Wes Moore

- The Democratic Party's next superstar?

This week on "Firing Line."

- I, Westley Watende Omari Moore.

- Do swear.

- Do swear.

- [Hoover] He's the first Black governor in Maryland's history.

But that's just one part of Democrat Wes Moore's remarkable story.

When he was three, tragedy struck Moore's family.

- He was given the simple diagnosis of, go home and get some rest.

He went to the house and then he died hours later.

- [Hoover] A troubled teenager who was sent off to military academy, Moore's life then turned around in dramatic fashion.

- I started feeling a sense of accountability for something bigger than myself.

- [Hoover] He graduated from college with honors, became a Rhodes Scholar, a White House fellow, CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation and a best-selling author.

- It is time for our state to be bold and that doesn't mean we are being reckless.

- [Hoover] Just 90 days into his first political job, there's already speculation he could one day head to the White House.

- Wes is the real deal!

[audience cheering] - [Hoover] What does Governor Wes Moore say now?

- [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Fairweather Foundation, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Jeffrey and Lisa Bewkes, Peter and Mary Kalikow and by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button, The Center for the Study of the International Economy Inc, The Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library and The Mark Haas Foundation.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. - Governor Wes Moore, welcome to "Firing Line."

- It's great to be here.

- In November, you became the first Black governor of the state of Maryland.

A political newcomer, but a "New York Times" article from 1996, when you were just 17 years old, noted that you had your sights set on politics even then.

What took you so long?

- [laughs] Well, you know, I have consistently been trying to figure out how exactly do you make your impact in the world, right?

I mean, it's not lost on me that I'm coming off of inauguration where I was decades removed from being a kid who was the the son of an immigrant single mother who was raising three children on her own.

And I knew at an early age that I wanted to be a public servant because I was going to fight for people like my mom.

And I was going to fight for people like my dad who died in front of me when I was three years old.

And so I think the journey into public service was not a new thing at all.

And I think that was one of the things that resonated most with voters in the state, because if they wanted somebody who had a long political career, they had plenty of options to choose from from that frame.

But if they wanted someone who just believes in the beauty and the purity of public service, and that we could go faster as a state and build inclusively, I think that's what resonated with the people in the state.

- You've said that everything in our lives, from the air we breathe to the water we drink, to the home that we live in, it is a result of a policy decision.

- Yes.

- One of your earliest memories you just referenced is when you were three years old and your father collapsed and died in front of you.

What happened, and how is his death the result of a policy decision?

- Yeah.

He died from something called acute epiglottitis.

And so, in essence, what happened was my father's body suffocated itself.

He was actually in media.

He was a journalist.

And he just finished a radio show.

And he went home and he was saying that something was wrong with his throat, that he was having difficulty swallowing and difficulty breathing.

It was a difficult night for him.

The next morning, he went to the hospital.

His clothes were disheveled and his face was unshaven.

And when my mother arrived at the hospital, they asked her questions like, "Is your husband prone to exaggeration?"

And he was given the simple diagnosis of, go home and get some rest, and if it got worse to come back.

There was assumption of whether or not he had insurance.

And he left the hospital.

He went to the house and then he died hours later.

And the heartbreaking thing about it is I know it's still happening, that we are seeing how essentially challenges within the healthcare system, challenges of believability, it's all being shaped and influenced by prejudices, ideals and assumptions.

My father fell victim of that.

And I think it's become such an important part of how I just think about the world, how I think about what our responsibility is in the world.

And I know I'm just, well, I know that I'm very, very proud that his DNA runs through me and I carry his name.

It's also that I carry his legacy in me in the way that I think about everything that I want to get done.

- After your father died, your mom relocated to the Bronx.

And she worked multiple jobs in order to send you to a prestigious private school in the Bronx, Riverdale Country School, where you didn't excel, skipped school, got into fights, suspended.

And at 13, your mom switched directions and made true on a threat and sent you to military academy.

You went to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, where in the first days there you tried to run away multiple times.

But eventually you excelled.

What turned you around?

- I actually I don't know if there was like one thing or one moment.

It was hard.

I do think something, though, happened where I started feeling a sense of accountability for something bigger than myself.

One thing that happened in military school, and the military does the same type of thing, but very early, they're going to put you in charge of something, right?

And they're going make it something small, but they're going to give you a real sense of responsibility over something.

And first, it'll be a hallway or a room, right?

If the room is clean, we'll congratulate you.

And if the room is dirty, then Lord help you.

So, you had that initial thing you're responsible for and you do that well.

And then you get promoted.

Now you're in charge a little bit more.

But there's this graduated sense of responsibility that I think I took to, where I wanted that feeling.

I enjoyed the idea of leading and I felt I was good at it.

And so I think the thing that happened to me was I was searching to be a part of something bigger, bigger than myself.

And I think in military school, I was able to find that.

- Well, now you're governor, and the Maryland General Assembly has completed its first legislative session with you as governor.

You had 10 priorities going into this legislative session, 10 bills that you wanted to have passed, ranging from increasing minimum wage, to cutting taxes for veterans, to expanding broadband access.

And you have claimed victory for all 10.

- That's right.

10 for 10.

- Pretty good start, Governor?

- Pretty good start.

Well, but I think it's a really good start for the state.

I'm very clear that everything we got done, we got done in partnership.

And the thing that I'm most proud of, we got all of those bills passed bipartisan.

Every single one we received Republican and Democratic support for.

When I went to parts of the state that were true Republican parts of the state, and people said to me, they're like, "You're spending a whole lot of time here.

Don't you know that these aren't really blue areas?"

And I said, "Yeah, but I'm excited to be your governor, too.

And I'm going to be back while I'm governor."

We meant that.

Everybody's going to have a seat at the table and we're going to leave no one behind.

And so, I'm really, really proud of what we got done in this first session.

- Marylanders seem to like bipartisanship.

And they seem to be, on the whole, pretty moderate.

Your Republican predecessor, Larry Hogan, ended his term with approval ratings in the 80s from Democrats.

It's a fundamentally different question to be a Democratic executive with a Democratic supermajority.

Truly, because the balance of power is different.

- You're absolutely right.

With a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, you could get things passed just getting Democrats.

I'm not concerned about just getting them passed.

I need them to work.

And I need them to work for everybody in the state.

And the way you're going to do that is by making sure that everybody is actually part of the conversation.

- When you look at Republican states that have supermajorities in the legislature and the executive, I'm looking at Texas, Florida, Tennessee, they have taken a very different approach than what you've just modeled in your first legislative session.

- That's right.

- They have forced through new restrictions on abortion, voting limits, limiting the power of political minorities.

How do you think about, as the executive of a state with a supermajority at the same party, preventing Maryland from falling victim to the same kind of intense political polarization that we see in other parts of the country?

- That's not who we are as Marylanders.

I understand other states and other chief executives, they can have their own motivations, and they can have their own initiatives they're trying to pull through.

But when I say that this is going to be a state where we leave no one behind, I mean that.

- And you've reached out to Republicans this session.

I mean, there's- - Yes.

- Good, open source reporting of your efforts to build relationships with Republicans.

- And I think that was, it was important, but not because they are Republicans.

It was because there are some good ideas that they came up with.

I was like, let's incorporate that into the work we're doing.

- Out of your first 10 priorities, were any of them from Republicans?

- Yes.

Well, I can tell you that every single one of them was shaped by Republicans.

Because we didn't just say, "Here's what it is, everybody."

Every single one of our bills were influenced by Republican lawmakers in the state of Maryland.

And I think that's actually why we ended up receiving Republican votes and Republican support on every single one of our bills, because they actually felt like they were part of the process.

- You've noted that Maryland has seen an alarming increase in shootings and homicides in the last eight years.

Violent crime is a statewide problem.

Of the 10 bills that you proposed, that you focused on in this first legislative session, none were directly focused on public safety.

Why not?

- I think actually many of them actually were.

And it's because public safety is not going to be exclusively about guns or about incarceration.

We are really taking an all-of-the-above approach when it comes to public safety.

And I think about the fact that our first budget.

I released the first proposed budget two days after inauguration, and that included a historic $122 million that we were putting towards local law enforcement to make sure that local law enforcement had what they needed.

And that included $17.5 million that went to Baltimore City alone.

We had record funding in public education.

And then we also put $107 million into mental health.

And so this was really an all-of-the-above approach in the way that we have to deal with public safety in our state.

- You say you can't arrest your way out of it.

- You can't.

- What will you do?

How will you focus on violent crime?

- Well, I mean, you have to make sure that there's real measurements of accountability.

But you're also you're not going to militarize your way out of something that is a much larger challenge.

We need to have a police force that moves with appropriate intensity and absolute integrity and full accountability.

But also, we need to make sure that we have our kids and our individuals who are not ending up in lives of crime in the first place.

That when a person is coming back from incarceration, that there are options for them to be able to reenter the economy and not one that's pushing them into a dark economy.

- You have rejected the defund the police rhetoric from the Democratic side, but the defund movement has its roots in Baltimore.

There are local activists who say that, quote, "The biggest budget hog in Baltimore is the police department."

They want money to be directed elsewhere.

How do you engage with them?

- I think if people look at our budget and people look at our priorities, they see where we are on this.

I think our actions speak louder than our words on it.

And so I think people see that we really are taking a very holistic approach in terms of making people feel safe in their own communities, in their own homes, in their own skin, and also that we are focused on creating pathways for people to be able to have a long term contributing life in the state of Maryland.

- Let me ask you about poverty.

You have written extensively about how you grew up on the brink of poverty, how you were later the CEO of a major anti-poverty nonprofit organization, Robin Hood Foundation.

Now you're governor of the state of Maryland, and you have touted that you are pursuing, quote, "The most full assault on child poverty in the state's history."

As you look back at your experience as a private citizen, in the nonprofit sector, in the private sector, and now in government, why do we still have such persistent poverty?

And who are the most effective actors at fixing the problem?

Because I know you have written that we understand more about poverty now.

- Than ever before.

- So what does it take to fix it?

- This was one of my big whys, why I decided to run for office in the first place.

I loved the work that I was doing and we were really effective at it.

We raised and allocated over $600 million towards some of the most effective poverty fighting tools and mechanisms in the country.

I remember we were working with a former governor on the issue of making adjustments to the child tax credit because this has been proven to be one of the most effective tools that we have to be able to lift children up the economic ladder.

And we're working with him, and I literally sent the note saying, "You should put this in the State of the State.

Here's the line you should use."

I mean, literally, I turned into a speechwriter, looking for the line that they should use in the State of State.

And I get an advance copy of the speech.

And there was nothing there about the child tax credit, or about child poverty as a whole.

And I remember speaking with our head of public policy.

And he said, "Listen, we've worked for six months to try to get them to include a line in the speech.

What if you could write the whole speech?"

And that's the point.

And so that's why a few weeks after I was inaugurated, I gave the speech that I wanted to give.

We can and we will end child poverty in the state of Maryland.

[audience applauding] If you look at just in our first legislative session, the first 90 days, we held true to that by doing things like making permanent the child tax credit.

Tens of thousands of children have now just been lifted up the economic ladder in the stroke of a pen.

By increasing the minimum wage and by speeding up the minimum wage to $15, we are going to see how, as soon as that is implemented, that is going to lift up over 150,000 Marylanders up the economic ladder.

When you combine all of these elements with everything that we're also doing around education, what we're doing around job training and job reskilling, I believe, from the bottom of my heart, we're going to solve this.

We can fix this.

And that's the thing.

If you look at the data around the issue of poverty, and specifically child poverty, we're not talking world peace, where people it's like it's just pie in the sky.

You're just making stuff up.

There's data to show we can actually be effective on this.

And what's happening right now in the state of Maryland, we are making a collective choice as a state that we can be both more competitive and more equitable, that we're making a decision as a state that we can end child poverty and we will.

- You inherited a $5 billion budget surplus from your predecessor.

Lot of people say a lot of these anti-poverty initiatives are expensive.

How do you do both?

How do you move the ball forward and combat poverty while still being fiscally responsible?

- Yeah, I think the thing that people saw, we came into it with an approach that we can be, and we can create a budget that was going to be bold without being reckless.

And so that's why I'm proud of the fact that in our first budget, yes, we made historic funding in public education and we had 10% in our rainy day fund in the case of any potential economic downturns or any economic headwinds.

That we said that we are going to make very real investments in being able to provide economic supports for small businesses, making sure that we can be both more competitive, reducing regulatory red tape.

And also, we are going to make sure that we are providing true measures of economic growth that's going to focus on new industries of the future.

I'm a data person.

I am data-driven and heart-led.

And the things that I know is that the things that we are investing in are things that are going to have significant societal return on that investment.

That's how we approached our budget.

And that's one of the reasons I'm really proud that our budget was able to both be bold, be ambitious, and also know that we're being incredibly responsible with taxpayer dollars.

- This program, "Firing Line," was hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. for 33 years, as you likely know.

The very first program on "Firing Line" that William F. Buckley hosted was with Michael Harrington, a public intellectual who was a socialist, who is really credited with informing much of the architecture of Lyndon Baines Johnson's war on poverty.

In 1966, Michael Harrington and William F. Buckley had this conversation about the war on poverty.

Take a look.

- Being kicked around and being pushed down, living in dense, miserable housing, and dealing with cockroaches and rats are not the kinds of things that make one a balanced, content, normal, and adjusted healthy personality.

- Yes and I couldn't agree with you more.

But I'm trying to raise the following problem.

Namely, to what extent is a poverty program that is materially designed to dissipate such difficulties as you have elaborated, to what extent can we count on it to alleviate all these concomitant miseries?

- So the debate about the role government can play in the war on poverty and eliminating poverty has changed dramatically in the last 60 years.

- Yeah.

- The arguments that Harrington was making about the role government should have are very different than the arguments you're making about how you're going to help alleviate child poverty in the state.

What have we learned?

- I think the thing that we have learned is, when people would say to me that poverty is a choice, and I'd say, you know, it actually is a choice.

But it's not the choice of the person who feels poverty's oppressive weight on their shoulders.

It's the choice of our society.

It's a choice of how much pain that we're willing to tolerate and endure.

The thing that we have learned here is, it's not just for us to understand what policies do we have to put in place to be able to relieve a bit of that human suffering.

We also still can not run away from the question of, but what role has policy had in creating these disparities in the first place?

That's the place that I want us as a society, and I want us as a state, to also get to.

- Let me ask you about education.

Eight years in a row of record funding to the schools, and yet 23 schools in Baltimore have 0% proficiency in math, according to a Fox 45 investigation.

There was a bipartisan program, it still exists, created by your predecessor, to provide scholarships for low-income families to send children to private schools.

You sought to cut funding or phase it out.

But for parents who want to have a choice, shouldn't they?

- I believe deeply in the idea that parents need to be and should be involved in their child's educational prospects.

I also know that when we're talking about public dollars and when we're talking about taxpayer dollars, how are we making sure that those taxpayer dollars have the largest societal return on that investment?

And I believe deeply that we've got work to do.

- How are you going to improve Maryland's public schools?

- I think we've got to make sure we're starting earlier.

80% of brain development happens in a child by the time that child is five years old.

So why we have children starting school at five in the state of Maryland makes absolutely no sense.

We've got to make sure we're starting earlier.

- You tweeted on Inauguration Day that you enjoyed visiting with some students from a charter school for your inauguration.

Are you comfortable with charter schools as an alternative, and growing charter schools in the state of Maryland?

- I'm comfortable with high-performing public schools and charter schools are public schools.

I believe we need to have high-performing schools.

- But the line for you is that you don't want public dollars going to private schools, so you're against that program.

- We have to make sure we're creating a quality public education system.

That's where the priority has to be.

And specifically, specifically when we're talking about taxpayer dollars, that taxpayer dollars should be going towards forming that true 21st century public education system that our students can benefit from.

My position on that has not changed.

- You served in Afghanistan.

You agreed with President Biden's decision to withdraw.

You lament and were heartbroken at the manner of the withdrawal.

- I was.

- There are 80-some thousand Afghans who served arm in arm with our military in Afghanistan who are here in the United States with very uncertain immigration status.

- Yeah.

- What kind of moral obligation do we owe those Afghans who served arm in arm with you and our military when we were there?

- And we're talking about people who didn't just serve arm in arm with us.

They risked it all.

And I can't help but think about some of the people who we serve with who would go home after running missions with us and would be met with night letters, which is basically letters that were left on their doors from the Taliban or whoever else, and saying, "We know you're working with the Americans and we're going to kill you and your entire family."

And the next day, they showed up to work again.

I mean, the level of heroism that we saw from the Afghans and the people we served arm in arm with and their families, is pretty remarkable.

- What kind of moral obligation do we have to them?

- Well, I think the moral obligation that we have is that for people who are willing to serve with us and sacrifice for us, that they should know that here, you're going to have a place that is going to provide a measure of safety and security for you.

- Have we lived up to that promise?

- We have not.

We haven't.

- You're in your first term of governor, but you have already been compared to Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.

There is a lot of speculation and anticipation about how you're going to do here as governor.

And the "Baltimore Sun" editorial board cautioned you to reassure your constituents that you are, quote, "Entirely focused on their well-being and that the governorship is not a stepping stone to higher office."

How distracting is that for your ability to focus on governing your state if others are already planning your future?

- I don't need to be cautioned on that by anybody because it's not something that I'm even thinking about.

I mean, I'm literally living a dream right now where I'm the chief executive of my birth state.

I love my role and I love my job and no one else needs to caution me on looking elsewhere because I'm not looking elsewhere.

I love what I'm doing.

- Governor Wes Moore, thank you for joining me.

- Thank you, thank you.

- [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The Fairweather Foundation, The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Jeffrey and Lisa Bewkes, Peter and Mary Kalikow and by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Damon Button, The Center for the Study of the International Economy Inc, The Pritzker Military Foundation on behalf of the Pritzker Military Museum and Library and The Mark Haas Foundation.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. [dramatic music] [bright music] [gentle music] - [Announcer] You're watching PBS.