>> will come i am the code are here along with my wife we have a great program for you this afternoon with two political experts here to talk about joe biden during the week of the election. if you are not familiar how the virtual format works, let me explain if you want to ask the question you can do so by clicking at the bottom of your screen and then to find the copy of the new book entitled

joe biden. one of the most talented journalist of his generation the first part is first in the chicago tribune shortly after graduating from harvard then three years later to report from iraq and other countries. and then to join the new yorker before moving to washington to cover politics and foreign affairs. in the 2014 national book award and was a finalist for the 2015 pulitzer prize. the new book has adapted from the articles written over the past decade most recently the profiler biden last august.

with all the accidental expertise and the portrait of the former vice president with the biden extensive experience and then put them pete buttigieg the former mayor of south bend indiana the 2020 democratic presidential candidate also new book called trust. and so then to recognize the work and to put in a plug for the former primary opponent and out to be the next president of the united states joe biden. mayor pete, take it away.

>> thank you so much. it is an honor and the treat to be participating that is iconic as politics and prose. and then especially with the writer and observer of that caliber that to help open a window is a recognized figure in us politics. and since and during his vice presidency and during the campaign it is important for the country to spend time as i hope and i will not pretend to be neutral on this, we are talking about somebody one week from tonight we will know

as the next president of the united states. so thank you for the chance to have this conversation i am looking forward to it. so let me begin by asking the first time i asked the nerve why my predecessor was a mayor. if he thought it might be a good idea for me to run. and instead of directly answering my question he has a remarkable career and indiana. he sat at his desk and his french fries and said politics is so much is out of your control to let me know the first have to think about is to prepare for that i feel like americans of that is out of our control.

in the meeting is forward on the one hand like a lifelong guest and then to never know they would reach this point so that group paying opening anecdote and then more broadly will you think of the relationship with the uncontrollable has played in his formation and political life and his presidency. . . . n

to begin with something people don't talk that much about is that you woke up one morning on the floor of a hotel room in 1987 unable to move his legs, he couldn't figure out how he got there. he had a brain aneurysm, two of them in fact, the ballooning of two arteries in his brain. the description of it was agony. they got him to a hospital and the surgeons told him he was at risk of such great injury he could have died so quickly they

had a priest deliver last rites even before his wife could get there. joe biden had been on the campaign trail for months and had this headache he had been putting aside. it was a strange bit of faith that he dropped out of that race and the fact that he was out meant that he was able to sort of have a moment. he was going to give a speech and that's when he was attacked with this aneurysm. the doctors had frankly you are a lucky man because if you were on the campaign trail and ignored your symptoms, you might be dead right now. they said you're going to go under the knife and we are going to give you a surgery to save your life. you may lose your ability to speak. somehow he did find a bit of humor and said i wish it happened to me last summer.

they did operate on him and of course he did come through it and it was an ordeal of the kind that shapes a person's conception of their own vulnerability and role as a father and husband and political person. he was out of the congress for seven months, he comes back and i think what's fascinating is through his life you see this recurring pattern of these moments of stored of extraordinary misfortunes and in their own curious ways extraordinary fortunes. i pursued that question to understand how he conceptualizes fate and control over one's circumstances. he has come to a bit of homespun philosophy in which he says everybody in the end had a sort of philosophical ledger in which they will be concentrated by and

that is how he made a sense of it and continues this pattern all the way until today. one of the things that is interesting he grew up at a time there was this great sense of control and that was the mantra of the postwar period. there was a feeling they don't have that sense of control and they feel things are happening beyond their reach and faith is something less to define and that's a sort of nerve ending that runs through the politics in this country. >> that leads to something else i want to explore with you which is this question being shaped by the moment to the generation you come from. i came of age in a generation that started with a big argument

being whether it was the end of history and whether things just settled down and all the tough stuff was over and we would ease ourselves into a period of prosperity and consensus and technology helping to create that fact-based reality it sounds tragic to think how we thought about it in the '90s but now it's a period to have history come roaring back at us which for many of us was the first time that a chain of events that started thousands of miles away affected us in a direct way and i think about that with the students i spend time with almost 20 years apart from me they have had their lives rocked by a chain of events that started overseas but

in a different way they feel their entire experience, their awareness of the world has been fashioned during the era of president trump and the blows of the great recession and then the pandemic and everything that's happened in between. joe biden is interesting generationally because he doesn't quite sit in any of the generations we have these stereotypes. there's the baby boomer generation he would be qualified mourners what is the silent generation he certainly wasn't in the generation that could've been directlcouldhave been diren world war ii but he wasn't in that counterculture 60s moment which is the touchstone a lot of us are using when we make sense of 2020 so i wonder sometimes he gets in trouble for being perceived as nostalgic and at the same time has a unique

conception about how transition and transformation might be the hallmark of this administration so with all of that in the atmosphere i wonder what conclusions you drew and how now he meets this moment. >> i found that compelling. there is a way you talked about it there is a point you don't want to assign characteristics but there's certain elements in the moment that shape us. there is an essay by my former colleagues that wrote about the postwar generation and called them the society of movers and doers and as he put it

[inaudible] he meant it was a community that felt they could do things because they had the tools to create their own realities. they were coming out of world war ii and they were one of the smallest generations. they had all kinds of specific advantages because there were so few of them sociologists called them the lucky few. that meant it was easier to become class president and the star of a show and get promoted along the way and it does shape our politics and the way people came to imagine they have a degree of control and to some degree thinking of a topic we will talk more about today they didn't need to trust the institutions. they could do it themselves. fast forward to today and

millennial's are the largest generation in history, the most diverse and have come of age in this time when you have two recessions in 20 years, the war that began with 9/11 and is giving them a different sense of what they can and cannot control. at some point when i was reporting i spoke to a scientist who studies politics and said there's never been a moment which the gap politically, culturally, technologically, ideologically between the generations have built as pronounced as they are and i think that poses a challenge to you and joe biden how do you begin to build for people and pose for the identity that allows them to say i'm coming of

age at a different moment but you and i can find something together. >> this is one of the challenges right now and so much depends on having the touchstones if they are not generational then otherwise, to take one example the experience of my generation is radically different from the experience of the baby boomer generation and those who experience to the vietnam era but i found i can walk into an american legion and have certain terms for talking to a veteran in the vietnam era because we both had the experience of service, different with the service all the same, the same country perhaps the same branch and it gives a touchstone to understand. i think part of how the society and communities are supposed to work goes back to to tocqueville we create these circles of belonging that overlap. i don't belong to your

generation but you belong to my church. you don't belong to my church but i belong to your soccer team or we live in the same neighborhood. the more there is overlap the more there is a sense of trust. this is another area that shows the ability to cut across but i can quickly be in conversation with an elderly resident of pakistan as i can my next-door neighbor and yet what we often find is the algorithms serve things that reinforce our pockets of belonging and the circles that ought to be overlapping have proven to be concentric that shows a sorting that is dangerous and so we are running out of things and ought to create more but we are running out of things we all have in common. one of the things we have in common is the presidency. part of the point of the

presidency is symbolic not to be discounted with a minimal amount of things i have in common with people who are incredibly different. we may not support the same person for president but we have the same president and a president that grasps that can use that in the same way a mayor knows they are a symbol of existence something i had to learn the hard way because i took office wanting to do policy and of course that was my focus but i began to once i admitted how important it was i begin to lean into the symbolic functions of the office so this brings me to another question central to joe biden's appeal and his message and that's the idea of unity and bringing us together whether it is across generations or political boundaries as our country has gotten polarized and sliced and diced, what

attributes or anecdotes did you encounter that might shed light on how as president he would be able to deliver on this promise bringing us together which is one of the reasons i support him and part of what he has to offer the country right now. >> you hit on something that is very interesting which is this idea is it plausible to talk about unity. is that a euphemism for saying we are just going to come to some kind of a consensus and in fact that is not what it has to mean. one of the things i've always found fascinating if you go back through his life or follow him for a while, you see he has these democratic habits that are ways of establishing a connection with people in which you try to transcend the boundaries of belonging.

i've been with him overseas in places, beijing and at one point i was following him for reporting. he has a line he says to people wherever he goes he tends to say to somebody when he meets a fellow politician he says if i had hair like yours i would be president. he's used that in baghdad, beijing, wilmington i don't know how many times. he probably tried it in south bend once or twice. the reason it works as it is disarming to everyone and it's his understanding of how political people function. he said to me one time he and obama have a shared idea that unity is possible. that is what brought them together. then of course obama had the ability to use a transcendent language that reaches down into

your soul and he puts it out there and you begin to feel elevated by it. that's what we saw at that famous moment that he emerged talking about not read america and blue america. he says something more functional that he believes as he said to me he said look, a lot of diplomats don't like me because when i start in on a process of negotiation into the samand thesame thing applies inc politics, my first idea is that i cannot say something to somebody that i think is bullisl shit. i have to understand they have a rational conception of their own interest and from the very beginning you have to acknowledge they have something worth listening to and to say

i'm going to have the conversation. but i would be curious i'm sure you encounter people along the way that say how can you look at our politics and think unity is possible right now, how is it not we just need to fortify our own tried in effect and prepare. >> i think all of us think about this through the lens of our experience. it comes by way of local. i've been in so many local political processes that are no less ferocious than the national politics in terms of how fired up we get with one important difference which is the coalitions are not quite as stable. they are not predicted by what party you are in and so the same person who might be at my throat and vice versa on his owning dispute might turn around and be the swing vote that delivers my

budget on the council, the same person who i might be going toe to toe with on an issue with housing policy could be my greatest ally on a matter of a quality that is at stake in some situations and because of that nature and the fact we encounter each other first as human beings. when you are a mayor, you eat what you cook. you are on the same streets and shopping at the same grocery stores. to me that creates a level of bedrock faith not to be unified on what to do. that's what politics is for is to adjudicate differences but we can at least arrive at that public square in good faith and not blow each other up because there might be an unlikely strange bedfellows moment. i think that the moment opened up the possibility for that

because he's done so many things that are as contrary and create a once in a generation moment after the election goes the way i hope it well and forces the republican party to decide what is going to be next. there could be an interesting moment for that and it doesn't require naïveté. this may be something else nobody can say someone with as many years in the senate as he has under his belt is naïve or innocent about how things work and at the same time you are right as he often says i really do mean it, he does mean it when he talks about the need to bring us together and i think you can feel that. i want to mention i see questions coming in and just a little bit later in the hour we will turn to those so keep them coming. i look forward to bringing in

some audience questions but i want to share a few more i just couldn't resist. >> you've been made here and now you are moderator. [laughter] i will take it. good honest work. something you ar were talking at before one of the questions we often hear about biden's how is he going to contend with a party that doesn't agree with him on a lot of things and is so suspicious of his fundamental instincts. i had a fascinating conversation with an activist who said i have been surprised by the degree to which joe biden has been genuinely open and honestly he said the biden campaign has been more open than we expected.

there is an openness to it and a good example of it if you take for example alexandria cortez had her differences with joe biden in the primary and she said if we were in europe i may not be in the same party. they get to the end of the primary and joe biden could have been within his rights to say i don't want anything to do with you and instead he said i would like you to come help me write my climate policy so that's how you end up in a room with a range of voices representing different interests that goes back to that word the conception of politics and they were all given a chance to speak. they said they were pleased how much they were interested in hearing and that is the tone if we've learned anything about

politics it really does matter. >> absolutely. i think of moments where if you are a sitting or former vice president and some 30 something-year-old mayor shows up challenging you and at some point is ahead, i think you would have every reason to say who do you think you are or worse. one of the things i appreciate about this at the beginning, middle and end of my arc he was equally interested in just being decent and getting to know you and talking to you. there was no break or need to change tone and how he treated me certainly and by the way, before, during and after my decision to support him.

it's not only a political strategy but something more woven into the core of who he is. today i believe that he is in warm springs which is a place that is associated with fdr. i think there's there is a grog interest comparing this moment and anything that could seem parallel. there's nothing that quite fit said. but a moment when democracy seems to be in question in a moment when people are hurting in many different ways, a moment when the future of the american project is in question and a moment where perhaps the immediate decisions that will be made about managing the crisis will also turn out to be decisions about what the

political and economic order might look like. you see the circumstances and he reached the presidency. i wonder how much you think that analogy holds up or if there's ananyways maybe it doesn't and given some of the mentions he's made how much is that a part of how he approaches this season in american history that he may be arriving in? >> there are some who are skeptical of the idea he spent his career saying i'm pursuing transformative change in politics and is that a matter of law to in authenticity.

it's a different country than it was when he entered the race. he understands the structural issues but we are facing a moral emergency in a way we weren't even before and that calls upon a greater ambition for the office and i think that it ties into this threat we see running through his life and something i try to capture in the book that in some ways his ambition to achieve something meaningful is part of the reason why he finds himself in this moment taking on the mentor and aroma even when he imagined might not be his identity before and it gets to something that i think is a feature of his we don't talk about explicitly enough.

he does something not everybody in washington does is he will admit mistakes. i say this partly because it's full of examples of him making mistakes. anybody with a career as long as his there are things he regrets or things he realizes he didn't fully understand and rising to that moment is partly about the ability to be reflective. i don't mean to say the obvious because his opponent does not have those same abilities but one example that was left out to me is after the killing of george floyd i said how did this change you. he said one thing i learned as i was wrong. i had been telling a parable

about race in america that began with me growing up and essentially the jim crow delaware in which african diplomats going between washington and new york were stopping at segregated rest areas and i then became the vice president to the first black president and there was this kind of satisfying arc of progress and what i saw and so many of us saw on that video iss we were wrong. this history was not finished and we are contending with it. he said i discovered you cannot extinguished eight it awaits for a leader to give it oxygen and then it comes back. there is an element of him coming to have higher belief in the power of the office because

he saw the damage that it can do and i think that for him it has been a learning process as well. >> one of the remarkable things about him is that he continues to see ways to respond to what's happening and update his account of how the world works even now after so much work done. i wonder if you think that is one of the primaries qualities. it's extraordinary if you consider how much he was written off at various moments and the fact he's attempted to run for president before and hadn't fared very well. a lot of folks didn't see him getting to iowa let alone

earning such a commanding lead coming out of south carolina and after that bringing the party together under his candidacy so i wonder what you think are some of the factors that helped to explain that when there was a period very few political commentators would have described him as a favorite. >> i'm going to have to ask you the same question in a minute but i think a couple of interesting things. one, this was a measure of ways in which it gets things wrong because we get locked into certain patterns of understanding and say this is what the democratic party is today and it's nothing but that and we say this is the electorate and this is who joe biden is and then all of a sudden what we discover is something the campaign believed from the beginning which is the democratic party as most people that would describe themselves as moderate or conservative democrats and even though a lot

of us in the press will pay attention to the frontier edge, the newest members and most public members that may not be where the main body is but the other feature of it that i found very powerful i was talking to jim clyburn who delivered this crucial endorsement in south carolina which allowed joe biden to break free and secure the nomination and he reminded me he may not look to you in washington or new york but in a place like south carolina that after almost contending with a massacre in a black church at the same time donald trump was announcing his presidency, for us this is a matter of existential significance. it's not something we are going to gravitate just to the newest

and most dynamic person and for that reason we know joe, he knows us and the great civil rights activist said look there's a certain unapologetic pragmatism that drives them to make some of the choices they made but i would ask the same question of you. were you surprised when it happened and to what degree did you see this coming and what do you think we got wrong from the outside right up until as i said how do you interpret what happened in that race. >> i think a lot of it does have to do with trust especially south carolina. for him to have been able to -- expectations were already high for him going into south carolina and he beat them. i think that reflects a level of trust including the southern black voters that no other candidate not even candidates like me but even candidates of

color. he had something different and i think part of it is longevity. even if there was the sense that you couldn't agree with him on every choice that he made there was a sense of who he was that could cut across all of that and there's a kind of persistence and he didn't get discouraged by the results that might have compelled others to question whether they were going to stay in the race and that gets back to some of what we began talking about an awareness of the ups and downs of life and readiness and i think all of that served him well as well as the qualities that make him so recognizable and connect him to people even if they are from a different generation or ideological province and they will be very important for

governing so i will try not to be greedy and turn more to the audience questions because there is one that touches on exactly this in sweden who asks the simple question how do you think he would make decisions as president? >> they are here to see you and i'm grateful for it. that question is fascinating because it was running through a lot of the inquiry how his mind works and how he's taken in the information and decide what to do. i have some encounters with people who work with him closely at the white house and he said in a memorable encounter the cliché about joe biden is that he talks too much but what people don't seem to get is that he is listening and here is an example of it.

in this particular case sure he would sometimes talk for 90% of the equation but at the end he would say great talk and i would go out and he would always pick something up and i think if he was building it with his decision-making you would hear him use that fact or that plaintiff and analysis and again you could make an obvious contrast but in this case part of this comes from a productive insecurity joe biden has had in his life as he said he is the first nominee without an ivy league degree since walter mondale and i think it carries with him a certain openness to continue to grasp for that new piece of information. the thing you know he knows you

don't know and he's constantly seeking that and would talk to you about that. >> he would ask questions about things i didn't know much about that humility to want to get information and i think that gets lost. we all know that. he's always filled with those questions and i can see that process soaking up information informing his decision-making. but the interesting question we are thinking about right now is the senate. brett says the unique body few have spent more time. how do you think his background is as a senator that drives his understanding and the role of the government in general? >> it's interesting he is to the molecular level a senator and it

is core to his conception of how human beings interact. you mentioned this idea we could disagree the first day and make a deal on tuesday. that is a sort of senatorial way of looking at things and to the point i mentioned in the book at one point he kept his locker in the senate jim because he enjoyed going over there. he's a little bit like an intelligence gatherer he would go over and come back to the white house with little tidbits about just to the color of the negotiations, the way things were going. that's who he is and i think the problem with that in some ways, and there is a disadvantage. as barack obama said at one point the problem is if he came of age in the senate that functioned it was a senate in which you could get things done. it would have been painful for joe biden to come to terms with

what might need to be done to make the senate functional again and that is where we get back to these structural reform prospects the question whether he will undertake something like getting rid of the filibuster. we are at the point now it's a basic question whether the functioning of the senate needs to be revised. i think you mentioned it in the book and it's important for people to remember these days we sort of forget if we use to regret the democratic functioning more often than we do and you mentioned in the trust' as every ten years we usd to do these reforms and we don't do them now. how did that change outside of the boundaries of doable things? >> we look at revising some of these things although you could argue they've done it in their own way for example changing the number of justices on the

supreme court. the only modern actor to do it was mitch mcconnell who changed it to eight until he took power but in terms of going through the motions of updating the democracy, even things like one of the last voting related amendments we had to lower the voting age to 18 at a time you could be old enough to be drafted in the military and yet not old enough to vote on the leaders who were drafted and we do seem to be out of practice but there is a moment of reform ahead and it's interesting to see how many of those that are creatures of that old senate, seen on other than harry reid come out in a filibuster for example i think tells you there's no danger of dramatic reform destroying the senate. it's about how we can put it back together that will be interesting to see how a

presidenpresident biden will gu. one anonymous attendee asks the question off topic but can you see buddy and truman, unfortunately no, they are out of the house at the moment so they will not be making an appearance but we also will not be interrupted as we sometimes are. [inaudible] >> they might find their way in. you never know. >> there's there is a question m another anonymous attendee that draws attention to the transition and you know, this is a period where i can't think of another time certainly in modern history where the window of transition mattered more or there's more pressure on people and it's worth mentioning through their differences there was a remarkable degree of collaboration between the

outgoing george w. bush administration and incoming barack obama for the legislation and relief for the great recession because those crashes happening in september and october couldn't wait until january for their game plan. but even so, there's nothing like this so the question is how do they knit this together in the transition and both the period when it's ambiguous and then even after that during the days waiting between the election and inauguration. >> i'm so glad you mentioned the fact we forget even this contest at the transition between the bush presidency and obama presidency there was a high level of collaboration down to the handshake between the incoming department head and outgoing department head which makes a huge difference when we

talk about the peaceful transition of power we never used to think we were talking about a president that wouldn't acknowledge the results of a legitimate election but we also meant we have this kind of extraordinary ability almost unique among the powers of our time to be able to hand off what is effectively an enormously complicated set of 250 companies working together to then do that every four or eight years and we did it between parties. biden has an advantage in this regard. he did come in after all in the obama administration on one of his first assignments the president asked him to do to take on the implementation of the stimulus bill so he had a sense of how to retrofit or fix the airplane while you are still flying and that is going to be required. there is right now a process

going on that you don't hear about as much in the news but it's a very serious plan to know what can we do one day number one and what can they accomplish things like returning to paris and the world health organization and then what is the legislative plan. it might be different in the past. what's one of the things you hear from joe biden's advisors is we don't need to use the old playbook which we more or less plan for two years in a highly sequenced carefully choreographed plan. this is an emergency and we are going to treat it like one.

what might be distinct about the presidential leadership. a. >> i think there's a significant detail we haven't talked about today that the world has fundamentally changed even while we have been drawn into our own domestic drama the nature of the geopolitics. china plays a different role than it did four years ago and one of the things i think you

would find with a biden administration is project number 11 of the things they have to do when they go out into the world is to begin to reestablish credibility and trust in what the united states represents. the difference is biden comes to this with some pre-existing relationships. somebody said you could drop joe biden into any capital in the world and he will know someone could be a socialist or fascist. he will have met that person some point along the way and there's something valuable. >> let's dig into that. it's rare to have a new

president surefooted on foreign policy as joe biden in terms of these relationships you are talking about and his tenure in the senate even before he came to the lighthouse where he insisted on being a central player in the national security and foreign policy decisions and a lot of the questions are on the subject and i don't want to miss the chance to engage your insights on this. you were in the middle east and you know china. you know dc and joe biden and china so how will he handle china and all of that, where does that story go? >> interestingly one of the things that got me interested in joe biden's when he came over to beijing when i was living there instead of eating inside the hotel, he and his staff, some of whom are still with him now working on china projects they decided to go to a little restaurant that happened to be

around the corner from where i lived which is what caught my attention. >> -- >> that is the kind of thing a political figure does in iowa, find a diner and go there. in china i don't know how the security team even lets you do that. sorry to interrupt. >> it made the secret service heads explode we are going where? so off he goes and he says to everybody look i know you came down here to have lunch and here i am screwing it up and he got a round of applause. for years after they carried a biden special on the menu. the reason he did that and the reason i mentioned it it was nice but he also had a deeper meaning about the nature of the american and chinese contrast. at this point china was going through scandals around official

corruption and luxury so by making this gesture we are not going to treat ourselves like we are we are in fact going to go and meet with people, he put the chinese political class on notice and not long after that he went to have lunch at a little dumpling restaurant in town. there is something fascinating and there's a direct relevance to that now because one of them, one of the kind of messages he will have to do as president if he has that opportunity will be to begin to remind people around the world what is it actually to be a free country. what are the countries today practicing democracy and maintaining it and restoring it and i think as we move into this

phase, we have two governing systems, the american and the chinese system offering claims for a certain natural right that it's incumbent upon us particularly now when our democracy is weekend to go out and begin to make that case again and he comes at it from a point of sincerity that he has been doing for a while. >> a little closer to home, thinking about the question of unity in the coalition may be beyond the democratic party and one thing i took as encouraging, the arden se c didn't have a lof prominent republicans. it seemed there was no sign of the mccains or previous chairs. the democratic convention by contrast had folks like bernie

sanders, folks like me, folks from the moderate wing and republicans not even former republicans but current saying we have got to be there for joe biden. a year ago one of the most frequent questions i would get if i were doing a panel or appearance is how can the democratic coalition stay together long enough to make it to election day and it's worth remembering how much that's exceeded expectations and unified our side as the fears have come to pass that is a credit to joe biden's leadership and also the leadership of the figures from the progressive wing in the party that welcomed the invitation to be part of the conversation and the involvement of independents who see something bigger at stake. so it's one thing to do that in the campaign. if biden takes the oath of office how will we deal with him in many competing fashions to

try to satisfy the different winds especially democrats will have an imperative to avoid a repeat that we experienced in 2020 so what have you observed that might give an insight into how he would hold a complicated coalition together? >> i want to reserve time for one more question for something you mentioned in the book that means a lot to me. the question of unity is interesting because the truth is the left end of the democratic party is going to start pressuring joe biden if he wins approximately 30 seconds after he wins. and frankly it should. that is how the system works. they should continue to push the party because that's how you get out of touch with the demands people have. now there's a difference between

pushing and seeking to undermine the possibility of progress and that is the boundary between optimism and cynicism. somebody said if we find ourselves in the position to have a joe biden presidency we have to figure out how you go from protest to persuasion and get things done without being self-righteous and that is incumbent on all of us as citizens to decide. >> i have a huge important piece of the book about trust and national service. you mentioned this early and it's something we think about one of the things you came to after thinking so hard about trust is the experience of doing something together, about laboring for a purpose larger than yourself has almost this

miraculous view on your self as a person. we have some institutions that can do it but it feels to me like we are approaching a moment we are ready for something bigger. there was a moment before the peace corps and i wonder how you think about national service, why it's important and what it might take to reach that new phase. >> america always does better when we have a national project of some kind. it isn't always a war or moon landing somehow had that same spirit even if not as many americans were participating directly. right now we have no shortage of demanding urgent or asked us to eventually important projects ahead of us which conquering this pandemic might be the most immediate, but something like conquering climate change.

a lot of these would benefit from engaging more americans in more ways and that's part of the problem but it's not just because there's good work waiting to be done but it's the experience itself even if it were not quite so urgent but even leaving that aside just the fact they would have an occasion they might have nothing in common besides being american. there might be nothing besides the uniform we are wearing and the flag on our shoulder to connect with someone with a different background or racial background or very different politics a lot of the time. people i trust my life to in a heartbeat because of the pressures we were under and the mission in front of us and i don't think you have to go to war to get that.

that's why i'm excited about lining up the funding for the volunteering of national service opportunities not only for young people but especially for young people. we don't have to make people do it but we could make it a norm so people could afford it if you make enough to get by. then it would get to close to universal and it would do so much good and it's an idea that i'm excited about because i don't think that it's a partisan idea but it would help us deal with some of our political estrangement, so i wrote about what that might mean and there are a lot of folks like his great ally senator chris coons who laid out legislation that doesn't require us to invent a lot of new departments basically just fund the instruments we've already got, every state in the union helps deal with things and i hope that it gets more attention in this decade. >> one thing that surprised me

it's less than one in five. in some ways it's a practical answer one of the ways is taking practical steps in the way you outlined. >> our time is drawing to a close. i'm so thankful to be able to visit with you and encourage everyone to read what amounts to a handbook on the style and character and priorities on a person who if i get my way and most americans i think agree on this ought to be and will be the next president of the united states. thank you for the chance to be here and i will turn it back over to you and thanks again for hosting us here at politics and prose. >> great moderating you definitely have a knack for this and we are grateful for your being