Jenny Durkan: ‘The baton got dropped,’ and Obama alums are running to finish what he started

POLITICO's Off Message

POLITICO

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4.5 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan was the first Obama appointee to win a major election after his presidency. She's part of a network of Obama administration officials that want his presidency to mark the start of a new progressive era — and in order to make it a reality, they’re focused on defeating Trump, not simply by opposing him, but by out-organizing him. “‘Resist’ is too passive,” said Durkan. “We’ve got to focus and build a progress and a movement going forward,” “We saw the immense amount of positive we could do in our communities,” Durkan said, adding that she saw also how much gets done when no one is looking, which she said is happening every day with the Trump administration. “Not only are they rolling the clock backwards—they are—they’re in there dismantling, brick by brick. What he tweets in the morning drives the news cycle, and in the meantime, there’s an enormous amount of harm being done to the country,” she said. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover.
0:03.3	Resist is too passive. People have to organize. They have to act. They have to get involved.
0:08.9	They have to do at the local level, the national level. They have to stay in the dialogue.
0:13.2	They should not get distracted in the raccoon theory by the shiny objects and the fights that don't matter.
0:18.4	We've got to focus and build a progress and a movement
0:22.5	going forward. Because if we don't get involved, we get the government we deserve.
0:27.0	Today's guest, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin, who won last year after quite a mess in local
0:32.8	politics out in the Emerald City. The last mayor, Ed Murray, got abruptly sacked by a scandal of molesting
0:38.7	young boys years before he was in office. Then all of a sudden, there's an open mayor's race
0:43.2	in a very democratic city that had become central to the anti-Trump movement. Durkin was a former
0:48.5	U.S. attorney appointed by Barack Obama. She was actually the first openly gay presidential appointee
0:53.4	ever anywhere in the country
0:55.3	for any senior position. But she was practicing law and she says not expecting to run for anything.
1:01.4	There didn't seem to be any options. All of a sudden, there it was. Mayor, not the most obvious
1:06.2	transition for a former prosecutor, but one she was eager to get into. And she's gotten into it quickly, working on everything from drug crimes to the future economy
1:14.0	to fighting the federal government on immigration raids.
1:17.0	There's another thing that struck me about her.
1:18.8	She was the first Obama alum to run and to win after he left office.
1:23.5	Now there are dozens running, so many that Obama's staff, which is trying to keep up, can't track them all.
1:30.0	At least that's what they told me.
1:31.7	This is what the article up on the website that I wrote along with this interview gets into.
1:35.0	So please get over to politico.com and check that out.
	...

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