Who is Ron Klain?

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the first major staffing announcement of his incoming administration, President-elect Biden named Ron Klain, Obama’s ebola czar, as his chief of staff. We had a great conversation with Klain back in April, in which he argued that leadership failure and government unpreparedness made the pandemic much worse in the U.S. Now’s a great time to refresh yourself on this episode if you’re wondering how the Biden-Harris administration will respond to the coronavirus and approach wide-spread economic recovery. Ronald Klain is a lawyer who served as the White House Ebola response coordinator for President Obama. He has held a wide variety of legal and policy positions in government, including his service as chief of staff to VPs Biden and Gore, chief of staff to the attorney general, associate counsel to the president, and chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. After serving as an advisor to the Biden 2020 campaign, he was named chief of staff for the incoming Biden administration. Twitter: @RonaldKlain Show us some love by leaving a rating or a review! RateThisPodcast.com/pitchforkeconomics Further reading: Confronting the Pandemic Threat: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/confronting-the-pandemic-threat/ Biden Names Ron Klain as White House Chief of Staff: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/us/politics/ron-klain-biden.html We’re past ‘if’ on the coronavirus. We’re on to ‘how bad will it be?’: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-coronavirus-has-landed-in-the-us-heres-how-we-can-reduce-the-risk/2020/01/22/afebe9ee-3d53-11ea-baca-eb7ace0a3455_story.html Trump says US has coronavirus ‘completely under control’ as Washington state confirms first case outside of Asia: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-coronavirus-china-wuhan-disease-outbreak-airport-screening-travel-a9296926.html Obama’s ebola czar on what strong federal response looks like: https://www.wired.com/story/ebola-czar-ron-klain-federal-coronavirus-response/ The huge cost of waiting to contain the pandemic: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/opinion/covid-social-distancing.html Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey Pitch Fork, Economics Listeners, today I'm incredibly excited to re-release an extraordinary
0:07.3	podcast we did several months ago with Ron Klein, who has just been named President-elect Joe Biden's chief of staff.
0:17.0	And the reason I'm excited is that in that podcast, we did a deep dive on his work as President Obama's Ebola czar and in particular on the
0:27.3	extraordinarily prescient article he wrote for democracy on the coming pandemic in 2016 before the pandemic.
0:38.4	And if you read that piece and listen to this podcast, you will quickly come to understand how big a difference it would have made if these folks were in charge, because it is indisputably clear that if Ron Klein had been running the show on the
0:58.0	pandemic instead of 3 to 500,000 Americans being dead by the time this is all over, a tiny fraction of those folks would have died.
1:09.0	And in particular, I really want you to listen to this episode and reread that piece.
1:13.7	But also share it with everyone you know, particularly people you know who did not vote
1:20.2	for Biden, because folks need to understand that the people who are coming into power
1:25.9	are smart, capable and effective and that will give them comfort to know that the country is going to get better, not worse.
1:35.2	So listen up, share widely, and thanks again as always for listening to the podcast. The difference between Korea and the United States can be attributed to the difference
1:47.0	between good governance and bad governance.
1:50.0	You know, leadership matters, there's no question about when we look at what's gone wrong in America.
1:54.8	We should not blame the WHO. We should blame our leaders in Washington.
1:59.2	If we had been prepared for the pandemic, the damage it would have done to the country
2:04.0	would have been much much lower. Pathogens are inevitable but pandemics are not. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics,
2:20.0	with Nick Hanauer. One American capitalist's desperate attempt to save us from ourselves.
2:30.0	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
2:34.0	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
2:39.0	So Goldie today, we're going to talk to Ron Klein, who was President Obama's
2:49.4	Ebola's and coordinated the response to Ebola and pitchfork economics of course is a it's a
2:56.6	podcast devoted to economics and not pandemic response but we thought it you know I thought
	...

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