for a lot of folks it feels as if we are more divided than we've ever been in our history. and that the election brought out the worst in the political system. but you know, i think this is a time to bring a little perspective. i would really think i can to having a rent as long as i have is to try to bring some perspective to the moment. i had a chance to reflect on a number of these issues when i was asked, great honor, my only political hero i ever had in my career, and i mean i mean this without exception, was robert kennedy. he was the only person, i've respected a lot of people, the only person who was a hero of mine when i was in college and when i was in law school. i had the great honor of receiving the ripple hope award from ethel kennedy and robert kennedy at the robert kennedy human rights center dinner on tuesday night.

there were two other awardees more deserving than me, but one of them got up and made a very, very compelling speech about how everything is broken and he is so worried that things have never been the same. brilliant guy, i mean for real. it was a serious, serious speech. and i was prepared and asked to talk about how robert kennedy, by his daughter, kerry, how robert robert kennedy is life influenced my career at every stage of my career. and so i was prepared. i started off and i was prepared to talk about when i first became acquainted with him, really was as a high school senior when i'm a junior, when president kennedy got elected and he got appointed attorney general. and i was prepared to go through my, how i followed him when he was in the administration and

then when he ran for president, et cetera. and i started to think about him. and, you know, things were a hell of a lot worse then than they are now. the nation is a hell of lot more divided than we are now. and on november 22, 1963, when i was a sophomore in college, i was sitting in the steps of a hall in my university, university of delaware on a warm november date and we heard that our hero, generational hero, john kennedy, had been assassinated. it was stunning, absolutely stunning because he was the guy that convince my generation almost overnight that politics was noble. that we could fundamentally change the trajectory of the nation. that there wasn't much we couldn't do. when i graduated, the vietnam

war was raging. there was serious, serious divisions. family members did not speak to one another. your best friends split on the issue. some deciding to head to candidate, others deciding that this was a noble endeavor, and most of us thinking it didn't make sense but we ready to go because that's what we're supposed to do. my last year in law school, 1968, january of that year, after being told the war is coming to an end, the tet offensive occurred. and all of a sudden there was a great comedian thin, rye and outlandish comedian named lenny bruce. because he had been taught about the previous two years, a light at the end of the tunnel he said there's light at the end of the

tunnel. it's a freight train. and it was a freight train. i train that ran over a man who dreamt of being president his whole life, but concluded, concluded after the tet offensive on may 31 that he was not going to run for reelection, lyndon johnson. did something that no one could ever known in his ever life thought was within the possibility that he would walk away from power. march 4, i had just gotten my physical for my draft board and is waiting at the airport in syracuse, new york, for a package to come from home, sitting in the parking lot at hancock airport. i heard dr. king had been assassinated. i got engaged in public life because of dr. king. my state was segregated by law

to my state was a border state. my state still had mrs. murphy's rule on housing, you could not discriminate against anyone seeking a room unless yo you wod for fewer rooms in your house. it wasn't until mike 68 we elected the first black state senator. that's how i got involved when i was in high school, and college, in law school. he was assassinated. my city was one of those cities partially burned to the ground. my hometown that is going to go home to in june, wilmington, delaware, was the only city in america since reconstruction occupied by the military for seven months. military on every corner with drawn bayonets.

on june 6 i graduated, and shortly after i started across the stage to accept my diploma, my own political hero was murdered after being named a putative nominee for the democratic party. imagine, those of you who were in school, imagine if when the last primary that determined barack obama to be the president, had he been assassinated. imagine. imagine what would have happened. in august the democratic convention, more than 10,000 protesters clash in the streets for the whole world to see with 20,000 policemen and national guard. it was chaos. it was chaos.

the '70s, things continued to break. as a young public defender after having gotten a job with the most stages law firm in the state, the oldest law firm, a white shoe firm as we used to say, after six months of being there i realized i couldn't do it. and to the chagrin of my pants and everyone who knew me, i walked across, those of you have done federal cases in delaware and a lot of corporate cases have done that, i walked across rodney square to the federal courthouse after having just one. one. i did when i sat second tour with the senior partner, a major case for a construction company and getty oil. i walked across the square inch of the basin the building that was catty corner. and asked for a job as a public defender. i'll never forget what the guy

who ran it, you look at me and he said, don't you work for pritchett? don't you know what you are doing? i knew what i was doing. i knew what i was doing. on may 4, 1970, peaceful protesters at kent state were gunned down by the national guard. for students killed, nine wounded during an antiwar protest. as the old saying goes, you think you have a tough now, imagine. imagine that now. may 15, 1972, i was a putative nominee for the democratic party at 29 years years old. george wallace running for president was shot and nearly killed, permanently incapacitated in laurel,

maryland. as a lot of my colleagues said yesterday, i used to stutter very badly and it works very, very hard to overcome my stuttering. and i had an uncle who was an intellectual and a student of irish poetry. i was a bachelor touch me he was bachelor and stayed with us often on for long period of time because he was a salesman for eastern pennsylvania. he was from scranton but he would come down and stay with us when he is working the southern district of his first company. and he always had a book of poetry of yates, and would sit on my dresser in a room that, we were typical middle-class, three-bedroom house, for kids and ability of always living with us. not a joke. always. it was a great way to be raised by the way. looking bad looking back on it, it was all the heart of my

parents what it was great for us. i used to stand in front of the near with a flashlight trying to come at night in the two sets of bunks, my two brother brothers e and my uncle, when he came to stay. and i would stand in front of the nadir when they were asleep and that would pick up the bulk of yates poetry and i would read it, and i would kind of try to watch my face to make sure i didn't contort my face because when you -- when you stutter, and i notice a lot of you are smiling. it's the only infliction you can smile about. i was telling you about, i told you i had a cleft palate, you wouldn't smile. it's an incredibly debilitating thing. it's awful hard to walk up to the pretty girl and say would you go to the prom with me? people think you are not smart. so i used to, my colleagues in

the senate for the last, for the 36 years i served, they would give me because i was quoting irish poetry. just because i read it so much. in one of the poems, i remembered thinking, as i was married at this time, the poem, the second coming, he said things fall apart. the center cannot hold. near anarchy is loosed upon the world. blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. some would argue that that best describe my generation and our

country, as they say, when i was coming up. my whole generation was basically told, don't trust anybody over 30. it wasn't a joke. and dropout. dropout. it didn't seem possible, the center would hold, but because we thought it was all about to spiral out of control. but we made it through that year, in those years, and that whole era. america was divided but it didn't come apart. it didn't come apart. and i thought then as i think now, i believe we can change things. i truly believed, and i would argue, i was proven correct, that we could change things.

and we did in a matter of four or five years. we ended that damn war and brought everybody home. we gave voice finally to the fulfillment of the civil rights movement. the women's movement came into full and clear view which no longer viewed the province of radicals like me and women's organizations. we made a hell of a lot of progress. because the march, to paraphrase dr. king, the arc of history in this country in particular is always towards progress. we made a lot of progress. ending, i might add, on january the 18th, my stand on a platform at the wilmington train

station, the same place i used to go as a public defender to interview my clients have been arrested by the national guard. i remember standing on the platform with over 25,000 people down below in the street waiting for a black man to take a 28 minute ride from philadelphia to pick an irish catholic kid up from a middle-class neighborhood, to take a 129-mile ride to be sworn in as president and vice president of united states of america. i was standing with my two boys and my daughter overlooking what they call the third street bridge on the east side that a been burned to the ground. i stood there almost 40 years before, almost to the day because that's what joined the public defenders office mid-january. and i said, boys, don't tell me

there is not progress in america. don't tell me, because at the time when i stood there, i wondered, will we ever, ever, ever be able to live together? so, folks, you know, one of the reasons i like robert kennedy was how we always would quote george bernard shaw. you see things as they are and say why. i dream things that never were and say why not? i believe it then, i believe it now. ..

>> my great regret was he never went to college and there's two things everybody used to joke, one, every one is entitled to dignity, no matter who they are. and he would just say by the way, it's simply good manners. it wasn't complicated. the most wealthy people believe that, poor people believe that, most people in their guts intuitively know that . we don't do it but be vast majority of ordinary americans know that. you say that the one thing

americans agree on is their abhorrence for theabuse of power . whether it is economic, political or physical. and i know now the debate going on in my party and outside the party which is normal. after after every loss, there's a recalculation, why did we lose? what should we do differently? notwithstanding the fact that hillary got 2 and a half million more votes than the other team. we talk about this as if there's this chasm now, that it's so wide. it's described in terms of as if there's a fault line down the middle of the country and the coasts are split. we are now a bicoastalparty, we are told . bicoastal nation. translated to folks on the

coast are much more interested in progressive issues, immigration, lgbt rights, climate change then they are in the plight of those leftbehind in the middle class . all those white boys out there and those white women living in the exurbs and its suburbs. and you know, my career, i never found there to be any inconsistency with the concerns about the difficulties of working americans and being progressive. i say this only for those of you who don't know my career but elected to the senate seven times, served only six terms,i had to leave to become vice president .

but i've been rated as one of the 3 to 7 depending on what the agency is in both progressive center of the entire time i served. i didn't have to be in the position where my position on lgbt evolve. it evolved when i was 17 years old. i will compare my role in civil rights and liberties, women's issues to anybody i served with. in all those years. and i'm also characterized in this town and other places as middle-class joe. now, for i'm sure you are the exception but most audiences in washington, that's not meant as a compliment . that usually meant that he's not that sophisticated.

i'm pretty damned sophisticated about what's made this country what it is. mister middle-class. middle-class has held the social fabric of this country together when other countries have prayed . middle-class is an aspirational notion. it's pretty straightforward. through the campaign i spent a lot of time in the union halls in ohio, pennsylvania, michigan, wisconsin. i did over 83 events in this last campaign. 50 unique to hillary, 30 unique to hillary, 15 for the party which always included hillary. and i thought about how we need to change the culture, about how we protect women from violence in this country and even guys that we cheer

this idea that all these blue-collar guys are a bunch of racists and sexists, simply not true. it is simply not true. i was recently in youngstown ohio at anautomobile plant . absolutely packed house. i started talking about equal pay for equal women and a cheer went up, you know why? the most sophisticated people in washington don't get it. their wives don't get paid well, their scale of living decreases. it's not complicated. it's not complicated. i talked about my passion to end violence against women and at college campuses, all those guys had daughters. they cheered.

so this idea that somehow, what's the base of the democratic party is no longer compatible with democratic principles, i reject . let me point out all those places where the candidate got beat 90 10, 8020, barack and i almost one or almost lost, close, we got 40 percent of those votes and all those red areas and counties you see. so much for it all being about racism. for me, when i think about the challenges in front of us, ithink about the people i grew up with in my neighborhood . most of all, the american people are for great and determination, a sense of fairness, equity and balance. there's no quit in the

american people. they get up area they move forward. and i'm really proud of what barack and i did for the economy, more than 15 million new jobs after losing more than 800,000 new jobs the day we got sworn in, that month. lowest unemployment rate in 2007, rescuing the auto industry but the truth is because of the changingnature of the economy, globalization, digitalization is a roadblock, the depth of this great recession , there's still people that got left behind. my dad used to say, i don't expect the government to solve my problems but i do expect them to understand it area to understand my problem. it's not an accident, the highest rate of suicide as white men between the ages of 40 and 55.

the greatest of use of opioids is not in black neighborhoods or are eight's, it was white men. the only people in america with a life expectancy has gone down in the last hundred years falls in that same category. so you'd think intelligent people, they'd say why? what the hell happened? my dad used to say that ever since he had to move from scranton where there was no work, and by the way, there was no hardship area my family, everything's fine.i remembered when he told me he was going down he said it's only 157 miles away, i'll try to come home most weekends and bring you, mom and the kids down.

and i remember looking then in the same everything's going to be okay. he really believed it. because there was a basic bargain back then. both parties agreed to a difference in degree that if you contribute to the enterprise in which you worked, you got to share in the profits . that doesn't happen now. for a whole range of reasons, some of them intended, some unintended, some a consequence of globalization, a whole range of regions . and so i know i got in trouble at the convention when i spoke and i talked about why i thought hillary would make it good president but i did say we are not paying enough attention to these people. we are not showing enough respect to these people. globalization is not an on alloying asset to everybody, much as washington and international relations politics in washington thanks.

you know, quite frankly even those with middle-class backgrounds knew the lead in america it's not the social elite. it's the elite lawyers, the elite ., the elite elected public officials, not all, the elite ones. ceos and it's based on the merits, is meritorious. it's black, is white, it's women, gays, straight area there's not a whole lot of connection to the old neighborhood area i'll bet i can tell you students or any of you that work in the administration, i that i can pick one of four neighborhood you live in.

we tend to congregate with people of like backgrounds, that's normal. and that's a good thing, not a bad thing. but not a whole lot of people from our own neighborhood. we usually don't think about that, i don't think we've got middle-class, is not just the economic kids in this nation, as i said, when it does well, everybody goes well, the wealthy do very well. they have always up, there's hope. and as i said and got some criticism from my own staff because i indirectly was criticizing campaign, i wasn't because i know she agreed with me. and i said we are not showing enough respect . it's a segment of the population. that's scared to death. not just because of the

effects of the middle class is this sense of loss of wealth which they did. how many people do you know never missed a mortgage payment but the long-term brown on either side, there may be more mortgages and all of a sudden everything they work for, everything they own, all the equity they had in their home evaporated. we lost $17 trillion worth of wealth in america, household wealth. we gained back 34. it wasn't because the top one percent are bad guys. they got 80 percent of it, why? they didn't lose the balance. they didn't get knocked out of the market, they get to stay in. remember the discussion? when the market fell below 6000, all those little investors are in their with their pension funds and their

iras. now it's over 19,000, guess what? they're not in it anymore. the one thing that bothers me the most, i remember i was going into cleveland and i was in the plane with my staff and i couldn't understand why i was getting so upset. therewas so many reasons for this, this is a rundown . i don't know if you ever had one of these epiphanies yourself about what is really bothering you.and i realized what was. elections are supposed to be about referendums on ideas, direction of the country. so that when a president is elected, they can say i told you this is what i was going

to do. the majority of you basically agree but that's what i'm going to try to do area but other than make america great again and forward together, what do you know about the last election? you're among the most educated people in the country, sophisticated that i could be speaking to and i'm not being solicitous. i wonder how many of you can tell me what hillary's plan was for free college education? i wonder how many could tell me how we planned on changing the tax structure to make it more equitable. i wonder if you can tell me what the position of either administration was in the south china sea and how to engage china. and i could go on. and even those of you that can't pay, i come up here and i challenge you to tell me the details.

it reminds me of jim sasso, a great guy from tennessee area he would always run and when there was a spending program, how are you going to pay for it? he said waste forward and abuse. change the tax structure, make sure the wealthy pay more. that tells people off.and why wasn't there more discussion? hillary clinton in my view, and i'm prejudiced, is the single most qualified candidate to run for the united states we had,. . she didn't have all these ideas, she did. the press, some of them that are here today, they didn't cover it. it wasn't your fault. the guy talks about grabbing a woman's private parts and when the guy says some of the incredibly outrageous things that were said, it sucks up all the oxygen in the air.

i was told there was something like, don't hold me to this press, i'll forget the number because i don't remember exactly but for 44 times more stories about hillary's emails and there were about any single issue. it's not the presses fall, i'm not blaming them, it's just the reality. there was little discussion and it was a very close election. hundred 20,000 votes had a different outcome. there were any number of things that could be attributed to why my team lost and their team one. from the director of the fbi not showing up enough and paying enough attention but the one thing i think is pretty clear is that there

wasn't much of a discussion on the issues, even in the debates area and so the reason i bothered to tell you that and i apologize i'm going on so long but this means so much for me and i think the country is that i really think that i'm still optimistic for this country because we are better positioned than any nation in the world: the21st century , by a long shot. and now were going to actually have a chance to have it happen. because there's going to be specific individuals and proposals put forward to the congress, even though the other team controls both houses and the debate will

have to be covered. you know, i guess it was pt barnum who said there's no such thing as bad publicity, i'm not sure that's true and trump says it and it turns out he's pretty smart in terms of being able to figure out howto deal with the press . some of the things he said would be just so de facto disqualifying for a president of the united states of america . it was such a negative campaign, it tended to take everybody's eye off the ball and the debate about, was there something in an email versus something in his background that disqualified him? and so i think if you listen to the lessons that just happened, you might think the world is ending but i'm not saying that we are where we

need to be, we're a long way from that but i'm telling you ithink now there's going to be a real debate . real discussion, because those issues, those proposals that have gone forward to eliminate or initiate fundamental changes are going to be debated, they will be covered, the public will hear them. you will hear them. and i feel confident about our ideas. i'll give you one example. this overwhelming desire for the republican party to eliminate obamacare. oh, man. all of a sudden they say in southern delaware they had an altar call. you've seen the lord. now what are they going to do? repeal obama care.

make it permanent but not take effect until after the next election. think about it. think about it. if it's as bad as that, just repeal it added three and have at it right now. repeal it wholesale. let's count the hospitals go under. may 20 million people off healthcare. get the press covering, my mother just died because she lost her coverage. all those millions of kids who are on your policies, aged 26 because they can't afford insurance on their own , threw them off. all of a sudden insurance companies are going back and charging women more than men for the same coverage area all of a sudden pre-existing conditions, oh, they matter? you don't get coverage? folks, i welcome the debate.

i can hardly wait. no, no, i'm not being a wise guy, i really mean it. i can hardly wait to engage this debate . and you're going to see the american people begin to refocus again because there will be a focus . it will not solve all the problems, we're not going to have wholesale medication in the next six months, a year, we're not going to figure out how todeal with digitalization. i was a keynote speaker at data last year , where 2800 ceos i was told and over 88 heads of state and they gave me an easy topic. they asked me to quote, before the industrial revolution, where it will there be middle-class?

every other major industrial revolution we had has resulted in over time the ability to mold it did not just benefit a few but to benefit all of humanity and raise it up. it's vastly oversimplifying in the interest of time, i would say we are probably about where we were in the industrial revolution in england where luddites were wandering england and smashing the machinery. not a joke. all of society turned upside down in that revolution. big pieces of society. not completely turned upside down but it's fractious, frayed, uncertain. we need to figure out how will this change? i told you i was there and i went to receive that award at

the robert kennedyfoundation . and the medicare and affordable care act, the infrastructure had to pay for it and college education, all those things, retraining and the job, now those things that we actually have to discuss. robert kennedy talking about some versions of those things back when he was running. and you know, one of the things he always argued about or his supporters, he said we don't listen enough to we don't listen to the other person's perspective. it's understandable, it's human nature. but you know, he used to talk about it and i remember when

he went to south africa. there was a south african government who said, i'm not going to give you any police protection, you will have no coverage and ethel went with him and he went and he met with the pro-apartheid parishioners and anti-apartheid activists. dined with the government officials, the counter government and found it indefensible, he sat with students who were risking their very lives to change the system. here's what he said. he said i come not simply to criticize but to engage in a dialogue, to see if together we can elevate reason above edginess. he did that same thing the next year in the middle of the deadly battle for civil rights in mississippi and bed side new york. and a year after, in the fight for economic rights in coal country.

he went to see the segregation of poverty that was ripping apart our country and he always listen area even though those who fundamentally disagree with him, the individual conversations , lost large crowds , cross mountains. schoolhouses, inner-city. his purpose of all those trips he made was to listen and let people know he was listening. even if they didn't vote for him, even if they didn't like him , listen. he felt their pain. he understood their perspective. so i think the most important thing we have to start doing in and out of government is start to listen to one another. because the simple truth is, we don't listen that much anymore.

i'll conclude by saying the one thing i'm always asked, what was the biggest change in the senate when you were a kid? if i were in the senate as a kid, i would say how divided we work. all the old segregationists are still in the democratic caucus. james always of mississippi, john mcclellan, meanest s ob that ever served area area at bird, virginia. you go down the list, they are all still there. they're all still there. but you know what? after i was there a while, it's amazing how even when the other quote bad guys, by the time strong thurmond left, he had the biggest african-american staff of anybody including teddy kennedy. he voted for the extension of the voting rights act. on his deathbed, page 100,i got a call from the hospital . would i do his eulogy?

i was his eulogy. i ran for the senate because i was against everything strong thurmond stood for. he was honest in the eulogy to, i didn't paint a rosy picture. he changed. a long time coming area long time in coming. jesse helms was a man who was the most bitter of all the people i got elected with area he ended up saying awful things aboutafrican-americans . i mean, just flat racist. and he said two years before he left if he had to do it all over again he would go to africa become a missionary. he was wrong. chris died and the only two people that showed up to his funeral, north carolina,

big-box church, big baptist church and in the side room, a reception room were all the senators went in to meet with the family and as they walked out before the service started, don't forget,.helms walking out. to really bright and beautiful daughters and a son who was 50 something years old now and raises up to his hips and steel braces on both arms area who they adopted in that same condition and not when he was 14 years old. they walked out and i stepped back from the meet the republican leadership and he walked up to me and said joe, we put your sign on our lawnfor president . for barack obama. we voted for you. we voted for you.

i don't expect epiphanies to occur. some of this takes a long, long time. and i'm not trying to paint jesse helms or strong thurmond, they did some terrible things in my view and i voted against them . but if you listen, if you listen to the otherguy's perspective , it's amazing what happens, it takes patience but it's hard. and we don't listen much anymore. you know, i've learned a lesson from senator mike mansfield when i was a kid. they said i got elected when i was 29, i remember i didn't come eligible to be sworn in until december 18, my wife was christmas shopping and a

tractor killed my wife, my two daughters and my boys and i decided i wasn't ever going to the senate area the democratic gulf governor could appoint a successor. and the bipartisan group of people including mike mansfield, hubert humphrey, fritz holland and ted stevens came to me and said you've got to come get sworn in, just be there for six months and help us organize area 58 democratic senators. but i use to have to report to the office of the majority leader on tuesday at 3:00 and i got an assignment. i honest to god but every senator got assignments from the majority leader. and i'm the first senator that ever knew. and one day, in may when i was walking in from my meeting i walked on the floor

and jesse helms was ripping into ted kennedy and bob dole on the precursor to the americans with disabilities act saying we have no obligation, we have no requirement that businesses have curb cuts and elevators, etc. and i thought it was heartless and i walked in, i sat down, i didn't realize back then that he was taking my pulse to see what i was doing. how i was handling it, going home that day. he said what's the matter joe? and i went on and i ripped into jesse helms area i said he has no socially redeeming value and i went on and on and he doesn't care about that and he looked at me and says joe, i found something interesting here. everybody since you sent to the congress because the public finds something admirable about them. i found it's better use of your time to try to find out what that is.and go after

people and question their motives. and then he said joe, what would you say if i told you that three years earlier, sitting in the living room in raleigh, being the observer, it was an advertisement for a young man, i think 14 at the time with braces up to his hips in an orphanage saying all i want for christmas is someone to love me. what would you say if i told you that jesse and.helms went down and adopted that young child ? >> i said i feel foolish. he said joe, it's never wrong to question other another man or woman's judgment. and go to war over it. but it's never appropriate to question their motives because as obvious as it appears, you don't know. andonce you question motives , you never get to go.

we do too much of that now. we should not remain silent one minute when this administration goes after the progressive values we should care about. we should not back away from arguments on the merits of all the things we care about. but we should listen. we should realize american people are a lot better than they are given credit for right now. and let's go back and the people. as they used to say in my old neighborhood, let's do the dance. all thoseworking-class people, black and white and the ones that brought us to the dance . sorry for being so serious but i think it's a serious time but i am optimistic, thank you. [applause]

>> we have more from the nyu political forum coming up here on c-span2. we hear about campaign-finance reform and news coverage of the elections, the role of social media and politics and public opinion polling. the new york university law school for a month the us political system and campaign finance and how proposals to reform campaign finance might change american politics area . the panel that we have here

and i'll make brief introductions is dedicated to campaign-finance, however those of you who heard a prior panel about political parties know that discussion was about party financing. were going to have a conversation about that but broadening it out so we are talking about campaign-finance in a number of other respects but before i begin to have this with you and you know we have a distinguished panel, to my left is samuel isaacharoff at university law school, he's a noted constitutional and election lawyer who's written widely in the field and i recently had the pleasure of hearing him deliver a lecture on party financing, campaign-finance, contemporary issues and the struggle between parties and outside groups at the university of houston. on sam's left is david donnelly who is the president of every voice, a noted campaign-finance reform advocates, involved in money and politics issues for 20 years and has done interesting work with considerable success that doesn't normally get noted at the federal level in campaign-finance area at the state and local jurisdictions

where his organization has been active but we will hear about that and that's important and often times omitted part of the story and on his left is richard haser, anybody who knows about this and thinks about it, politics in large member through the writing of richard haser, his election output on the subject in newspapers across thecountries and in the new york times , slate, i can't begin to name them, his scholarship, his well-known blog, all of that has been probably the most prominent commentator on federal campaign-finance and other election law issues in the united states and he is a professor at the university of california at irvine law school. so with this group i'd like to begin by just broadening the subject out so for vice president biden early today,

he opened up the conversation by saying briefly and i'm continuing, he thought there was too much money in politics and he thought it was corrupting an earlier there was some discussion on the prior panel that the evidence about how much corruption or not corruption there is associated with political money was mixed and certainly some of our panelists thought virtually nonexistent so let me begin with you rick and move down the road here. are we at the end of the review that money is corrupting in politics? is there a sense that it's evidently and clearly a corrupting influence that we need to continue to fight for significant congressional controls on campaign-finance we have a court that will allow it? >> thanks for the opportunity and your kind words. i'm glad to be with you here. i'm not the person on the reform side who thinks that corruption is a majorproblem in our politics . contrary to that, i'm the

only one who supports it. so my concern is one about rousing inequality, inequality that comes from the greatest wealth transforming their economic power into political power so i think the question that is posed by the latest election is whether, should i switch to your mic? >> just push the button and the light goes on. can you hear me with that? that sounds a little better. the question is whether or not we are seeing with the latest campaigns a transformation of our campaign-finance system, a bifurcation of our campaign-finance system for people to list themselves and

i think we don't know yet, on the left, i think it was ben gifford who said in the middle of something it's hard to figure out exactly what is going on so what we have in the trump campaign was a celebrity driven campaign run through social media that went around the traditional institutions and the traditional mediation by the press and others. and it's a question of whether future campaigns are going to be run this way, whether they're going to have a kanye campaign in 2020, whether we are going to have celebrities, the opera campaign and this is going to be the new model and if that's the case, what's the role of money? we might save money didn't matter for trial but we started off with a trump that did put $16 billion of his own money into the campaign and he did in the end not only put the super pack

donors, he also when he started his transition literally gave rebecca mercer as one of the super back donors so i'd like to know whether this was a transformative campaign, whether trump is just as aspirate as he might be on the access going forward, or whether we're going to see a bifurcation and what i mean by bifurcation is it maybe four rules for the president because there's so much free media, so much free media given to trump during the legislation, whether the president, money does not matter in the same way but for all of the other offices, money is doing better and if you look at the senate race, you look at the governor's races, the role of outside groups, super packs, they are having more influence and to get back here, i never thought the corruption issue

was the same issue. i think the courts still talk about it in that frame and i would argue that that's a mistake. the real problem is one of economic inequality and i think it's something that we're going to see whether social media and these new celebrity kind of campaigns change the equation or simply ship the money into social media, digital advertising and television and mostly the same pattern. it's hard to say. >> i guess i would argue that what you just described is most of the economic growth in our political sphere is a version of corruption. that the process is corrupt so that some people have more of a waste than the rest of us so we think about doctor mercer sitting on the table , i talked to voters that joe biden was talking about, so when you think about a corruptive process, about some people having more access than others at the top

and not for the rest of us, i think that's still a version of corruption. i also think that when you think about the delusions on these matters, we need to move more towards questions not just of dealing with that corruption but dealing with classification so that the answer to these questions isn't about getting the money out or stopping the wealthy from having all this power or having influence but it's about increasing influence for the rest of us and changing the organizing principle around these types of money and politics to one of encouraging more people to get money and incentives, incentivizing small donations and other forms of donations in the process so that can be the antidote on a policy matter and i do think that inequality is a version of corruption. and to the other points, yes, absolutely there's a paradox that in the race that we all know the best, money matters the least. while there was tremendous

exposure for presidential candidates, we need to have enough money to be not saturating everything, the reason why mitch mcconnell was raising $25 million in the last weeks for independent expenditures around the country because they knew that we needed to pour that money in the pull out some type senate races around the country and even further down the ballot, at the state and local level, money matters atremendous amount , a tremendous impact on fundraising that it had on race outcomes. >> i think that, okay. so i'm partially in agreement and partially i want to push away a little bit because i think that reform community got distracted by the narrow window that's open on the corruption rationale and they

tried to package everything through the corruption argument and i think that one need not fall into the trap of saying money doesn't matter, clearly it does matter, organization is expensive at every level, it's hard to get off the ground as a candidate without an initial expenditure of funds . yet at the same time one can also think that maybe the problem is not the money that's there but where the money is that's at issue so if you look at the narrative that is put forward before the election, it was on one side largely the problem is this united, the problem is the wealthy control whoever gets the most money, corporations from certain kinds of vested interests is going to dominate in one of the candidates had pledged to have as a seal of approval on any supreme court nominee a commitment to overturn citizens united. that didn't resonate as a political matter but it

dropped out altogether from the discussion after the election because it turned out that the better funded presidential candidate who had a better funded presidential candidate during the primary season. the question is to go back to the theme that was picked up this morning is where the money is and i think that we have unfortunately institutionalized three critical events over the last 20 years, one of which was mentioned this morning which is the supreme court rulings that were very damaging, the two colorado republican decisions in 1990 in which the court basically held that candidates are at risk of being corrupted by the parties and therefore you had to put up very hard wall between candidates and parties, thereby diminishing the influence ofparties. the second two events were more on the ground events , there was a lesson internalized in the summer of 2004 when john kerry ran out of money and it turned out

you could fund a perfectly adequate presidential campaign without the candidate and without the party through the forum of private funds and george soros, running it through move on and then in 2008, president obama not only made the decision to forgo public funding showed that you could get a significant amount of money, harnessing the technology for direct fuels to voters to raise funds and bypass the party organization altogether. and that was the lesson that was internalized by the outside challengers this time, bybernie sanders and donald trump, of how they would get the seed money for the campaign. in addition to trump's individual fortune but sanders basically did thesame thing without an individual fortune area so the three combined , the wall between the candidates and the party , between funding and

organization of the campaign. the ability of outside funds basically extricate party activity and to meet the breakdown of the need for the party, and intermediary between the candidates and money. all have pushed in the direction of whatever money there is being held further and further from the candidates and parties as was discussed this morning. >> there's a lot there so i'm going to come back to some of those points but let me go back to rick for a second. rick, you have been an advocate and this is going to tie into something that david has worked on much of his career and it ties into what vic said earlier about the potential for particular aid to parties, you've been an advocate of vouchers, both overall limits but also about some form of financing to bring additional voices in and to compensate for whatever restrictions are placed based on the supply

side of money. where in your view and david, you can answer on the state and local level, where in your view is the political will or basis for the argument that weather increasingly through the resources could ever be feasibly argued to be allocated to the support of political campaigns? how would you approach that issue with the skepticism you are likely to see on that, that it leads out front? >> if your question is about is there public support for public finance in general or about that in particular question mark. >> generally about vouchers. >> we've heard the movement to his food stamps for politicians mode when he was asked about how to finance it . i don't think it's happening on the federal level. if anything is to happen on the federal level over the next year, it's going to be a furtherloosening of campaign-finance restrictions . especially limits on party fundraising, i think those needed next to go and we may get into this later where

there is a chance for the new supreme court with a new justice striking down what remains of mccain-feingold's money rule which is going to put parties and so on the federal level, not only do i have no hope for any form of campaign-finance much less vouchers, i think it might work work last on the state and local level, i think the public financing is greater and the potential for vouchers is greater, we know that we are starting to see jurisdictions, not just the apple adopting vouchers, we're going to have to see a play out and whether or not they work as well to provide another alternative without vouchers to small donations, which is what new york city had and the others as well. but then it's about public financing, you've got voters that decide i got $100 to donate for political activities, do i want to give that to this candidate or

this interest group or this political party? one concern about vouchers which rick and others have raised is whether it would be voter fragmenting and a situation where if you are worried about possibilities on the left and right as some people are, it's exacerbated and i think one way of dealing with that political party is that we could say that some of the voucher money gets divided through the party. you could do libertarians or democrats or republicans and you're not just empowering voters but you are not diminishing parties so that's actually pretty optimistic, not on the limit side because i think the supreme court goes further but on the leveling outside , thinking about vouchers and especially in those state localities where they pass initiatives because public financing is, presented to the voter i think is very appealing to

voters. much more appealing than it is to state legislatures or city councils voting. >> that's back on me too. >> just this election cycle there were several issues around the country and whenever the reform that through, so when that got put before voters and either the new policies or resolutions for 12 million votes that were cast in support of reform measures, four of the five actual statutes one overwhelmingly. there were resolutions in wisconsin, on citizens united, overturned citizens united indifferent counties . even paul ryan's county 186 support to you overturned citizens united, the statewide health in

washington state as well. when people get the opposition for voter reform as was mentioned around the initiative process, they go for it. four of the five of the finance initiatives in the past two years have one and they are beginning to work well, they went back to the battle last year, to upgrade assistance from previous houses in 1996 generations past and we saw a dramatic uptick in the number of candidates that were participating in the system even though there were still independent expenditures and there were campaigns where they are raised through party senate. i do like the ideaof recognizing a lot more small donations into political parties . a lot more access towards parties to have resources to support their candidates. and if we do that, there are policies that overton has promoted that we could drop that court peace in mind between parties and

candidates, where that money is coming from, lots of individual donors. we allow that coordinating to drop, the money still comes from large contributions but you risk the problems that we see in a variety of places where big money really calls the shots. >> let me move from that and take him a little bit on this point, so sam, you have two people on your left and we voted for them in the previous panel who thought providing financial aid, public support for political parties would do good things area but you also have evidence that more and more people are disaffiliated from political parties and in particular in the millennial court there's less enthusiasm for political parties certainly among senior citizens than cohorts above them. why then as a public policy matter should money be allocated to parties if

parties at the moment don't attract, in in fact attract a decliningamount of loyalty in the electorate? >> i think the question is and what form it's given to the party . if you look at the experience of other democratic countries in western europe where the political parties had always enjoyed a mass base, either in the trade union or the social democratic parties or in the small business confederation, the christian democratic parties, as soon as the parties are to lose their mass base, they increasingly try to use their parliamentary advantage through public funding which meant to give a subsidy, a welfare system for politicians who had lost the faith of their flock and that seems to be a bad system or a imperfect system that locks in a sporadic set of parties, just because they've lost mass support so i like the idea of providing the parties as the channel through which any funding flows but to make

the funding dependent on their ability to engage and get support so if you look at countries that have for example undertaken public provisions of tv time so that you take that out of the money area, just phasing yesterday technology with today's message but leave aside that there's a right way to do it, countries like brazil or argentina or mexico and they, they apportion tv time to pending on your success in the last election and then there's a lottery system for additional slots so that new parties can come in and it's not just a freezeout of any new claimants for political power. i like the idea of funding being tied to small donations because that's a way of rewarding or incentivizing the relationship between the population and the political parties but the question is,

where do you also, where do you want the money to go and that's a separate question from how much and how it gets there. if it does not go to the party, there is no evidence whatsoever that the small donation or this kind of private funding is conducive to a healthier brand of politics. there's every reason to believe that candidates needing to raise funds on their own will pitch for these seats so be that's what you pay attention to, is salience, striking, shrill add is more likely to arouse passion and get donations than a well composed, moderate forum center of the road appeal. and so unless you have a strategy that in my view includes mediating institutions, i have no confidence whatsoever that any of these mechanisms will improve the quality of either governance or the political

engagement. >> rick, you said the campaign finance reform would be predicated on promoting inappropriate vision of political equality.he is suggesting there's an additional potential driving force between shaping influence on policy and that would be arriving at a healthier political system between which dialogue is simple, a forum or whatever. are you comfortable that we can trust our legislatures judgment on how to shape the rules to make politics healthy? >> first of all, i trust voters so i would trust the voters to make those kind of judgments about those trade-offs. i'm not a big believer that were going to be able to use campaign-finance rules or other rules to create more deliberation . i think we are at a point where polarization is such

that you can't use the lever of campaign finance. i think the biggest impediment to that kind of problem is our subdivided government and gridlock and in fact, looking forward to the next congress, we are going to have republican parties in the house and senate and arepublican president and soon, what i would call a republican report . none of the advantages of this system is such that voters will be able to decide whether or not big like the output that comes from a republican government and then rejected if they don't. they can't reject the supreme court but they can reject the other branches so i think what we have now it has been a system of gridlock where democrats and republicans, republicans blame democrats, you couldn't get sent toagree . but if we want to have a system where the government is responsive and actually fulfills the policies that

people want, a system of unified government where voters can look at the policies and reject them or accept them and let office is one that i think will help all politics, not deliberation but in terms of getting policy that people can judge whether they like or don't like. >> on the state and local level, there are questions about being in trust voters. >>

a second major thing is they want a legislature to look for bit more like themselves. they want something more reflective of the key muted in which those legislators are pulled from and will serve. there's a lot of talk about whether not to use the corruption of language as a selling point for winning these policies. the jury is out on that sometimes corruption as a hot button item you can press on and get people excited but it does only people and hopeful place that there's anything to do about it. there's a lot of debate about that. in terms of polling but it leads you to a variety of solutions that we think are ones that will reform. in terms of turnout, with very strong turnout in seattle in 2015 when we did a ballot measure their pick turnout was a little lower in maine that year, an off year election. lower than we anticipated. this year the initiatives that

one, south dakota passed a voucher system. washington state fellow short of winning. howard county, maryland, and berkeley but across the country this year like you said 12,000,0012 million votes were r reform measures in an election whether 30 significant antiestablishment message delivered by presidential outcomes. this we think is an important lesson for people actually will vote for policies and changes dramatic policy and changes in the political makeup. >> i can't believe berkeley passed a public financing system. >> i really piece of work. >> they rejected 110 years ago. >> fair enough. sam, just on the question because you raised an issue often raised by small donations

and a notion somehow democratize campaigcampaign finance, the int through small donor donations can mean a democracy that is perhaps less healthy than we would like it to be. but the question is, how do we monitor for that? how to recite what is robust democratic debate and what's unhealthy? i'm thinking for example, one measure in mccain-feingold that was designed to police the bait a look at and that was the stand by your ad requirement on barack obama and i approve this message that was supposed to have candidates have second thoughts about running negative advertisement that they had to personally embrace. that doesn't seem to have changed much, that general tenor of political advertising in the united states. what hope even if we adopt the notion of a healthier policy, what competence will we have that changing the rules or killing the rules could be successful? >> it depends what success is. here i like to disagree a bit with rick on the effect of the campaign finance laws.

i don't think we can expect a change in campaign finance laws will quickly change what works in the public domain. so if tweets were, people will tweet and if you have 140 characters, you will put your fighting to learn about the negative of the other because that's all you can go to get across in that space. i think the cumulative effect, the division of party some candidates and the growing inability of the parties and the candidates to raise funds on an level competitive with the outside groups does have an impact on our politics it has an impact in two ways. first of all the parties are weaker, which means their coronation function in governance is diminished. so our governmental institutions are unable to deliver public goods the way that they were, when you can cut deals. so one of the bazaar interesting

proposals that's going on that in front of us right now is bringing back earmarks. and i used to think this would be a height of corruption, private money to each congressional representative to deliver to his or her district. it turns out that gets them in the game of needing to cooperate a little more with cutting deals. deals. it may be a small price to pay for more effective capacity to govern. and if you diminish the money being the fuel for the centralizing mediated functions of the parties, that money will simply reinforce what we haven't probably pushed to the margins, and it doesn't much matter to me whether the money comes from the polar big donors who are far from the center as it stands, or whether comes from the polar small donors who are likely to be mobilized along the same kinds of catchphrases and more ideologically rigid positions,

or single issued decisions. so i think, i'd like to direct this back to what's the aim of this? i do want to civilized discourse. the angry, hate the other side. that's good. that's the history of her country. you want to get -- yes, i think would be terrible. what kind of crap is that? fight them on this. that's good, but do it to institutions that can then deliver public policy as a result and not through showboat. >> i should mention just for the record the vice president earlier thought we should maybe not hate the other side. >> you know -- [laughter] >> it's harder. >> just a note. rick, supreme court. let's talk a minute before he turned to audience questions about the supreme court.

you are not optimistic about what the next addition to the court will need for campaign finance for jurisprudence. the buckley court also looked unfavorable on the inequality rationale. how would you reformulate that? if you had a courthouse open to it, it was a listening what would you say to that court would be the basis for inequality rationale that had a limiting principle in it that didn't prevent congress in the name of inequality to basically promulgate the most wide-ranging goals it could? >> yeah, it's a perfect academic question because there's no way the court is going to move in that direction it's going to move in the opposite direction. not when justice scalia is replacement comes on because of been the court will be 5-4. 5-4. if one of the liberals leaves of the court in the next two years and is replaced, then i think things could move further. we've been calling for the demise of buckley is going to die but we've been saying this

for 40 years but it is still standing. the question is going to be whether these cases that are coming up like a soft money case that will be before the supreme court to possibly take within the next few months would provide avenue for a nail in the coffin. but in an alternative world which is what you asked me about then i would say that the, excepting political equality as an interest that could justify some campaign finance limits is no different than accepting corruption as a reason to impose some campaign finance limits. and if you subject it to strict scrutiny and you require that the courts ensure that there remains robust political speech and avenues for speech, then i think that is the limiting principle. so i would not think that limits on the movie constitutional without some kind of voucher system or the way of ensuring that there are multiple voices

and people can get the points across. >> we are in question time, and reminder that if you have questions, there are people station on the side and a little cards. you can write them out and send them on in. and let me say in the alternative universe for just a second, because one of the questions was there are concerns about the quality of voice sufficient to justify policies that would subsidize some voices or encumber others. what would the supreme court with this pass constitutional muster? this is an alternative universe. thoughts? >> so i think we could subsidize all voices. i just think it's, would you think about this alternative universe it's actually not that far away even though it's like

in seattle, a maine, it's in this country. so you candidates like lorena gonzales on january 2 will begin collecting $25 voucher for people who will mail the vouchers from the city of seattle. she will be running for office all the bases almost entirely in these small donations, that every single registered voter in the city will get. that's not diminishing anyone's voice. that's making sure that everyone has a chance to be heard. and so we think about that alternative universe and the future of campaign finance reform law, it actually looks a lot to than this panel because it would be much more that much more multicultural, much more diverse, much more reflective of the rest of the country. and that's what's exciting about the possibility. how that stands in front of the courts is incredibly important question, and i think my colleagues to my left and my right will be much better suited

because of their experts on the constitution all the of this, but as a political and practical matter if w we're not moving in the direction then we're missing the opportunity to purchase made our way out of this problem rather than try to prohibit activities we don't like. >> i think these programs work reasonably well at the local level as seed money. there is no evidence that pay scale. there is no evidence of a public commitment to the kind of funding necessary to run a serious national campaign for the leadership of the central government of our country. and so it's well and good to experiment at the low-level. that's exactly why we had this concept of the laboratories of democracy that as it should be. but if you're talking about the big show, it's just not going to happen. we had a public finance system for president of united states until bob bauer broke it.

[laughter] and it didn't work. it didn't have enough money. you couldn't run a campaign, as a public commitment even when the federal election campaign act was established was to set the amount at two-thirds of what george mcgovern had spit in 1972, and what was the most disastrous presidential campaign of all time. and so many people who run for president, here's a little secret, actually want to win. and they will don't want to reproduce two-thirds of the successes of mcgovern which i means just boston and its suburbs or something of that sort. it's just not the way that our politics has been organized. so in my view, where this has led as in the arizona case that went to the supreme court is the recognition that there's not enough public funding for this so you couple the public fund within an attempt to dampen down

other voices are other sources of funds. that's what's been constitutionally problematic, and it would take i think a number of votes on the supreme court to get that to be approved, the idea that you can silence speech in and in a supporting of the speech. i think rhetorically that's where scalia was at his strongest in this area, but constitutionally that's where he had the biggest foundation. >> bob, would you like equal time to respond? okay, the next question is one of the panelists this morning, david keating, posited there's no evidence that contribution limit reduced political corruption or increased trust in government. do you all have a reaction to that comment from someone steeped in campaign finance and campaign finance reform? >> i think the trust in government question is a tricky one and i know it's been looked

at and the public doesn't show pay enough attention to campaign finance to have a sense of exactly how things work. but they delete everything is corrupt. i think this after mccain-feingold corruption, use of corruption went up. to the extent were talked about the public perceptions, i think that there's some validity there. in terms of no problem with corruption from large contributions, well, if i could give $10 million directly to a candidate, i think that's the kind of influence i would have over that candidate would be much, much greater than the kind of influence someone who doesn't have that kind of money to keep it we might call that corruption, i would tend to call that a problem of inequality but there's no question that it creates a system that were those with the greatest wealth have

the most ability to influence not who's elected but what public policy favorite i think it's problematic whether we call that corruption or something else. >> look, you have to compare reality to reality. the question is not whether it be give $10 million to a candidate that's going to get your photo answer the question is, is a worth while to get the 10,000,000 dollars to the candidate instead of going through the façade of giving it to a super pac and after they candidate, which is the way it's handled right now. so whether it's more or less corrupting, i go back and force -- back and forth on this trip if you get 10,000,000 dollars to the candidate directly and it is transparent and that something would have to enforce, but if it is transparent, then there's an accountability for having taken those $10 million where if you

launder it through an llc and he goes into the super pac and there's no identification or goes into the five o one c, this identification of the institutional backing of the money on the individual backing of the money and there's no apparent accountability of the candidate for it. i think we're probably the worst of all worlds right now. so yes, if we had everybody had the same amount of money to give, that's one thing, that that's not the world we live in right now and i thought the question, the comet this morning was really directed at maybe it's time to liberalize and money going to the actual players and the system. >> this is the last question for this panel and is somewhat of a curveball. and ask it only because i got a handful of questions from this mornings panel on the same subject pickets the electoral college. i encourage you, if you wish, to take to take the law school pass rather than answer.

the question is in keeping in the themes of inequality, what do you think about professors argument but electoral college votes should be cast proportionally, or in some other different way, or as i heard this this morning on a number of questions, gone, no more electoral college? >> i wrote an article 10 years ago saying that what's most relic about the electoral college is not the institution but the allocation system for the votes. and so we have a long history of constitutional statutory attacks in this country ought at larger multimember district and because it tends to suppress minority votes. if you are a hispanic vote in texas and is reasonably polarized voting between anglos and hispanics in texas, it means that your vote goes to zero for the electoral college. whereas we know from mo light of cases in texas boat under the

constitution and under the voting rights act, that if you have any other office in texas that was at-large at that level, any other multimember office that was at-large at that level, it would be unconstitutional or unlawful give it a certain level of polarization of the voting. i think the problem with the electoral college, it's not that it is a distortion from pure democratic norms. i'm leaving aside larry les next always crusading id you can overturn the last five elections or some number of last elections. leaving that aside, the problem is not that it such a big departure pickets it certainly less of a departure in the senate from equal population but the problem is the winner-take-all aspects of it is completely discordant with where our law has moved in the last 40 years. >> the last word spirit i will take a more general point that i see his comments as fitting into just the kind of liberal

desperation to try to find a way to avoid a trump presidents. it fits in with the jill stein recount and other aspects. going back to the never trump movement, the people looking for ways to get around the usual rules in order to get a political outcome that they like better. if larry wants to litigate over whether or not the current way electoral college votes are allocated as unconstitutional, you don't raise that only after the election has already been had. you raise that argument for the next election coming. he's got four years now to try to litigate that and if he wants to come let them go ahead. you can't go back and rewrite the rules after the election has already been run. >> so always forward-looking. let's say thank you for the past panel, and ask our next panelists -- [applause] -- to come on up. thank you very much.

>> the conference, white askew medications director jen psaki and columnist ruth marcus talk about the political news media, social media and fake news. >> so our next panel is changing role of the news and social media. we have two remarkable panelists. on my far left is ruth marcus, the deputy editor for the editorial page editor for the "washington post." she's been writing columns for the post -- [inaudible] for a number of years.

[inaudible] we had sitting next to me jen psaki who is the white house communications director who has been mostly participant and an observer of the role of media in campaigns, in politics and in our political system. i want to thank you both for being here. i'd like to start with the question, in terms of the role of media, how is of this election different from previous elections? there is a little -- you don't have to catch that. what lessons can we learn from this election for the future? kind of wide open and then will hone in. do you want to start? >> sure. thank you. well, i think a lot of ways to

go with that question that you alluded to with a bit of a wink, but i will start with the immediatmediaspecific area and t is one of the areas i think is that people consume information through social media and news through social media at a much greater percentage than any other past election. i think that something that people are familiar with, but the question is why did set matter. and why it matters is because there's a much lower barrier to entry to provide information and share information and be an originator of information on social media platforms. and, therefore, it doesn't go to the same quality control that i would say "washington post" information or the information on a range of online, television, radio typically does. what that means is that people can't differentiate and people are receiving information that

is not through a fact check editorial, you know, board or editor. it is the editor is the algorithm that puts information into people social media feeds. and i think that is had huge impact. people who say it didn't, i think probably need to wait some more time for some analysis of white voters actually voted how they did before we make a conclusion. >> my name is ruth' ruth and end answer for all the sins of all the media through this entire election. not. look, there is not being an election cycle where, in my now lengthy experience, where we have looked at the election and gazed at her neighbors and said dam, we did a great job. and more important for the rest of the players in our bassist looked and said, that media,

they did even better than usual. so this one in that sense is no different from that. i think we saw, it is built on what some of what jen three phenomenon this election that conspired to make things look, to bar from norm ornstein, even more open, not get it exactly right, even worse than usual. before i get to the even worse than usual usual, i think ever e want to make sure i don't forget to stand up for the really good things that we did. i can brag a little on the "washington post" because i'm on the editorial side so i can brag a little bit on the new side. look at the reporting that david fairchild did about -- thank you. go, david. about the trumpet charitable in error quotes foundation. that was the best of journalism and it wasn't just that. it was access hollywood tape.

it was good reporting that the "new york times" did during the election with the tax returns. so we were not massive across-the-board failure to do it we pushed and pushed and did our job. however imperfectly. three things happen this campaign. the first was donald trump. the second was the silo, increasing finalization through social media of voters access to information, access is not exact right. it's more consumption of information because if you want you can get it. they're just deciding what diet is they want to read. and the third was this phenomenon of the rise of fake news. and the three of those together conspired to create a different

atmosphere. i'll just say a few sentences about the trump phenomenon. under the normal rules of political gravity, what a lot of cable channels were accused of doing, which was giving trump unfiltered air time, should have brought them down, right? when i watched personally wall-to-wall coverage of a trump rally, i i walked with my television set saying, you've got to be joking, okay? that was not how voters responded, obviously. at least enough of them. is that the cable companies fault or the voters fault cracks i'll let you decide. but when child time after time gets enormous amounts of

attention for saying things like starting with john mccain isn't a war hero, going to the mexican judge, and we all know the list of outrageous things that he said and gets enormous amount of attention for those, the fact that he survived is just the difference between come it's not a journalistic failure. it's just that voters were in a different and particularly whatever adjective you'd like to insert at this point, mood this cycle. but it did have an impact on the coverage that was really problematic for me in this sense. he was just the bright shiny object in our journalism. and so it occupied all of our attention, the latest trump outrage or statement of the day. and it continues to do that by the way during the transition period and it distracted us as a collective from asking him reallyreally, not just him but f the other candidates while they lasted, really serious questions

about policy. and not entirely, not throughout the whole cycle, but for too long. and i think that for me if i were the end of a newspaper rather than on the editorial side, where i would really try to think through how we can view that piece better in the future and when there's something so mesmerizing as a trump like candidate and something as inherently boring how we were going to fund your infrastructure program exactly, how you can figure out how to make both of those forms of coverage work. ..

>> you are just a great defender of what the washington post has done. the mainstream media is not universally well-regarded. it is not trusted by most voters and it is not read by most of the millennial's. how do you reclaim? how do you reassert what is the role of mainstream media as you see it? >> i am going to go back to david because i really do think that i know one mind to millennial's at home were emailing me insane david is going to win the pulitzer this year, or this is a credible journalism, okay they are

washington kids a washington post kid so they're not necessarily completely illustrative, that reporting broke through. and the "access hollywood" tape broke through. how do we get people to pay attention to us? i think the question is not how much how do we get people to pay attention to us it's how we generate a business model that gives us resources necessary to do the excellent kind of journalism that my colleagues on the new site did the selection. in order to, the business model to get that done. i would say that i am not all that -- if people don't trust us

that is obviously not great, but i would say there were a lot of really, from my point of view, quite view, quite gratifying things that happen this election cycle. now we have this capacity in the newspaper to see numbers that we never had before. for example, in one of the moments, one of the earliest moments of getting questions asked of donald trump, donald trump came to the editorial board. good for him. a certain other candidate at the democratic side never made time in her schedule to do it. good for donald trump. he came, we have some serious questions. we wrote an some serious questions. we wrote an editorial about it but to our astonishment we had millions of readers of the transcript of that editorial. that's good news for journalism and are good news for ability to get information to readers.

similarly we wrote extensive and long editorials condemning donald trump even after he came to see us. and those similarly similarly got millions and millions of readers. this to me is good news, not bad news for journalism. it suggest there is an appetite for quality reporting. there is an appetite for intelligent questioning and there is an appetite for what i hope his intelligent opinion. >> so if you were to have another campaign that you were running, would you turn to the mainstream media, or do you think you would prefer to look at some of the other sources out there? >> first i would say that the question, with all due respect is the root of the problem. i think the root of the problem that i think a lot of

traditional newspapers have. i read the washington post and the new york times but i'm a communication director at the white house, of course i would. part of the problem is that a lot of mainstream media which i think people think of traditionally has national newspapers or even local newspapers, maybe network television, sees all online digital media is not just a competitor but the enemy and lesser than. putting my friend here side, or outside of this and that is hugely problematic because it is the mainstream media national newspapers cannot figure out how to reach people, that is a a root problem they need to sell. in my feelings of newspapers with very smart reporters i think first of all this is a sidebar but if you like a need to say it, i don't don't think the media needs to get a great

or should get a bad grade from this election cycle because elections are determined by winning hearts and minds, they are not determined by charts and policies. meet we may want it to be the other way but it is really that way. house people should look at the media and the next to work and how donald trump performs on his president and the analysis of policymaking in government. that's an aside. i just wanted to say. so let me go back. ruth throw the column last may about how there needs to be soul-searching and that's with republicans and democrats. dashmac true, but, but maybe we have more soul-searching to do. but with the mainstream media i would say the way we, in the white house sees the media is it

is a spectrum. there's the new york times and the washington post but there is also online outlets that too great, excellent work. mike.com is a mike.com is a good one we have done work with. bus feed has done interesting things. it's not all caps videos, i promise you. so i'm not in the media, but i think us versus them is very problematic and one of the soul-searching things the immediate needs to do is figure out how to reach people and change how they do that. >> we were talking about this earlier, here is an astonishing fact about the obama presidency. you can ask plane why this is a totally sensible choice. so president obama came when he

was president-elect obama for an editorial board meeting because once again, we had failed to lure him when he was a candidate. so he came from an editorial board meeting and this is a true fact, that was the last time he spoke on the record to the washington post. through two terms he has not given us an editorial board interview or an interview to our news reporters. despite numerous quest. there have been reports about off the record meetings with columnist and so i am just siting those reports. so the amount of time spent on the record with the washington post, zero. amount of time spent between two firms with his act -- or with a bunch of youtube, i'm gonna say this in a provocative way, with a a much of youtube video bloggers with purple hair, much greater. i meant to be just a little snarky about this that's

unsettling. and i think not really as a white house, productive of the sort of reporting that you just said you wanted to see of us from the trump white house about deep substantive policy issues. >> i don't feel like i need to defend myself. i feel like my responsibilities to help determine how the president can reach the american people. the washington post reach a viewership is significantly lower than a huge number of media outlets out there. that do reporting and report on smart issues, that asked challenging questions. so it is not my role to sell that for the washington post.

i think i would say that the president has done interviews with the new york times. he has done interviews with the atlantic. he has done interviews with charlie rose, george stephanopoulos, norah george stephanopoulos, nora o'donnell, i don't think any of those people, i think they would strongly defend the notion that they are not serious hard-hitting journalists. this goes back to the question of what your role is. the benefit of having so many outlets out there is that you have many more choices and many more choices as a professional who is working on behalf of the president or a senator, or elected official, or an organization. you have to determine one of the choices we make is how to reach the audience we are trying to reach. often times that is millennial's, sometimes it is senior citizens, sometimes it is middle-age latinos. it really latinos. it really depends on who you are trying to reach. and that is a lot of how we make our decision. i had hope we have been able to do a washington post interview

as i had told ruth and i think there are a lot of reporters, some some of whom she mentioned today who have done incredible and amazing work. i don't think the question of how the mainstream media and i hate that term, mainstream media because i think there's a lot of ways to define, i don't think it's an easy one. video companies are businesses. it is not just a public service providing the information is a public service but there are other factors beyond that. >> you just spoke about the audience of the multiplicity of media and we heard the vice president earlier reminisce about an earlier age. actually i'm his generation and i remember when it was only walter cronkite. there are three networks at the time. virtually everybody in the united states got their news from one of three sources in all of which were within inches of one another on any kind of spectrum. now it's completely brown range.

is asking earlier about your thoughts on one end of that range. there's the other end which may be the source or the vehicle for some of these fake news that you had both mentioned. i like you to spend a little bit of time talking about that as a phenomenon. and given our traditions of free speech and our seeming enthusiasm for these multi- media on check sources, can anything be done, what can be done, and i look very close to comic pizza so i understand some of the fake news have real ramifications. along question, celeste talk about that end of the spectrum and get off the mass media part. genia can start.

>> i would say this is one of the most important questions that can be asked right now. there are a lot of questions we don't know the answer to even as a government. who the fake new sources are, whether there are actors with male intent behind it and it's not just a bunch of young teenagers in macedonia making up stories and pushing them about donald trump. we don't know a lot of the answers to the questions. once we know the answers it may become more alarming than it is now. i would say that there are couple of things i think a lot of social media companies are beginning to think through, but we assess a society and as a government as media organizations and companies need to push hard on. if you are social media platform where the majority of the public or large swath of the public is getting their information about

an election, do you have an editorial responsibility? i think the answer should be s in some capacity. i don't. i don't know a form that takes. i think the current situation is clearly not sustainable. i will add one challenge that i think is not talked about enough that companies will have to grapple with is a standards around the globe. in the united states we are fortunate to have a free and open media and press. whether people like what we say or not we have three briefings of the government every day where reporters can come and ask questions. that's rare. the number of countries with the free press continues to decrease. there's a question of standards. if you look at it country like russia or china where people are receiving information from state run media that is like a cousin of fake news and may be a good

learning device for us to look at, does that mean that social media platforms prevent these outlets from putting information on their sites? how do you draw the line? i think their hard questions but i certainly think there's some serious changes that need to take place. >> i don't pretend to have the solution to the fake news problem because it is a very complicated problem. it is really easy to say pope francis endorses donald trump, we all know that is not true, we all know is fake, you could take it down, but once you then get into it's a very slippery slope about truth that goes from there to man-made global warming and on. and who do you want to put in charge of making that determination, and even if you could put people or computers in

charge of making that determination, can you really scale it because facebook and other social media are global platforms and multiple languages and so it's a really big conundrum for them. it's also really essential for them and everybody else to try to figure out a way to figure this out and to try to give some priority, this little self-serving and their algorithms to trusted new sites and to push those up and suppress the others. i was looking at some of the fake news things that have been tweeted and what's alarming is that if you are disposed to a certain point of view is

conceivable that you would believe the fake news is real because it looks real. it doesn't have the feel of something slapped together. it's easy for kids who know how to code to put it up and make it look real. we could say civic education and educate high school students about news literacy, but but it's hard. you have a phenomenon of people who have been nominated or chosen for very high and responsible positions in government who seem to have been taken in by this. so underline the phenomenon of fake news is the willingness of people apparently to believe the craziest worst of people in the pizza gate situation