He can't be blamed that there is a coronavirus. He can't be blamed that there's a pandemic. The country is moving in the right direction. So even though it's much worse than it was a year ago, it's better than it was three or four months ago, and we're going to make an exception for him. Very hard to win on an exception, but maybe that is a possibility that we do get an exception, an epidemic exception. Okay, so if we were to look beyond the past month and look over the years, I know one of his favorite metric is the stock markets. How has that looked for him? Well, the stock market is not really the single metric to look at when it comes to the economy. You really have to look at everything together. You certainly do look at the stock market. You look at the unemployment rate. You look at consumer confidence. You look at it's saving rates. Are people saving money at a higher rate than normal because they're afraid that they may be out of it a job. They're afraid they may be losing a job that they have or won't be able to find a new one. All of those metrics combined are terrible for Donald Trump right now. So while the stock market had a good quarter in the second quarter, every other metric isn't good. And so it is not a good sign for Donald Trump. If he runs on the market, that's not running on the economy and it's going to be a big mistake for him. And that's why they've got to focus on other things as well. Okay, so sounds like the economy is actually tilting in Biden's favor. What are the other issues? What other major issues do we have on the table? Well, if you look at everything, you can break it out into what different factors. He is the incumbent president because he had a lot of great successes. And I think most people would say not great successes. His supporters think he's had great successes, but there hasn't been any amazing foreign policy success. There hasn't been really any massive legislation enacted with him as president other than the tax cut, which was done now a few years ago. He's done things that his base likes. The Republican base likes. He likes protecting the Second Amendment. They like appointing conservative judges. But there's a lot of civil unrest in the country right now. He is out of tune with that. He is certainly not, you know, getting a lot of blame, not for the pandemic itself, but for the response and that, you know, we have now about 125,000 deaths right now in the United States. We shouldn't have that. And so he's going to get blamed for that. So you've got protests in the streets. All of this is not a good sign for an incumbent running for reelection. Now you mentioned foreign policy. Help us to understand the psyche of the American voter. Does the average American voter really care about foreign policy? As a rule during an election, no. The American voter does not look at foreign policy. They look at, you know, kitchen table issues. They look at, do they have a job? They look at, you know, will they have a job going forward? Do they feel safe in their community? They'll look at social issues. It could be, you know, pro-choice versus pro-life on the abortion stage. It could be on, you know, homosexual and LGBTQ rights. It could be on other things that they focus on that affect their day-to-day lives that they see much more than foreign policy. What is interesting in this election is that while Democrats and Republicans disagree on just about everything, anything you can name, they will disagree on it. They will disagree on guns. They will disagree on abortion. They will disagree on civil rights. They will disagree on Black Lives Matter. They agree on China. They agree on China. It's the one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree upon. And it's, right now, the Biden position and the Trump position are the same when it comes to we have to approach China differently than we have in the past. They diverge in whether it should be a bilateral approach through tariffs or should it be a multilateral approach working with our allies. But the direction of where US China is going is going to be the same, whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump, and that takes away some of Trump's narrative that he used successfully in 2016 against Hillary Clinton. I think the way that Trump talks about China, the way he articulates about China, tends to resonate better with the voters because he doesn't use this traditional superfluous foreign policy language. I mean, he put it across to them. He drives it straight. You know, you have Kim the Rocket Man. You have C, the technological thief. You have Putin, the intelligent strongman. So they kind of resonate with the voters better because it's not some flowery language. Do you think he has more of an advantage there? Well, he had that advantage. You're exactly right. He had that advantage in 2016, and he had that advantage as an outsider running against the establishment. And no one is much more establishment than Hillary Clinton, right, having been with her husband as president for two terms and then being a senator, being secretary of state. And so he had that advantage over Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump's issue now is he's running the same exact campaign in 2012 that he ran in 2016, but it's a different world now against a different opponent. And he's had four years, you know, basically four years to change course with China. And while he has changed course, the results aren't very different than they were before. We still have a huge trade deficit. China is still taking aggressive actions. Businesses are still concerned about forced technology transfers and their protection of their intellectual property. So it will, the language will resonate with his small base, but he's not expanding his base. And that's the issue he's going to have running against Joe Biden as opposed to Hillary Clinton. I think you're right to say that is a different opponent, but I think to a certain extent we have to recognize that Biden and Clinton are cut from the same cloth because they both served in the Obama administration. They served together for eight years. That's not an insubstantial period of time. So Biden has this long record of public service that his opponents can pick apart, and that also binds him to the status quo establishment that Americans have come to distrust. So how can he break away from that? How can he make sure that his public service record is going to do him more good than home? Well, you have actually exactly outlined the Trump campaign and what they are trying to accomplish. That is exactly what they're trying to do. But the question is, do the voters care in 2020? In 2016, the election was a choice. It was a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and a majority of the electoral college went with Donald Trump. A majority of voters went with Hillary Clinton, but a majority of the electoral college went with Donald Trump. 2012 is not a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden right now. This is a referendum on Donald Trump. Voters are going to say, am I happy with him as my president? And right now, every poll you see, the answer is a resounding no. What Donald Trump is going to try and do desperately over the next few months is change the election from being a referendum on him to a choice between him and Biden. This campaign is going to do exactly what you just said. That's what they're going to try and do. But voters, if they don't get there, if they don't get to making a choice and just say, I'm voting against Trump because it's a referendum on Trump, it doesn't matter that what you just said may be true. So to summarize, you are saying that this 2020 election is not really about party policies or ideological affinity. It's about defeating Trump. Is that correct? Well, no, it's a referendum on did Donald Trump do a good job. Almost every incumbent election is a referendum on the incumbent. And you go back to 2012, the referendum was not, it wasn't, is John McCain a bad person, is John McCain a bad president. The referendum was, do we want Barack Obama for a second term? Yes, it doesn't matter who he's running against. Bill Clinton in 96, same choice with him and Bob Dole, George W. Bush in 04 between him and Kerry, it was a referendum on the incumbent. People are happy with the incumbent. They win. Right now, people aren't happy with the incumbent. And if that doesn't change between now and election day, Donald Trump is going to lose, absent a couple of different strategies he may try and take between now and then. Now you talked about that you also mentioned the Electoral College and then you mentioned the popular vote that Hillary won. So my question to you is, you know, do we still bother about polls? Do we now have to scrutinize their methodologies, who they're polling, who's getting poll on, who's financing the polling? Because I think to an extent the polls were accurate. Hillary did win the popular vote. But what are some of the things we have to keep in mind when we look at polls? Well, the most important thing we have to keep in mind is that the U.S. does not have a single election, right, for President on Election Day. It really has 51 different elections, the 50 states in Washington, D.C., my old hometown. And so you have 51 separate elections. And so you have to look at the polls in each state. And then you look at the polls in the battleground states, those states that can, you know, go one way or the other Democrat for Republican. So those are the polls you have to look at. Those polls may not be as accurate as the general polls. So while Joe Biden might be up eight or nine points right now nationally, but if he's down in key states, or much closer in key states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, you know, Wisconsin, Arizona, it's a whole different ball game because Donald Trump could lose by Hillary won by almost three points. Joe Biden could win by maybe five points and still lose the electoral college. So the general polls will give you a good direction of where the country is, but you got to go state by state and the state polls are not as large. They're not as accurate as the national polls. And that's what you have to keep in mind. What about voter demographics because one in 10 eligible voters are immigrants, which translate into about, I don't know, 23 million voters. That's not a small number. And since 2000, the number of Asian American voters and Hispanic voters has doubled. Do you see the shift in demographics working in Biden's favor. The demographic shift is working in Biden's favor and the Democrats favor over time. The question on election day, right, is not how you're doing in the polls, you know, the saying is the only poll that counts is the last one and that's, that's the one on election day. And what you need to do is get your voters to the polls. And that is why Hillary Clinton lost. There were about 12 million people who voted for Barack Obama, who did not vote for Hillary Clinton. About 4 million of those people stayed home. They didn't even bother to go to vote on 2016. And what the Democrats have learned is that we as Democrats cannot allow that to happen again. So how do you get those people to vote? Well, one, maybe it's you nominate a different type of person. You nominate Barack Obama's vice president, maybe that'll get those 4 million Obama voters who didn't vote in 2016 to come out and vote again. Maybe you don't take certain of your constituencies like African Americans for granted as much. A lot of African Americans stayed home. They're part of that 4 million. And so if Joe Biden has a different approach, let's see who he nominates for his vice presidential pick, that may get those voters back out. Do you have a pro immigration stand when it comes to labor, when it comes to immigration itself? And then you get those types of voters who care about that more than anything else to come out to vote. And that's why Donald Trump didn't really, from everything I watch, he didn't learn anything from the 2016 campaign, other than just do the same thing again. The Democrats have learned differently. They're going to approach it differently and they're going to try and do everything they can, fix the mistakes they made in 2016. And that's why they're doing relatively well right now. Now back in 2016, 65 million voters for Clinton and 62 voted for Trump. So there were in fact 100 million voters who were eligible to vote, but they didn't come out to vote. So how can we better galvanize them to come out to vote in his corner? Because what was the prime reason for them not coming out to vote? You mentioned many stay home. What was the reason they didn't vote? Was it because they didn't like Trump? They didn't like Hillary? Some of it was both. They were literally, literally the two most unpopular people who've ever run for president, ever, were running against each other in 2016. And that was part of it. They were not as likable as previous candidates. And part of it is the fault for our electoral college because if you're sitting in California or you're sitting in Texas, you say, you know, my vote doesn't count because I know California, if you're a Republican California, you say my vote doesn't count because, you know, Hillary's going to win or if you're a Democrat in Texas, you say my vote doesn't count because I know Trump's going to win that state. And so part of it is our system. It disincentivizes some people to vote. Some of it is who the candidates are. Some of it is our system. It's harder to vote when it comes to registration. And there's a lot of voter suppression that goes on. And we're as a country addressing some of that, but we're not addressing that nearly enough. And that is going to be a real issue in voting in a pandemic. How are we going to make sure people can vote and feel safe doing so? Really, there have been very few steps, if any, for the country that has taken to address that issue in this election. Now here in Singapore, we're going to the polls next week. And I have to tell you, I'm not entirely sure what the vision is. I mean, we have a whole cadre of candidates that came out and tell us, you know, they came from a humble background. They did this and they did that. And I respect that. But I think we need to have a vision for what they're going to do for Singapore, what they're going to do for the people. So my question to you is, has Biden articulated a vision? Is he now able to tell the future in a way that is so compelling that we'll get voters to come into his corner? Again, your answer is probably not as well as he should have. And that in a close election would be working against him right now. But the problem for Trump is, it doesn't matter because people are not asking, they're not saying, I've got to weigh Trump on the one hand, Biden on the other hand, what's Trump's vision, what's Biden's vision. Now they're saying, Trump, did he do a good job for four years? No, I'm not voting for him. And they don't even look to see what Biden's vision is. And so that is where the Trump campaign has trying desperately to make this a choice, which is what they want to do. You know, Donald Trump was calling him Sleepy Joe. That was his nickname. Crooked Hillary was, you know, the nickname he had for Hillary Clinton, a very effective nickname. Sleepy Joe, not so effective, because you know what a lot of voters are saying? You know what? After four years of Trump's sleep, it's not so bad. You know, I'll be boring. No, thanks, Sleepy. So now he's changing into crazy Joe and corrupt Joe, and he's trying a different thing to make it a choice. The Trump campaign is struggling to do that. They're struggling to get any traction to make this a choice. If they do, then Joe Biden better come out with that compelling vision. And then it will matter. But right now, it's just not really a matter because Trump, it's all about him. And he's made it all about him. And he continues to make it all about him. And let's see if he can change. Now, what do you think of Biden's residency is going to look like for multilateral trade? Well, you would certainly expect a Joe Biden return to what Barack Obama did, to what George W. Bush did, to what Bill Clinton did, to George H.W. Bush did, to what Ronald Reagan did, and working within the multilateral system to advance the interests of the collective, you know, countries, you know, like Japan, like Singapore, like Australia, like Canada, Mexico, EU, United States, you work all together on that. Now, it will be a more confrontational approach within that multilateral system when it comes to China, because the U.S. approach to China, Republican and Democrat, you know, almost from Jimmy Carter through what's toward the end of Obama's term was we're going to accommodate China's rise, we're going to engage with them. And a result of accommodate and engage means they're going to become more like us. They're going to open up. They're going to have more of a society like ours. They're going to have rules like we have when it comes to the economy. They're not going to have state-owned enterprises. They're not going to have national champions. They're not going to engage in state cyber theft. None of that was true. And so all of that still has to get addressed. And it's going to be a much tougher approach. There's going to be a lot more competition and a lot less cooperation that a Biden administration would have than we had in previous ones. It started in turn with Barack Obama when he shifted to the TPP, you know, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, that let's get like-minded countries together, keep China out, and let's have a trading system in place that doesn't allow those types of things. Joe Biden might not go back to TPP. He'll go back to that approach. He'll go back to something like that. Donald Trump will continue what he's doing. So we'll still be a tougher approach to China, but in a much different way. Let's see. Now, I saved the best for last. I want to talk about the VP ticket. This is the one that gets a lot of attention every time the topic comes up, you know, the lights come on, the energy gets pumped. I know there is a range of choices. And if we look at the past 18 Democratic VP candidates, VP's, 15 of them were senators. So would you say people like Warren, like Harry's, like Klobuchar, they are more likely to fill that bill? Well, what's interesting is you just mentioned three people who ran for president, you know, Warren Harris and Klobuchar. If you look at the last 10 VP's that were chosen, only three of them ran for president. So I think it's a much broader field than most people would typically look for. So I think you look at that. The most successful vice presidential choices, Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter. The most successful ones give people confidence in the thought process of the president, you know, or the presidential nominee. He selects shows how he's going to govern. What's important to him? Where does he see his strengths? Where does he see that he needs help? And if I make the choice that people say, this is the kind of guy I want for my president, that is what is most important. So let's take a look and see if he's going to choose somebody with some experience. Doesn't have to be national experience. Is it got to be somebody who's going to excite the Democratic ticket? An African American woman would certainly do that. So I think those are the types of things we want to take a look at. But we can go through individual names if you like. I think there's one name that's not often mentioned that's the best by far. I don't think it's going to happen, but it would be the best pick for him. And we know who you're talking about. I believe you're speaking about. It's Michelle Obama would be the greatest pick for him. She's got, she is the most known. She's got the experience of having been in the White House, even though she was first lady she accomplished a lot she's accomplished a great deal. And she left the White House and she has the highest approval ratings and we know everything there is to know about the Obama. So, you know, if you get back to your opening question, you know, you can choose somebody who's never run for statewide office or national office and something could come out that you didn't know that voters may not like fair or unfair. That's not going to happen with Michelle Obama. Now whether she take it is a is a different issue, but no question she would excite the exact people you need to get out to vote African Americans, younger people, you know, suburban college educated women. They are all the demographic that Joe Biden needs to come out to beat Donald Trump. So she would be the best choice. But if you take off that choice, the interesting question is, does he need to choose an African American, given where we are in terms of social justice in the United States, and having the first ever African American in the White House as Vice President would send a very strong signal about what's really important to Joe Biden. And at this moment in time that signaling what's important to him could make the difference in November. Now we have just two minutes to close, but I just want to ask you very quickly as a follow up to what you just said. Are the American people prepared to have an African African American lady as an American president, because Biden is not young and knock on wood but should anything happens to him, the VP is going to step into the role and likely be the one to run for the next election. So is the American people ready for an African American women president. Two things one. Yes, they are. It has to be the right person right it has to be somebody that they have confidence in, and they can get that confidence over time, when when she is Vice President. You know, if it's Kamala Harris, if it's Susan Rice, if I mean there's a half a dozen names. And if you look at those were there is going to pick as any white, you know, male previous pics that we've had, and certainly, you know, better than than the two white females who have been chosen, who did not help their ticket at all you know Geraldine for our Walter Mondale, you know in 84 and Sarah pay one for john in 2000 and so for the right person who proves themself as Vice President absolutely the United States is ready for that and and right now that would help Joe Biden when I believe in November. Thank you so much Steve. Thank you so much for your time and your input today and that Steve or could we have seen your visor to McClarty. Thank you, sir. Thank you.