flexibility to states had -- we love competing on jobs. education plays a key role in workforce development. we have to have the maximum flexibility possible. if we're going to say what works best in wisconsin it may not be what works best in missouri or utah. my hope is for the folks in washington, the more flexibility, the better. we are the ones who are ultimately accountable. >> governor, we are in a renewed era of local control, no doubt about it. it is a transparency build. -- transparency bill.

there you have that. you have the ball, absolutely. it is all yours. it is not against a lot to close the achievement gap. it is not against the lot to have annual assessment. if you did, for no child left behind, for the record. local control has often translated into establishment control, a union controlled. a lack of policy makers to understand what is going on. you got it. >> what i fundamentally believe is that we should be [inaudible] high bar, hold people accountable to results. give them to be creative, innovative, hit the high bar. we're all saying the same thing.

i would like your thoughts on this. there has been a massive disconnect, inefficiency, and nothing we have done to prevent this. somehow, that has not happened. -- we have done nothing to prevent local industry to talk to local high schools. somehow, that has not happened. your employers care desperately about the community. your educators care desperately about the community. those two world have not historically met. i would ask all the to think about why 2 million high skilled jobs are unfilled each day. what can we do to close that gap? this thing is not working in anyone's interest. if we can be more creative together, the best thing to do is to incentivize where those partnerships are actually happening.

>> both of what you said is very much on target. the one thing i get frustrated in looking at and our state, whether it is saying the federal government dictated this, and i am going to -- people said collective bargaining prohibits me from rewarding the great teachers and paying for performance. when i hear from others, too many excuses. it is too easy to say, it is not my fault. it is not my fault because the federal government dictates what we have to do. in the end, they do not give a you know what. they want to know why there are

not enough students to get into the workforce. i am not keeping the burden on either one of you. for a lot of us, we're trying to figure out how can we be accountable. we do not want to blame somebody else. that doesn't cut it to our employers. >> we have to stop pointing fingers. these false debates do not move anything for. i met in the state, i will not name it, with a number of superintendents. i asked the employers, how many of the high-school graduates are ready to come and your place of work? they said, less than 50%. and the room got quiet. they had never -- these were all good hearted people in the same community. they had never talked. somehow, whenever you can do, whenever we can do to

facilitate both skidding past educators running business, they do not get it. so much mutual self-interest, but they had never had a conversation. that is what we have to figure out. >> we're in the middle of doing that, region by region. bringing the largest employers with their educators. we are guilty of this as governors, but you talk about having -- we want to be as tight as we can on the standards and as loose on how we get there. i know that is no news to anybody. gov. nixon? >> switching gears, i appreciate your help and community colleges.

thank you very much. i can tell you that the competitive grants are training people for jobs that exist right now. it would not have happened but for your work and the administration's work. you will be very proud of what we have done with the dollars that you have given us. there are productive people how they're moving their lives for word. thank you for that. we appreciate it. talk about higher education, public higher education. we spend a tremendous amount of part-time respectfully -- of our time respectfully critiquing k-

12. we hammer this, we hammered back. we talk about all sorts of consequences. and then we send our kids to traditional four-year colleges. a graduate with no jobs. -- a graduate, and no jobs. they have debt and are being waiters and waitresses. you have a tremendous number of folks who have been into that higher education system, when they get out, spent the better part of the next decade than for what they got and not getting the economic return [inaudible]

i am talking about real cost. do you think we will begin to have a nationally the beginnings of the discussion about that issue? not to say there are not real issues at preschool and k-12. we take our kids that make it all the way through that process, and they go to southwest eastern something and they get a degree in something and they are dramatically underemployed. they have done all the stuff you are supposed to do. they have worked really hard. they have actually put some scanned in the game themselves -- skin in the game themselves. -- skiing in the game themselves by putting their name on a piece of paper that says they have to give the money back. what can we do to begin the kind of specific discussion? any time we began those kinds

of discussions, we are seen as governors as supporting higher education when we give the money, or not supporting higher education and we did not give the money. it is not that simple. i do not need to over speak, but you see tuition pressure. what kind of -- what advice do you have to us to a format that public discussion? i would argue that you can say we have dropped -- boy, i would not want to back up any. i see a lot of folks that are making a lot of choices. it is not the right economic choice for them. what discussions are going on? what advice do you have? we had a great control over some of those dollars to began get technology, performance measures and higher education,

truth in advertising about what the degrees are worth. without attacking the system. you have shown throughout your career as a great ability to be reformers from the inside. what advice do you have to us to be reformers from the inside? >> these are all great questions without easy answers. go back to where it started around shared responsibility. i would challenge you to continue to invest in higher education. 80% of states cut back last year. that is not a good thing for the country, but it cannot be a blank check. universities have to keep their costs down. some are doing an amazing job of that. some of them are doing and run this job of that. -- and some are doing a horrendous job of that.

and they have to deal with cultures around completion. access is important, but access is not the name of the game. one thing we have tried to do, we want to do a race to the top for higher education. incentivizing diversity's to keep their cost down. -- universities to keep their cost down. and to incentivize cultures around completion. we have funded everybody the same regardless their ability to control cost, regardless of their ability to have them walk across the stage at the back end. gov. o'malley -- maryland had the right to bargain a few years -- maryland had the right bargain if you years back back, the university's committed to systematically reduce their costs substantially. not have the state this invest. i think that is the right trade-off. if we get more folks to move in

that direction at the state level, we want to do that. this is an area where we had been part of the problem. we provide all of our resources based upon access. we do not provide resources based upon the university's ability to increase completion rates. we want to start to have more of our resources go to institutions that are graduating folks and doing the right thing economically unless the two other places. when i was in chicago, our students were 90% below the poverty line. 85% minority. we tracked them. identical gpas going to local universities. staggering the disconnect. we started during our young people toward certain universities and away from others. we have to think about our

levers. i think there has been -- >> i am sorry to interrupt you. but i am interrupting you. we have a school choice model in place for higher education. people get to choose where they go. it is so talked about at the k- 12 level less choice been the solution. we already have that. you can go to all kinds of schools. i mention that as a background that is more than just choice. especially in rural areas. i just signed a state wide charter school bill. that choice model -- do you think we can have more impact in the higher education sector?

>> i think you can drive more resources towards place is doing a good job. none of us differentiate enough to the good actors are and give them more dollars and the the bad actors are. a challenge -- i think we have the best system of higher education in the world, no question. 75% of people apply to one school. in rural communities, that's tougher. i do not think enough people are exercising choice. there has been a lack of transparency. what is a grant versus a loan? very confusing. think there is enough choice being exercise being done today.

>> that is a responsibility that we have. i would argue that if the child filled out the form, that should get them a two-year certification for something. [laughter] i know you have worked on the form, that that is governors saying what we say. >> it strikes me that in higher education, we have a lot of consumer choice and very little information. that is often the opposite in k-12 education. the chamber of commerce has done this report on six indicators. efficiency and cost effectiveness, innovation, how much transparency and public information can be gained. further, how much linkage do you have in your employment data. what are your post-education employment opportunities? what are your wages likely to be after?

bob mcdonnell, i will give you a tip of the hat. virginia is working on this hard. we have not at all been very deliberate about our strategy. we applaud the money out and we hope for the best. we have -- we have put the money out and we hope for the best. we do not have any kind of deliberate strategies. we are a one-thrid federal invester in higher education and 9% on k-12.

we get what we get it. >> nor have we been critical. anywhere near the same tone. we have the national debate about how to get rid of bad teachers, but we are silent about bad professors. this is not something we will snap our fingers and it will be solved instantaneously. we need to have that discussion. otherwise, we end up with a bunch of folks sitting here 10 years from now saying, we used to be first, and now we are not first in higher education anymore. i do not want that to happen. we're all doing a lot of the things you're talking about, but we have to have the public with us. we need to make sure that college means something economically for people that invest. we need to have the courage to criticize the system that oftentimes does not deliver. >> i want to thank both of you for being here. i want to thank secretary

duncan for the department of education. a fantastic partner, not to take compliance driven organization. your people have been very helpful. now that you were into this for 3.5 years, you are getting to see what kind of progress states are making. what are the biggest -- what makes you most nervous about the progress we have made? or the progress we're not making? given what you have learned, if we ever starting this over again, what might you do differently? >> great question. you guys in delaware have been at the forefront. i do not know how many hours you have spent on this personally. i am hopeful and i think the progress the states have made a stunning.

nobody predicted that. nobody predicted the amount of movement across the country. the second part, i worry about, this is going to be a hard couple of years. higher standards, at results going down. holding teachers to a higher bar. moving to the next generation of assessments. this is going to be a choppy couple of years. i hope that we stay the course. i think the other side of this is going to be very positive. the prospects are going to be hard and complicated. there will be a lot of legitimate pressure to go back to the old way. to dummy down standards. whatever we can do to keep

marching forward and to learn from each other. folks are starting to figure out that everybody has worked in isolation. you guys are all struggling with the same issues. the more we share best practices, technology did not exist 10 or 15 years ago. we do not need to keep reinventing the wheel i think it is an important role for us to play. to sherry was knocking the ball at of the part in different areas -- to share those knocking the ball out of the park in different areas. i continue to struggle with the biggest critique i always get is that we're going to fast. i think we're going far too slow. everyone around this table is going far too slow. i think we are in a unique position to not do this well, but i would like a lot more

people banging down my door and saying, you have to get better faster. and how do we create better demand not only in suburban areas, but in rural areas. ultimately, president obama always talks about when he met with the president of south korea. what is your biggest challenge? the president of south korea said, by biggest challenge is that my parents are too demanding. my poorest parents demand a world-class education. i have to spend billions of dollars each year to bring in thousands of teachers a year to teach my children english and the first grade. because my parents won't let me wait until second grade. i wish we had a lot more grass- roots pressure. this is not a washington movement or a governor's movement. we have not crossed the rubicon yet.

to sustain this for a long haul, i think we need the pressure. our biggest battle is not ideological. our biggest battle is complacency. complacency is the enemy right now. we have not quite yet moved the country beyond that. >> amen. >> thank you, bill. thank you for the amazing amount of overlap and agreement. you were tough, candid, and non-partisan approach when it comes to excellence. you deliver some very tough messages to the nea. i really admire what you have done. let me ask you about teachers. most would agree about the empirical evidence about the results you get from early childhood education, tremendous evidence about what a world class teacher does and means in

a classroom. we've tried in virginia on some reforms. merit pay, trying to recruit teachers at based on the subject matter expertise. we have run into some roadblocks from the educational associations and unions. what is working? how do we best recruit these world-class teachers? how do we elevate the competence and the esteem in which we hold that profession? you made a little bit of money as a professional basketball player, yet we do not pay teachers at all. what are the things that are working that we can do to get the world class people involved in the profession? >> maine authorizing no child left behind. -- we started this conversation with reauthorizing no child left behind.

maybe the biggest givft that we could give to this country used to recruit the next generation teachers.r we have the baby boomer generation retiring. a million teachers, a third of the workforce. it is a once in a generation opportunity. i have spent a huge amount of time to do it. there is a grand bargain to be had, which is tough on everybody. we need to not tolerate a failure. we need to reward excellence. we need to move out those where it is not working. will this far too many of our good teachers to -- we lose far too many other good teachers to pay. we have not talked about schools of education. we need to pay teachers a lot more money.

this is not just -- people look at tenure reform as one slice of the puzzle. to me, it is the whole spectrum. the pool of talent is not anything where it should be. the training they receive is woefully inadequate. they do not have career ladders. we have to take on that entire establishment. we have to do it systemically. the grand bargain is a lot more rewards, compensation, making a true profession. there are a lot of trade-offs that have to happen. you go to high performing countries -- singapore, finland, 100% of their teachers come from the top 10% of graduating class is. 100%. 90% of folks to want to teach in those countries cannot. we have demonized the profession. i am spending a lot of time

looking at other countries. england is an interesting country. this significantly elevated the status of the profession. and not surprisingly brought in great talent. if all we do is put a lot more money into it now without changing the conditions, we do not get there. if all we do is tenure reform without greater rewards, we will not get there either. we're competing with all kinds of other fields. what if you could make $100,000 a year as a 30-year-old? people wake up and pay attention. we have to create the climate and conditions. we've launched a respect initiative. we want to help to drive this. this should be led by teachers. we want to get teachers to take

ownership. it has to become a profession, we have to treat it as such and respect it as such. right now, that is not where we are at. >> we have to be smart about how we allocate talent and resources. we do not do that now. often, our best people are doing the least challenging work. yes, that runs afoul the bargaining agreement, as you know. it is a local and statproblem. you are the wind that is writing the framework for the bargaining agreement. just like any other enterprise, having our best people do the most challenging work. >> that is so important. we have the -- when the

president went after osama bin laden, he did not send in a bunch of rookies. he sent in the navy seals. what are we doing? we have a million disincentives and very few incentives. not individually, but en masse. i talked to a principle of their, was asked to go to a low performance goal. it is the most moral and ethical work i have done in my career. i am so thankful i had that big a badge of honor to work in the communities that need the most help.

getting the talent where we need it, that is a big piece of it. >> i want everybody to be as concise as possible. >> so you waited for me to say that? [laughter] >> i will try to do that. the discussion has turned to points i wanted to make. we absolutely know what works. in many cases, we lack of resolve, more often on the local level, to replicate what works. we'll have -- we'll have the examples. every one of my feelings school districts had a great school. they did not go out and repeat that across the board.

reality about what we are doing in higher education is that because we caused this divide between a career and education -- we do not teach that in college. we do in some of our community colleges. we do not counsel people to define what actually they will be good at it early enough in life. we have to get back to doing that pretty quickly. one example, i had a program in one of my community colleges that had a 98% placement rate for 12 years. september 1, there will be four -- 3 more community colleges doing that. they will replicate that very

program. i want to swing back to the point that i became convinced of in my own state from discussions i had with educators at the various state universities and the private universities that produce some number of teachers in our state. most of them have failed to collect data about the jobs their teachers are doing once they leave. in some of those cases, there is a conscious effort not to collect the data. in many cases, they are sending out teachers who are going to fail within the first, second, or third year their teachers. -- that they are teachers. to correct that data and have to report it would be a very scary proposition. we have to make some very rapid changes in how we educate teachers and how we prepared this teachers. waiting for the third or fourth

year to put someone in a classroom, it is trapping a person in education. if they had that experience as a freshman or sophomore, they could have directed their educational model to a different degree. i would ask the two secretaries, who i want to begin by thanking. where are we? where are we in preparation of teachers? you just made reference to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace the overwhelming number of teachers in public education in the united states, but the reality is, the preparation has not changed a lot. if you could comment on that. >> i wanted thank you for the huge courage you have shown. i do not know if anyone has taken any more -- taken on any more than you. that would not have happened

without you putting your neck way out there. i appreciate that. 64% of young teachers say they're unprepared to do their job. two-thirds of our teachers. if two-thirds of our doctors were unprepared to practice medicine, we would have a revolution in this country. we have some skills and challenges. wwe have some challenges. i think we have not done enough to challenge the status quo. two big complaints, not enough real education. not -- i talked to all these great teachers who are using all these formative assessments to take their craft to a different level. they are learning that on the job.

they say, why did not learn that when i was -- when i was in my school of education? we have not done enough to incentivized those schools better doing the right thing and to move the resources from those who are not. i am happy to talk more about this, i am conscious of the time. we want to do a lot more about shining the spotlight on those who are doing a great job. you guys have a lot more power and authority than you realize in this area. no one ever closes down schools of education. i urge you to look at that. on data, louisiana tracks tens of thousands of teachers, hundreds of thousands of their teacher-student data track that back to schools of education. they are changing their curriculum in the schools based

upon the real data. there a couple of other states moving in that direction. i do not understand by 50 states do not do that. this is nothing unique. it is a lack of courage. louisiana probably does this as well as anyone. three or four others are doing this, not perfect, but a lot better than the openness. -- the opaqueness. >> a couple of quick adds. tfa another alternative certification models allow us to wire around some of this and create some different approaches. i would commend you all to make this a priority. the dirty little secret is you know better, colleges of education or a cash cow. they are a low-cost operations. everybody wants to cut a ribbon

at a health center, but pay attention who is minding the store. on your college of education. the incentive is, let's get more of these people in. this is going to sound odd, this is a place where you can work with your unions. they are as frustrated and ill served by colleges of education as anybody. it is a place where governors of all stripes can find common cause on some of these reforms. >> i yielded my time to gov. malloy. [laughter] >> is this an east coast conspiracy? >> i have something i will end with. >> you were talking about what i was going to ask about. we have taken a lot of

education reform steps in oklahoma. children have to read by the third grade. we have taken a lot of great steps. we measure our students and how they're performing, the greater our schools, but it goes back to what has been discussed. how do we measure the quality of the teacher in the classroom to make sure our teaching degrees that colleges get from our college of education -- i think that is where we have to look at some of our reforms as a nation. how do we not make it a default agreed? they mean something, too. a teacher's certificate from a

college of education degree mean something, too. >> the ability to take -- now that we have all this infrastructure and this data to look at -- where was she prepared? you all have treasure troves of data that can be mined for this sort of finding. you should do it. louisiana is a good example. >> this is a perfect segue into a lot of the challenges with our budgets. medicaid is going of 20% a year. we have had enormous increases. a lot of us have cut our funding in higher education. 46 states.

when the congress reauthorize the higher education act, there was a mandate that possibly could end up penalizing us in terms of college access. there is a waiver process. are we going to be able to work with the department on that? be able to get back to where we were? >> we are working with many states. i do not know your situation specifically. where states have to make cuts, we totally understand fiscal reality. we're trying to make sure that higher education was not cut disproportionately. we have to take it off line.

our goal is not to remove funds from states. our goal is to continue to invest. but we want to hold states accountable. >> part of the situation, unless you are -- you have to continue your medicaid. when it goes up 20%, the cuts to become disproportionate. -- when it goes up 20%, the cuts to students becomes disproportionate. that is the real issue. some states, like wyoming, are still sitting on surpluses. how do we resolve this? most of us are working hard to reduce our incarceration cost. that is not significant in terms of the same scale. >> happy to sit down with you. >> we have been discussing

eliminating the entire border between colorado and wyoming. [laughter] >> you have been discussing it more than i, governor. [laughter] >> you all been terrific. you talk about running a marathon. we have been here a while. if anyone has one last point they're dying to make -- you all have been terrific today. it would be a consensus of opinion that both of you have been the ideal of how cabinet secretaries should work with states. we're grateful for that. [applause] with that, there is nothing else we have to do right now. thank you very much for your attendance. [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> our coverage of the national governors' association meeting continues this weekend. live coverage saturday at 10:30 a.m. eastern here on c-span. >> this weekend on american history tv -- >> the campaign collection is about 100,000 objects. that is important for us. we're trying to keep this large tradition full and documented and reflect the larger story.

>> and a look at the smithsonian presidential campaign memorabilia collection. also on sunday, more from "the contenders," air series john keefe led a magic key political figures who ran for president and lost but changed politics. senator willkie would become an unlikely ally to fdr. at 7:30 p.m., american history tv this week and on c-span 3. >> speaking on the ground in syria where people have died in the 17-month-long conflict. she was in the country without the approval of the syrian government. she talked about the killings, the syrian government's response to the opposition and how the international community has responded to the violence in

syria. speaking from the center for strategic and international studies in washington, this is about an hour. >> i recently spent weeks in syria investigating civil rights abuses and for crimes. i was in syria without the approval of the syrian government. the syrian authorities have not allowed human rights realizations to access syria. so i crossed the border -- i think the term is "illegally." of this lay, inside syria, i worked in 23 different towns and villages and in three areas of

the country in the north. i would like to start talking about the biggest city, the wealthiest, the economic capital of syria. the last place in syria i am aware there is --where there is no armed confrontation between the citizens and the government forces. this city has been late in joining the protest movement. it did not start as early as 17 months ago as in other parts of the country. the protests have been exactly like other parts in the country.

every day i saw small demonstrations varying from a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people. within 15 minutes, the security forces would intervene. they're working alongside security forces and would fire live rounds assault, weapons but also hunting rifles. in a single day on may 25, 10 people were killed, 10 demonstrators and bystanders. two of them were children and several dozen were wounded. not only they fire on the crowds of administrations where there is no use of violence. people were sort of clapping with their hands raised above their heads to show they have

nothing in their hands. then they go after those who have been injured. this has been very much throughout the country from the beginning. cannot go to hospitals because they will be arrested. you have mostly young medical students, doctors, nurses, people who perform very important task which is providing life-saving emergency treatments. those people have been targeted by the regime. three weeks ago, three young man, medical students and an english students, were a part of a medical team who were providing treatment to injured demonstrators on the floor of apartments where they were at risk and the owners of the apartments were at risk.

the three were arrested and after a week their bodies were found with clear marks of torture. they had been shot in the heads and their bodies had been set on fire to give a clear message that it is not a good idea engage in this type of humanitarian tasks. this is just one of many examples. elsewhere in the other towns and villages, it was a different story. i was there in april and may and through the beginning of june, it was an open armed conflict with the armed opposition, which is present throughout the country in different strengths and government forces fighting it out and in rural areas.

but more importantly i went to the specific area to investigate a string of very brutal military incursions that have been carried out by syrian government forces and militia from late february through to early april. in all of the areas i found similar patterns. i will give you a couple of examples. security forces in one city into a house where three brothers were sleeping with their mother and their sister. they took the boys out. there were 822, 24, and 26. -- they were aged 22, 24, and 26. they were construction workers.

they had participated in demonstrations. they did not flee their village because they figured they had not done anything and they were not worried about the army. the army went into town the day before. they knew the army was coming to town. they were asleep when they were dragged off from their beds. there were shot in their heads outside their home and their bodies were set on fire. the mother and sister were not allowed to collect the bodies until 7:00 p.m. that night. in another place, the army swept in. a young man who was with the opposition ran up the hill to get his little cousins who were aged 8, 11, and 13, to get them back home.

the army caught up with them, made the four of them kneel on the ground and shot them dead. the little one was shot in the head and in the palm of the hand. other people were up in the hills looking after the sheep. other children in the area told me that he was kneeling on the ground with his hands up when he was shot. these are really individual examples of cases that i found by the dozens and for a period of five weeks that i spent in syria. in every single town and village that i visited, big or small, houses had been burned down to the ground.

in some villages, half of the houses, hundreds of homes as well as other property, medical facilities, pharmacists, field hospitals and also ordinary clinics were burned down. it wasn't just a question of some soldiers lighting amuck -- lighting a match because the burning was a thorough from wall-to-wall. some it incendiary devices were used which indicates a level of premeditation. soldiers on a normal round don't normally carry incendiary devices with them. does it do not carry hundreds

of incendiary devices with them. that is not what patrols carry. they would have to carry those with a specific intent. we cannot talk about possibly the actions of some rogue elements or acting on personal initiative -- that cannot be the case because the patterns are too similar. brutal execution, burning down of large numbers of home and property by different units who were operating in different parts of the country at different times. this is a state policy quite clearly. they also in every village took away mostly young men. those who were killed or mostly young men and also elderly people and children. it was the same for those who were arrested. the ones i could speak to were the lucky few who have been released. they bore horrendous marks of torture and open wounds.

they all said that they had got off lightly. we can believe that. those released were people the security forces no longer had any interest in or whose families paid a lot of money to get them out. a small number of cases. there are hundreds that we know about but many more who have disappeared and have been detained, some up to a year ago and they have never come back and the families have had no way of knowing where they are detained. when they contact the different intelligence agencies that are responsible for the detention, they are told that they are not there.

sometimes families manage to get some news because they hear from people who have been released and tell them, "i was detained with your son." in most cases they had no idea that their relatives have disappeared. as the conflict worsens, we have to be mindful of the behavior of the armed opposition. the armed opposition was formed after several months of peaceful demonstrations being shot at and demonstrators being killed and injured and anybody suspected of being involved with protests or demonstrations being rounded up and tortured and in some cases disappeared and in some cases killed. an armed opposition was formed and it is becoming stronger and

more organized. it is engaging in a more efficient way in recent weeks with government forces and gaining more ground in recent weeks. they, too, have begun to commit human-rights abuses. it is for now at the level of individual cases. we all know that in the situation of armed conflicts things can escalate very quickly. i would like to have a small digression on the issue of the term "civil war," which is being used in the media quite a bit when talking about the issue in syria. i do not think we are in the situation of civil war. as a kind of private initiative.

the monopoly of violence has been firmly in the hands of government forces. syria has a certain ethnic composition. sick. -- the secterian issue has not started with the uprising and goes back many decades. there's a danger because some of the development that we have seen since the first large- scale massacre that was reported on the 25th of may and in which has not completely been clarified until this day right up to the massacre that was reported last night. the reports in these cases which remain to be very -- they are all militias from villages going into sunni alleges with the -- into sunni villages

with the support of the armed forces that shell the area with artillery and then the militias going in and finishing the jobs, so to speak, killing people. government forces targeting their opponents because they are at their opponents and because they protest. the danger as the conflict continues is that it could acquire a greater sort of sectarian element, which would be very dangerous. i would like to end with a few words of the role of the international community.

everybody i met, if there was one question that everybody was asking was, why is the world doing nothing? why is the world watching? the syrian uprising took place during the arab spring and people in syria saw that in tunisia and egypt. people brought about change without it becoming armed conflict. in libya, it was a different story. there was intervention by the international community. in syria, the world has watched and has done nothing. the international community is paralyzed in a way that it was not in libya. looking at this from the perspective of a human rights

organization whose interest is first and foremost the protection of the civilian population. it is striking first of all if one goes back and looks at the kind of debate that was being had in the spring of 2011 at the syrian uprising. very quickly, the only option that was being discussed by the international committee. should there be a military intervention or not? but there was no discussion of any other initiative and there

could have been a number of initiatives. the situation in libya was referred to the international criminal court within two weeks of the first demonstration taking place. we are 17 months into what has been a brutal assaults on civilians. the leaders of the free world are still discussing whether it would be suitable to refer the case to the international criminal court. have seen the international community agreed last april to the setting up of the united nations mission in syria. it was a case of too littlte and too late. the un supervision mission in syria was there with the wrong mandate. it went in to observe the cease-fire. there was no cease-fire, not even for a single day. it was clear there was not going to be a cease-fire.

things had moved too far for a cease-fire to be a realistic option. two useful things that should have been done that would still be useful now would be for the situation in syria to be referred to the international court and for the mandate of the u.n. mission to be renewed not in its current form but to be expanded, to be given the authority and the necessary human skills and capacity to carry out investigation into war crimes that continue to be committed. the use of that would be that it would be sending a signal to the perpetrators of these abuses. the time for inpunity is over. it is regrettable that that

message was not delivered to the concerned parties right at the beginning. it is not too late to do so now and i'll stop there and be available for questions. >> thank you very much, donatella rovera. thank you for your comments. the challenge in syria from the operational ground level all the way up to the strategic picture, you have levels of complexity and a kind of challenge that the region has not seen in decades. my comments will focus on taking us from the internal to mention -- the internal dimension and the obstacles therein. the roots of the crisis are tied to social economic

disparity. the mismanaged distribution of natural resources. -- of national resources. the crisis has evolved at a pace and scale that has metastasized the internal politics of the opposition and the responses of the assad regime. one thing can be said about the assad response. every authoritarian system about -- why ever lesson from lybia and egypt and yemen, every authoritarian system about what to do to maintain power does

very little to translate into a path forward for a future for syrians and for a way out for the assad regime. it can only prolong the crisis. you have by far more polarized environment, no communication between assad and the opposition. this has now ballooned into a struggle for power in syria. that is shifting on both sides. you have on both sides an effort to shape a message in what is happening in syria. you have a battle for what the course is in terms of the right steps that the assad regime thinks they can take. versus the steps that the opposition is taking.

there is no thought that either side is inflating the picture to change the reality. but it doesn't change the fact the both sides have been battling to craft a message. this has been happening in the context where you have an environment that is far more divisive than at any point in the last few decades. syria now sits on a broader regional fault line, not necessarily by design but by default. the competition and the polarization along the rhetoric of -- the struggle is between the regime and a predominately sunni opposition. this fault line impacts the future. therein lies the gulf

competition with iran. kind of longevity in the access to lebanon and supports the has a lot and try to shape some of the outcomes in syria first is the gulf states that are trying to reshape the balance. this complicates their responses because you do have a difficulty in reaching any kind of consensus at the regional level over what to do about syria. everybody wants to negotiate as long as they get exactly what they want which is not exactly the definition for negotiation. beyond all this, the gulf states find themselves at a crucial crossroads in politics.

this is the first time that they can shape regional outcomes at a time when the three traditional pillars of the arab state system are either silent or unable to -- are either sidelined or unable to change events and that is shaped the tactical choices, this idea that whatever emerges locally will most likely be predominately sunni to be supported. all these things complicate the struggle that 16 months ago was essentially a grassroots efforts to shift the debate about what syria's future to look like, what economics should look like. there is no international community on syria.

there is not likely to be one in the near future. you've of actors like the united states that are struggling with the lessons from past experiences in places like lebanon and iraq. these are countries with deep communal divisions that the u.s. could not and cannot fix decisively in and a short-term effort. here in the context of a country like syria, there is -- that is close to the epicenter of an arab-israeli politics, it is critical to the stability of neighboring states like jordan, lebanon, iraq, and turkey. it affects the stability of israel as well. the reality of the view from washington is that there must be a strategic outcome in syria, one that maps out some kind of stability at a time when states like egypt remained unstable, jordan has seen a

shift in leadership over time, and all of this is critical in light of iraqi concerns about its own internal stability. none of these paid positive scenarios for the syrian future. you have a regime that will continue to repress and will continue to adopt the lessons learned from other cases of authoritarian failure but will not be able to chart a path forward. you have continued support from external actors which will make the kind of scenarios and on the ground experiences that the syrian people are suffering all the more intractable overtime. this will be a long-term crisis and even have assad were removed or left, it would not change the reality that whoever runs syria will have to face the socio-economic, political and economic ramifications for the next decade if not longer. we can talk about the other points during the question and

answer period. >> ladies and gentlemen, let me throw things open for questions but before i do so, let me ask a favor of you. if you look around, you can see how many people are in the audience. a lot of them are going to want to ask questions. i'm going to ask you the favor of actually asking a question, not making a statement or a speech, having the question of simple enough so the panel has a chance of actually answering it, and before you actually ask that question, could you please indicate to you are and the organization you are a member of if it is an organization you're speaking for. with that, let me ask you as the first question? forgive me if i don't identify those of you i know by name. i will just point but the lady and the front row -- please,

>> barbara slavin from the atlantic council. the question is -- we read that the opposition forces within the country are getting stronger and they have a defect of control -- have de fact control over large swaths of the countryside. is that the case and, if so, what are you so pessimistic route -- about their ability to defeat the assad forces? >> in the whole of the north which is where is i was and is no different in other parts of the country, it is kind of a shared management of the land, if you will. the government forces are present. have checkpoints on the main

roads and sometimes they put up flying checkpoints at intersections with smaller roads and the smaller roads you can move if you are careful and always check ahead that there is not a sudden flying checkpoint. ofs that kind of division labor -- also on the main roads at night, the government forces tend to kind of lock themselves up in the tanks and not stay very visible. i would not say there is total control that the opposition has anywhere but they certainly have operational ability to move around. >> thanks for your question. you have to understand a static snapshot of what is happening

along the frontier with turkey is something that is not going to capture the scale of what is happening between the regime forces and these units that are operating as part of the opposition. there have been reports, none of them completely accurate, about command and control by opposition forces in places. the mapping we have seen suggests over a significant portion of the promise, they are -- of the province, they are reporting and i am suspect about that. there are indicators that there are strong pockets of control along the turkish frontier. there is a reluctance now by the syrian military to send the kind of messages that could aggravate further an already difficult dynamic with turkey. that being said, the assad regime still has enormous repressive capability. they have always expected as far back as the early 1980's that the next battle the security apparatus would have to

face is not unlike what they saw in the 1970's and 1980's. you have an ideological military and far too many desertions as opposed to defections and you still have a fair amount of command control but the challenge this patrician battle -- this attrition battle really poses to the regime is that they are engaged in a struggle that always shifts, it is like a game of whack-a-mole and does not -- has learned not to stay and fight to the and it will drag things out further. that is partly why i am a pessist. neither side is able or willing to make the kinds of decisions that slow the pace of violence. i would not be surprised if we're talking about this kind of cycle well into the end of the year if not into next year.

>> i'm going to try to spread things around the room. the gentleman next to the gentleman with the microphone. >> thank you. i have been listening for months on this thing and have been waiting for someone to give a percentage of population of syria. >> to ask a question please? >> i would like to find out what is the percentage of opposition as opposed to assad forces. >> why we take a couple of other questions at the same time? the gentlemen and the second row there. -- in the second row there. >> i appreciate and things are more horrific than they thought. i was surprised that the role of sectarianism is not bigger. could you draw more of the sectarian roles and how they

play in this? >> one more question? the gentlemen in the front row. >> thank you. my question is for the entire parent. -- entire panel. when you look from lebant to the bay of bengal, what does the panel think the chances for all this violence in syria to spill over to jordan, turkey, and elsewhere and become a catalyst for a larger regional conflict? >> i think we would all love to know the percentage but the situation in syria just does not make it possible to conduct that kind of research. there is either people and

journalists in syria with government approval and their movements and their actions are tightly controlled and observe and monitor. then there is others who go in illegally and have other challenges in terms of how much they can move about and what they can do and so on. it is very difficult to know with any degree of certainty either what is the percentage of support amongst the population for one side or the other on the one hand as well as a exactly -- the numbers in terms of what is in the syrian army, that is reasonably well known. what is less well known is how many people have actually defected. the figure is very -- the figures vary greatly. i have not seen a figure of the exact number of members of the armed forces that have deserted

that i consider to be reliable. i think there are various figures. it is still a small percentage. spill over potential -- i would like to rewind back to libya. that was one place where the international community acted or reacted with lightning speed. everybody was united pretty much on what to do. there was a small group of people who named them sells the national transitional council that essentially represented themselves, not anybody else but they had good contacts mostly in the western capitals in america and europe.

all whole world fell in love with them, completely forgot any of the people. i was in ban gauzy and -- benghazi and everybody thought libya was going to be so easy because there are not the sectarian issues you have in syria with different communities. it is very homogeneous. and they forgot about tribal differences. the regime in libya fell and now you have 100 nations in a single -- 100 militias in a single city and many hundreds more and when there are disagreements, people don't sell that and more by punching it out but they fire rockets at each other from across the street. the situation is very messy, indeed. in terms of when you talk about spill over, the parameters of analysis that have existed for a long time in the middle east have been sort of thrown up in

the air in the last year. it is because those who brought about change have not been the traditional oppositions. in any of these countries, they are trying to play a role now to a larger or smaller degree of success but certainly, the opposition played no role from tunisia to syria. it has been young people who have just come out and got us to where we are in the different countries. i see too many of the parameters of the old analysis that have been used for decades to predict what may or may not happen and i don't see not taking into account analyzing the situation today of a new reality that the actors have changed, at least the change that is deeply chicken the country. -- shaken the country. you still have the older guys trying to find a place in the

new egypt or the new tunisia when they were really not very present during the uprising and they did not play a decisive role, if any at all, in bringing about the downfall of the regimes. i think that is something to really bear in mind. the second thing i would say is that after the french revolutions, they got napoleon. it took many decades before democracy. what has happened in the middle east is the beginning of a process. it does not matter -- in each country there are challenges. in none of the countries, it is going to be great.

even in the best case scenario, there will be internal conflict, internal strife at different levels because people who have been denied the possibility to have a free press or free expression or free assembly for decades are going to need to find their own way to create spaces for debate, for resolving their differences. while applying the old parameters of analysis is worth bearing in mind, there are rather new elements. >> on the question if you can reliable man about the percentage that supports the opposition or supports the regime, it is hard enough to map out the players involved in politics as it stands. you will not get a reliable picture in terms of accurate

numbers. what is clear is that you do have a large cross-section of the syrian population that has to deal with the reality, the myth of a unified syria under some language of arab nationalism which has been pulled out of the equation. you now have communalism. you have communities like christian minorities and some heterodocs. they can be critical of assad but they don't know what the alternative is in terms of social economics and politics and security "is still a sizable popular support and even with the in the sunni community. have a significant portion within the armed forces that are hanging in there because of the real threat that they face

should there be some kind of debasqification. you have these kinds of defections are people being sidelined. on the question of sectarianism, the assad regime has widened the communal told -- the communal to mention the of largely -- largely lost control of that message. it has polarized society and you have the lot of mob politics that impacts this. the communal dimension and the potential divorce between communities could be a source of instability and require true leadership in that something as increasingly scarce in syria. in terms of the chances of spillover effects, with libya as a country that imploded and syria will exploit of things

continue, we already have instability in the northern provinces. they are launch platts -- bear launch pads for opposition activities and in syria, you have a sunni community in lebanon bettis in the same politics of the shiites before the and the 1970's. they feel they have no leaders and they have, because with-- and have common cause with their brethren in syria. lebanon has become increasingly unstable and subject to the effects of a potential tsunami of instability from syria. jordan has already seen a number of prime ministers come and go and it is not a good sign for stability in jordan and there are pressures there in a country that has fewer sources of revenue and is relying on external support for stability. even turkey has to face the

reality that it has an 800 + kilometre with syria and its own source of instability and iraq tested deal with its own sunni- -- iraq has to deal with its own sunni-shiite problems. in none of the countries where we have seen regime change or changes in the distribution of power do we have any sense of certainty that the players who are shaping events today will either be relevant or able to shape outcomes in the future. this is not the kind of cycle that one can assess in 2013 or 2012 alone. we will have to assess this overtime and who ultimately in harris the centers of power is deeply uncertain. -- inherits the centers of powers is deeply uncertain. >> i think that both panelists race an issue which needs far --

panelists have raised an issue which needs far more attention. these are changes taking place in the region which, for decades, as seen economic and demographic pressures build on a largely national level. there is varied little regional integration or regional economics accept for a local security arrangements. the pressures that are outlined will be extraordinarily difficult for any government to solve. that report to the conclusion -- that report drew the conclusion that many of them could not be adjusted by a company and government on -- in less than a decade simply because of the u.s. pressure, economic pressure, the disparities in income on the problems of governance. there's a warning that i think needs to be drawn particularly by americans, a confusion that there is an easy route to elections and elections produce

legitimate governments. historically, elections do not produce legitimate governments. virtually every election held in the post-colonial period did not produce a legitimate government or one that could survive for half a decade. the president historical even in -- the precedent historically even in europe is one that we might bear in mind. i remember a senior arab official making this point -- it was in st. for westerners to talk about an hour of spring when westerners have their own experience. they had a spring in 1848. last it arguably until 1914 and didiy what we want to keep in mind over time. the gentlemen in the second row over there and we will take another series of questions.

>> good morning. while it is clear to me who is supporting the regime, i would like to know in your opinion if it's true that in the opposition there are also minorities or is it just the sunni uprising? >> the gentle man in the far back over there. >> thank you. i'm a former prisoner from syria. you mentioned the icc. when need a resolution.

on not sure if i understood this but you describe the mission of the un observers as useless because there is nothing to see there. what you expected from expanding a useless group? there is lots of weapons and nobody will collect those and how you deal with those steps anybody picking up arms is in a position. >> thank you. the gentle man in the front row here. please -- >> good morning, i'm from the leadership academy in from the building.

what is the position of the international community on syria and today have any plans or actions to take on stabilizing the community and stopping the violence of syria? >> who supports the armed opposition was the first question. that is a good question and i think it is one where the answer is likely to possibly keep changing as the situation develops further. some of the armed groups that i saw operating in syria had one kalashnikov between four people. they were poorly armed. that has changed a little bit in recent weeks. the last week that i was there at the end of may, i saw some more and they have light weapons and a arms -- in the

hands of armed groups. they have been able to capture more weapons from a temporary military camps that they have been able to overrun. obviously, there are different players outside mostly who seem to be offering help. none of it is done very much in the open. i don't like to work with speculation but with facts. for now, i think there will not say anymore because i have no certainty and i don't like to speculate but certainly what i think is clear to all is that there are different players as in any other conflict who might have an interest and influence in things and may choose to do so by providing support of different kinds.

to the question over there, icc russia - it has not been tried. we have seen that russia and china agreed to the un mission to the kofi annan plan. it is regrettable that the international community did not think outside the box and did not try to address and look at options which were options outside the military intervention. that is what i think it's regrettable that from the very beginning, the debate that was had was should there be military intervention and not look at other options. there has been no serious attempt. it is quite clear that russia has been playing an obstructive role but it is too easy to just blame russia because even the

government's were talking tough today, only four weeks ago, there was an initiative by the swiss government precisely to rally support for going to the security council and tabling a resolution on referring syria to the icc and countries in the northern hemisphere were still saying that maybe we should give the kofi and non plan a chance. they have not tried and that is regrettable. with regard to the role and mandate of the u.n. mission, i did not say they were useless i said by the time they got there, the mandate that they were given was inadequate. there were there to observe a ceasefire and that was the mandate and there wasn't a ceasefire to observe and there will not be one to observe any

time soon. but what we would like to see is the mandate to be renewed but expanded -- for them to be given a mandate to investigate human rights abuses, crimes against humanity, war crime and if they're given the mandate, they will also be given the human resources necessary. in terms of the question on the role of the international community, as i said earlier, the international community has very much focused only on looking at the possibility for military information and -- intervention and decided that was not a good route to go down and it has not done very much else until now. >> in terms of the question on minority representation within the opposition, the reality is that by a factor as opposed to by design, it has been difficult to build an opposition

that has minorities and meaningful -- in meaningful leadership positions. there has certainly been syrians who belong to minority groups who have distanced themselves from assad but that does not change the fact that the opposition groups remain largely dominated by sunni demographics. you have to be careful about pigeonholing anyone group. many minority groups are cautious. on the question of the u.n. mission, and whether it should be renewed, you have to look at the alternate scenarios. includes a protracted civil war not unlike what you saw in algeria or lebanon which would go on unabated and with metastasize further and no one

will have a sense of what the outcome will be. beyond that, you have the prospects of deepening instability and communal division. the annan plan was the right idea at the wrong time and not supported by a mob of the players that mattered locally to say anything of international. is only now the people are starting to come around to the reality that this will become a very messy and long-term crisis. in any form, there needs to be some prospect of diplomatic effort. a lot of what we are seeing is deeply depressing and-on syria. that does not mean one has to completely close of the diplomatic channels. on the question of whether or not, what is the position of

the international community -- again, there is no international community on syria. you have a very divided political sphere. have disunity in the security council. you have russia that is deeply suspicious of any western efforts in syria. it is based on what they view as the erosion of their interests in the region to say nothing of their own internal pressures tied to the expansion of nato and all of these things make it very difficult to chart and a meaningful course when it comes to syria. it is not very good answer but it is as close to the truth as i can find and it is not clear what any player at the international level can do in the short term to stymie the violence. >> ladies and gentlemen, i've been instructed to end this discussion formally at 11:30. i would like to thank dontatella very much of giving us a human rights picture. i would like to thank aram for providing perspective encourage

you think and in the usual manner? [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> tomorrow, on "washington journal" -- with your calls, tweets, and emails live at 7:00 a.m.

eastern. you can watch more of the national governors' -- governors' association meeting this weekend on c-span. a panel on new strategies to lower medicaid costs. a round table discussion about veterans welfare. on sunday they wrap up with a look at the ways states can support entrepreneurship. president obama talks about his middle-class tax cut plan at a campaign rally this evening. the event was held in the historic fire station number one and is part of his campaign tour of virginia. it was the first time a sitting president has held an event and rhino since jimmy carter in 1967. he became the first candidate to win virginia.

before the president you will hear from mark warner and tim kaine. this is a little over one hour. >> hello ron noble. and this crowd looks fantastic. i hope everybody is ready to win a big election this november. remember in 2008 they did not think we could do that. they did not think virginia would get behind president obama. we showed they were wrong and we were right. we are going to show them again this year, are we not? absolutely. it is great to be back and run

up. my wife is a roanoker. we have had a great day and have done events and virginia beach, the hamptons, it is nice to be enstar city. you look great. i know the president is looking forward to be out in a few minutes. i have been on the battlefield myself for the past 15 months. everywhere i go people in virginia talk about what they are wanting to see, what they want to see improved in washington. first virginians when a president and a leader who will create jobs and rebuild our economy. president obama is that leader. [applause] i know you know this. when he took office we were losing 750,000 jobs every month. since he took office our

businesses have brought back 4.4 million americans. the stock market is back up and we are making critical investments in infrastructure and education. we know we have a long way to go. we tried putting insurance companies in the charge and it made our mass weaker not stronger. we tried tax breaks for oil companies and other businesses who did not need them. it made us weaker and not stronger. we tried racking up millions of

dollars in debt from two unfunded wars from tax cuts that were not paid for and other programs that made us weaker and not stronger. we cannot afford to go back to the ideas that put us there. that is why we need president obama. he will make us stronger. what virginians say is that they want leaders who will help us tackle our fiscal damaged -- fiscal problems the right way. that is why we need to re-elect president obama. he has offered a balanced approach, one that protects the fragile recovery while restoring fiscal responsibility. let's talk about the other side. the last time they had the reins they took us to massive deficits and racked up trillions of dollars in debt. now they are proposing deeper cuts to clean energy. to education, to defense.

they are advocating protecting special interests while shipping costs onto the back of middle- class families and seniors. that would make as weaker not stronger. they are promising to gut medicare. to explore dramatic changes, even privatization of social security. that would make us weaker, not stronger. as governor i had to make a lot of tough cuts. i was governor during a tough time. we can do it without compromising on the promises we make. president obama knows it. he will make us stronger, not weaker. finally, and maybe most important, what virginians tell me as i travel a run the state is that -- talk about a novel idea, we need people who know how to work together. is that so hard?

people who do not come into as pledging to be an obstructionist with the president but actually putting the needs of our citizens and the economy first. let's elect some people who know how to work together. the president has been doing that since the day he entered public life long before he was an elected official when he was working in communities and bringing people together. as part of what he does every day whether there is a hand on the other side. this president is always reaching out a hand to work together. we have seen a different philosophy and washington. a couple of weeks ago there was a hurricane relief and flood insurance bill up in the senate. it needed to happen quickly because of hurricane and flooding in the gulf. a senator decided he will block it. he put an amendment on it to make personhood legislation at

the federal level that would outlaw abortion and much fda- approved contraception. this is a flood insurance bill. this is a hurricane relief bill. they come up with a wedge issues. we know what wedge issues are. they are designed to pull us apart. we do not need more wedge issues in this country. we need glue issues that will pull us together. that is the kind of leader president obama is. you saw a state legislative session where we were supposed to be focusing on jobs and the economy. instead they did things like pass invasive alter some legislation degrading to women. making it harder for people to vote. there are two kinds of leadership. we can have people who want to work together like president obama or we can pick the kind of leadership that is divisive.

that makes us weaker, not stronger. that is why we need barack obama reelected because he will continue us down the right path. [cheers and applause] some of you might have seen a lot of tv ads about politics. i think my face my view and one or two of them. there are ads that suggest that it is anti virginian to support the president of the united states. [boos] there are ads that suggest it is anti virginian to support this president of the united states. [boos] i feel the same way. i believe all virginians should one our president to succeed regardless of party. when our president succeeds, our nation succeeds. [applause] i had a blast working with

president obama my last year as governor to help the nation and virginia get through a tough time. three years before that i was governor and president bush was president. we disagreed with a lot but i did not define myself as his obstructionist. i said we want a partner for everything we can for the good of the country and the good of the commonwealth. we need a president and elected officials to understand that. we were the state -- we are a state that was the birthplace of an awful lot of united states presidents. is it anti virginian to support the president of the united states? i know you can do better than that. >> no. >> we are a state where one in four or one in five of us are active duty, active reserve, veterans, military families, contractors, this huge community

that has pledged support for the military and commander in chief. is it anti virginian to support the commander in chief? they may suggest it is but we know that it is not. we work together and we support each other and we support this president. that is the right thing to do for the commonwealth and this country. [cheers and applause] i will conclude and say this. i am optimistic about this country's feature. we live the through tough times. we live through the toughest times since the 1930's. we have been through tough times before. we are tough people. tough times do not last. tough people last. one of the reasons we last is we are not just tough but we are optimistic. he watched the doom and gloom that the other side cranked out nonstop. they want to talk the president down. the want to talk anything down

they can. i saw an interview recently with donald runs feld. he was asked, would you not at least admit the president did a good job in taking out osama bin laden? he would not complement the president on that. he said that would have only taken a leader 15 minutes and the first 14 minutes would have been getting a cup of coffee. it is up to us and virginia not just to win this election but to be the voices of practical, can do american optimism that have always brought us a head and will always move us forward. let me just say this and conclude and there will be two more wonderful speakers. senator warner and the president of the united states. before 2008, let's be honest with ourselves.

we were virginia voters and we cared about the presidential elections but we would have to turn on tv and oriental central time to see how ohio did or mountain time to see how some other states did because we really did not have much hope we could put electoral votes behind our can did it. we did not have hoped we would be pivotal to the election of a president. what we showed in 2008. you remember they called virginia for the president and within two minutes they call the united states for the president because virginia was pivotal. i guess what i want to say is, we did it in 2008. we do not have to be taught how to do it. we know how to do it. who is ready to do it? [cheers and applause] all right. we will win this election with your help and with the behind us. we cannot fail. i look forward to being back.

have a great night. [cheers and applause] [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, to introduce the president of the united states, please welcome mark warner.

[cheers and applause] >> hello roanoke. you look marvelous. i have to tell you, it has been 35 years since a sitting president of the united states visited this roanoke valley. are you not proud it is barack obama? [cheers and applause] we have an amazing evening. we had an amazing day. it has been said, we are all here tonight because we know the elections have consequences. i have to tell you.

and washington, i know that every day i go to work. we have a crown particularly in the house that only one to say no. they do not want to bring the president up on anything. one thing i ask of you before we get to the main event, you just heard before i came out somebody who has been my friend for 30 years. somebody who served as a great member of the city council and mayor of richmond. before he was governor i had the opportunity to work with them as my lieutenant governor. in addition to the president being on the ballot, will you send tim kaine as the next senator from the commonwealth of virginia? [cheers and applause] once again we are involved in a mighty electoral struggle. we have to make sure that we do

not elect the other side -- led the other side get away with their snappy sound bites. remember that when you are talking to voters over the rest of the summer and for the fall. remember that as we get flooded with hundreds of millions of dollars in tv ads from who knows to because they do not know who is paying for them, we cannot allow the other guys to rewrite history. do you remember -- i remember where they lead our country. we all remember back in 2008. we remember that this economy under the previous crowd of lost 8 million jobs. i am proud under president obama's leadership we have returned 4.4 million private- sector jobs to this economy. [cheers and applause]

this president recognizes this moment in time. is really not about red versus blue or left versus right. it is about the future versus the past. this president understands where the future of this commonwealth and this country needs to head. is a question of whether we will continue to invest in the infrastructure, and research at virginia tech. do we have any hokies in the crowd tonight? this president who believes america is stronger what we have a strong manufacturing base and demonstrated that by making sure our auto industry is the strongest the center of the world. it is great that we make things again in america. we can do more. he knows that as we sort through this globally competitive world you should not have to leave your home town to

find a world-class job. the the kids in southwest virginia ought to have the same opportunities as the kids in northern virginia or anywhere else in the world. we have many young people here tonight? [cheers and applause] because he turned out in record numbers and enter 2008, virginia surprise the world because of your support for this president and he has not forgotten that. he has not forgotten that by making sure we have more investment and pell grants and making more investment and community colleges. making sure student loans do not have a doubling of their interest rates. [cheers and applause] when we were on our earlier tonight, tim said we are blessed to have a rich military heritage of any state in our nation.

i am proud of our commander in chief and what he has done to take out the leadership of al qaeda. i am a product of tax he has not only said he will member veterans, but he has honored that commitment. -- proud of the fact. here we are again, virginia. the eyes of the nation are going to be upon us again. are you prepared to do your part? [cheers and applause] in 2008, we changed the guard. in 2012, we will guard the change. [cheers and applause] say it with me. in 2008 we changed the guard. in 2012, we are the change. ladies and gentlemen, please welcome me in welcoming the

president of the united states, our president barack obama. [cheers and applause] ♪ >> hello roanoke. [cheers and applause] it is good to be back in virginia.

there are a couple of people i want to acknowledge. first of all, you have one of the finest senators and public servants in the country in mark warner. give it up for mark warner. [cheers and applause] mark was a great governor for the commonwealth of virginia. now he is a great senator. i just want to point out we have another great governor of the commonwealth of virginia. he is going to be a great senator. we are thrilled to have them both with us today. i want to thank mayor byers who is here. the fire chief. [cheers and applause] all of you are here. [cheers and applause] i could not ask for a nicer setting.

it is beautiful flying into roanoke. let me just say, unless you have managed to break your television sets, you are probably aware that it is campaign season. i know it is not always pretty to watch. we are saying more money flooding into the system than ever before. more negative ads, more cynicism. a lot of reporting is about who is up or who is down at the polls since of talking about things that matter and enter your day to day life. i know all this makes it tempting to turn off the tv set, turn away from politics. there are some people betting that you lose interest.

the fact that you are here tells me you are still ready to work to make this a better country. [cheers and applause] you are still betting on hope and you are betting on change and i am still betting on you. [cheers and applause] i love you back. [cheers and applause] let me just say this. >> four more years! four more years! four more years! >> if i win virginia, i am going to get four more years. [cheers and applause] that i can say with some

confidence. the reason you are here tonight is because no matter how petty and small politics seems sometimes, you recognize that the stakes could not be bigger. in some ways the stakes are even bigger than 2008. what is not at stake is just two people or two political parties. what is at stake is a decision between two fundamentally different views about where we take the country right now. the choice is up to you. now, this is my last political campaign. it is true. there is a term-limit thing to the presidency. you get two. this will be my last campaign. it makes too nostalgic sometimes. i started thinking about my first campaigns when i was traveling across illinois. illinois is a big state and it

has cities like chicago and small towns and rural areas and suburban areas. and you meet people from every walk of life -- black, white, native american. you stop at diners and go to churches and go to synagogues. wherever you go, you are going to have a chance to meet people from different walks of life. when i think about the first campaign. what strikes me is that no matter where i went and no matter who i was talking to, i could see my own life in the life in people whose vote i was asking for. i have met an elderly vet and i think about my grandfather who fought in world war ii. my grandmother worked on the bomber assembly line.

i think about how would my grandfather came back home, because of this country he was able to get an education on the gi bill. they were able to buy their first home using an fha loan. i would mean a single mom somewhere and i would think about my mother. i never knew my dad. he left when i was barely a baby. my mother was struggling and she had to go back to school and raise a kid. later raising my sister. she had to work while she was in school. despite all of that, because she was in america, she was able to get grants and scholarships and her kids are able to get grants and scholarships. they could go as far as their

dreams could take them. you know, i have talked to some working people. i think about michelle's family. her dad who was a blue-collar worker and work that day water filtration plant in chicago. her mom was a secretary. despite never having a lot, there was so much love and so much passion. her dad had ms so he had to wake up an hour earlier to get to work. he never missed a day of work. he took pride in the idea that, you know, i will earn my way and look after my family. i see that same pride in the people i was talking to. what this reminded me of at the

heart of this country, its central idea is the idea that in this country if you are willing to work hard, if you are willing to take responsibility, you can make it if you try. that you can find a job as supportive family. you can find a home you can make your own. that you will not go bankrupt when you get sick. that may be, you can take a little vacation with your family once in a while. that you can find a job that supports a family. and find a home you can make your own. that you will not go bankrupt when you get sick. maybe you can take a little vacation with your family once in awhile. nothing fancy but just time to spend with those you love. maybe see the country a little bit. maybe come down to roanoke. [applause] that your kids can get a great education and if they are willing to work hard, they can

achieve things he would not have even imagines achieving. then you can maybe retire with some dignity and some respect and be part of a community and give something back. that is the idea of america. it does not matter what you look like. it does not matter where you come from. it does not matter what your last name is. you can live out the american dream. that is what binds us all together. [applause] the reason that i think so many of us came together in 2008 was because we saw that for a decade, that dream was slipping away. there were too many people who were working hard but not seen

their incomes or wages go up. we had taken a surplus and turned it into a deficit. we were running to wars on a credit card. job growth was the most sluggish it has been in 50 years. there was a sense that those who were in charge did not feel responsible and so we came together to say we are going to get about the kinds of changes that allow us to get back to those basics. allow us to restore and live out those values. but we did not realize that some of the recklessness, some of that irresponsibility would lead to the worst financial crisis we have seen since the great depression. i do not need to tell you what we have been through over the last three and a half years because you have lived it. too many folks lost job, too

many people saw their savings take a hit. but you know what is giving me confidence and faith is the fact that as i have travelled around the country just like i used to travel around illinois, that same decency, those same values are still alive. at least outside washington. [applause] times have been tough but america's character has not changed. the core decency of the american people is undiminished. our willingness to fight through and work through the tough times and come together, that's still there. just as we came together in the last campaign, not just democrats but republicans and independents, because we are not democrats or republicans first. we are americans first.

[applause] just like we came together in 2008, we know that we have to keep working, keep moving toward in 2012. we knew back then that it was not going to be easy. these problems we are facing, they did not happen overnight. they will not be solved overnight. we understood it might take more than one year or one term or even one president. but what we also understood was that we were not going to stop until we have restored that basic american promise that makes us the greatest country on earth. [applause] our goal isn't just to put people back to work although that is priority number one. it is to build an economy where the work pays off. an economy where everyone,

whether you are starting a business or punching a clock, can see your hard work and responsibility rewarded. that is what this campaign is about, roanoke, and that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. [applause] crowd: four more years! four mroore years! four more years! >> let me say this -- it is fashionable among some pundits, this happens every time america hits a rough patch. it is fashionable to say this time is different, this time we really are in the soup. it will be hard to solve our problems. what is missing is not big

ideas. what is missing is not that we have got an absence of technical solutions to deal with issues like education or energy or our deficit. the problem we have right now is we have a stalemate in washington. and the outcome of this debate we are having is going to set the stage, not for just the next year or five years but the next 20. on the one side, you have my opponent in this presidential race and his republican allies. no, no, look -- we are having a good, healthy, democratic debate. that is how this works. on their side, they have a basic theory about how you grow the economy. the theory is very simple -- they think that the economy grows from the top down. so their basic theory is if

wealthy investors are doing well, everybody is doing well. if he spent trillions of dollars on more tax cuts mostly for the wealthy, that is somehow going to create jobs. even if we have to pay for it by cutting education, transportation projects and maybe see middle-class folks have a higher tax burden. they believe if you tear down all the regulations be put in place, for example on wall street banks or on insurance companies or on credit card companies or on polluters, that somehow the economy is going to do much better. those are there to theories. the tax cuts for the high end and rollback regulations. here is the problem.

you may have guessed -- we tried this. we tried this in the last decade and it did not work. now, before i finish, can i say by the way that some of you have been standing for a while and i see a couple of folks slumping down a little bit. make sure your drinking water. bend your knees, do not stand up too straight. the paralegals will -- the paralegals. [laughter] you don't need lawyers. the paramedics will come by to give folks a little help. this happens every event. >> we love you. >> i love you back. [applause] but i just want to point out

that we tried their theory for almost ten years. and here is what it got us -- we got the slowest job growth in decades. we got deficits as far as the eye can see. your incomes and your wages did not go up. and it culminated in a crisis because there were not enough regulations on wall street and they could make reckless bets with other people's money that resulted in this financial crisis and you had to foot the bill. so that's where their theory turned out. now, we do not need more top- down economics. i have a different view. i believe that the way you grow the economy is on the middle out. i believe that you grow the economy from the bottom up. i believe that when working people are doing well, the

country does well. [applause] i believe in fighting for the middle class because it they are prospering, all of us will prosper. that is what i am fighting for and that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. [applause] >> four more years! >> this is what i have been focused on since i have been in office. in 2008, i promised to make sure the middle class taxes did not go up. because the recession, you needed help so we cut the income taxes by $3,600. [applause] if you hear somebody say i am a big tax guide, you just remember $3,600 for the typical family. that is the tax break you have

gotten since i have been in office. [applause] four years later, i am running to keep middle-class tax is lower. this week, i called on congress to immediately extend income tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income. what that means is 98% of americans make less than $250,000 so that you would have the security that your income taxes would not go up a dime. this was not some campaign promise. if congress does not do anything now, on january 1, almost everybody here, your taxes will go up. on average of $1,600. you would think this makes sense. republicans say they are the party with no new taxes. that is what they always say.

excepts so far, they have refused to act. this might confuse you. if you might say why would they not want to give 90% of americans and the certainty of this income tax cut? it turns out, they do not want you to get your tax rate unless the other 2%, the top 2%, they get their tax break as well. now, understand, the top 2%, all we are the ones most benefited from the last decade and not only tax breaks but also a lot of the money from increased profits and productivity went up to that top 2%.

the bottom line is, the top 2% does not need help. i understand why they would not want to pay more taxes. nobody wants to. but if you continue their tax breaks, that costs $1 trillion. since we are trying to bring down our deficit and debt, if we spend $1 trillion on tax cuts for them, we will have to find that $1 trillion somewhere else. that means we might have to make it look more expensive for students or we might have to cut back on the services we are providing our great veterans when they come home. or we might have to stop investing in basic science and research that keeps us as a leading edge economy. or, as they have suggested, maybe we would have to turn medicare into a voucher program. i do not think those are good

ideas. what i have said to the republicans is let's have this debate about the tax cuts for the wealthiest folks but in the meantime, let's do what we agree on which is give 98% of americans some certainty and security. [applause] so far, they have not taken me up on my offer. this gives you a sense of how congress works these days. you have the possibility of your taxes going up a dental four, five months and instead of working on that, guess what they worked on this week? they voted for the 33rd time to try to repeal a health-care bill we passed two years ago, after the supreme court said it is constitutional and we are

going to go ahead and implement that law. [applause] i do not know about you, virginia, but i think they have a better way to use their time. i think helping you make sure your taxes did not go up, that would be a good use of congressional time. this is just a small example of the difference between myself and mr. romney, between myself and the republicans running congress. look, virginia, i want to repeat -- this is a choice. if you think their way of doing things is a recipe for economic growth and helping the middle class, you should vote for them. you can send those folks to washington. i promise you they will carry out what they promised to do. but that is not what i went to washington.

i went to washington to fight for the middle-class. i went to washington to fight for working people who are trying to get into the middle class and have some sense of security in their lives. people like me and mr. romney do not need another tax cut. you need some help right now to make sure your kids are living the kind of life you want for them. and that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. [applause] on almost every issue, you have the same kind of choice. when the auto industry was about to go under, when million jobs lost, my opponent said let's let detroit go bankrupt. what did i say? i am betting on america's workers. i am betting on american industry. guess what? three years later, gm is number

one again and the american auto industry is rolling back. so i believe in american manufacturing. i believe in making stuff here in america. my opponent, he invested in companies who are called pioneers of outsourcing. i believe in in sourcing. i want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas. let's give tax breaks to companies investing right here in the united states. let's invest in american products -- american workers to the commit product and ship them around the world with those words made in america. [applause] i am running because our men and women in uniform have sacrificed so much.

we could not be prouder of them and we cannot be prouder of our veterans. because of their efforts, i was able to keep my promise and end the war in iraq. [applause] i now intend to transition out of afghanistan and bring our troops home. [applause] what i said is, because of their outstanding work, we have been able to decimate al qaeda and take out bin laden. [applause] so now it is time for us to take half of the money we are saving on war, pay down our deficit and use the other half to do some nation-building here at home. roanoke knows something about transportation. this is a railroad hub for a

long time. so you know how important that is to growing an economy. let's take some of that money and rebuild our roads and bridges and rail systems. let's build wireless networks in rural communities so everybody can tap into world markets. let's put construction workers back to work. in doing what they do best -- rebuilding america. that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. that is the choice to face. i am running to make sure that our kids are getting the best education in the world. [applause] when i came in office, we passed the tuition tax credit that has saved millions of families out of dollars. now i want to extend it but i

do not want to stop there. we want to fight thanks to some of the folks here, including students from vt, we want to fight to make sure that the loan interest rates would not double. but that is not enough. i want to lower tuition to make it more affordable for all young people. [applause] i want to help our elementary schools and middle schools, our high schools. hire more teachers. especially in math and science. i want to million more people to be able to go to community colleges to get trained in the jobs that businesses are hiring for right now. [applause] because of higher education, a good education is not a luxury. it is an economic necessity. that is how we are going to win the race for the future and that is what i am running for a second term as president, to

finish the job we started in 2008. now, we got another person down there. ok. we see him. we've got a deal with home ownership. and the fact of the matter is that my opponent's philosophy when it comes to dealing with homeowners is let the bottom fall out. i do not think that is part of the solution, that is part of the problem. what i want to do is i want to let every single person refinance their homes and save about $3,000 a year because he will spend that $3,000 on some of the stores right here in downtown.

you will help small businesses and large businesses grow because they will have more customers. it will be good for you and it will be good for the economy. that is why i am running for a second term as president because i want to help american homeowners. [applause] i am running because i still believe that he should not go bankrupt when you get sick. [applause] we passed that health care law because it was the right thing to do. and because we did, 30 million people who do not have health insurance will get help getting health insurance. 6 million young people who did not have health insurance can now stay on their parents' plan and get health insurance. seniors are seeing their prescription drug costs go down and by the way, if you have

health insurance, you are not getting hit by a tax. the only thing that is happening to you is that you now have more security because insurance companies cannot drop you when you get sick. and they cannot mess around with you because of some fine print in your policy. if you're paying your policy, you will get the deal if you paid for. that is why we passed health care reform. [applause] one last thing -- one of the biggest differences is how we pay down our debt and deficits. my opponent, mr. romney's plan is, he wants to cut taxes and other $5 trillion on top of the bush tax cuts. the only way you can pay for that if you're actually saying you're bringing down the deficit, is to cut transportation, cut education, cut the basic research, about

arise medicare and he would still end up having to raise taxes on middle-class families to pay for this $5 trillion tax cut. that is not a deficit reduction plan. that is a deficit expansion plan. i have got a different idea. i do believe we can cut. we have already made $1 trillion worth of cuts. we can make more cuts in programs that did -- that did not work and make government work more efficiently. not every government program works the way it is supposed to. frankly, government cannot solve every problem. if somebody does not want to be helped, government cannot always tell them. parents, we can put more money into schools but if your kids to not want to learn, it is hard to teach them. but you know what, i am not going to see us gut the investments that grow our

economy to give tax cuts to those who do not need them. so i will reduce the deficit in a balanced way. we can make another $1 trillion cut and ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more. by the way, a guy named bill clinton did it. we created 23 million new jobs. turning a deficit into a surplus in which people did just fine. we created a lot of millionaires. there are a lot of wealthy, successful americans who agree with me because they want to give something back. they know that if you have been successful, you did not get there on your own. i am always struck by people who think it must be because i was just so smart.

there are a lot of smart people out there. it must be because i worked harder. let me tell you something, there are a whole bunch of hard- working people out there. [applause] if you are successful, somebody along the lines gave you some help. there was a great teacher somewhere in your life. somebody helped to create this unbelievable american system that we have that allows you to thrive. somebody invested in roads and bridges. if you have a business, you did not build that. somebody else made that happen. the internet did not get invented on its own. government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off of the internet. the point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative but also because we do things together.

there are some things just like fighting fires that we do not do on our own. and imagine if everybody had their own fire service. that would be a hard way to organize fighting fires. so we say to ourselves ever since the founding of this country, there are some things we do better together. that is how we thought it the gi bill and created the middle- class. that is how we build the golden gate bridge or the hoover dam. that is how we invented the internet are sent a man to the moon. we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people and that is the reason i am running for president because i still believe in that idea. you are not on your own. we are in this together. [applause] all of these issues, all of these issues go back to the first campaign that i talked about. everything has to do with how

do we help middle-class families, working people, strivers, doers, how do we help them succeed? that is what i had been thinking about the entire time i have been president. the other side will spend more money than we have ever seen in history and they do not really have a good argument for how they do better but they are thinking they can win the election if they just remind people that a lot of people are still out of work in the economy is not growing as fast as it needs to and it is all obama's fault. that is basically there is. -- their pitch. and they will run more of these ads. there will be more variations on the same theme but it will be the same basic message over and over and over again. now, their ads may be a plan to

win an election but it is not a plan to put people back to work. it is not a plan to strengthen the middle-class. the reason it does not worry me is because we have been outspent before. we have been counted out before. the pundits, they did not think i could win virginia the last time. the last time i came to this part of virginia, all of the political writers said he is not serious. he is just making a tactical move. no, i am serious. i am going to get some votes out here. [applause] and so the reason that i continue to have confidence is because when i look at you, i see my grandparents.

when i see your kids, i see my kids. and i think about all of those previous generations, our parents and grandparents and great grandparents, some of them came here as immigrants. some were brought here against their will. some of them worked on farms and some work on mills and on the real world but no matter where they worked, they always had faith there was something different about this country. that in this country, you have some god-given rights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. and a belief that all of us are equal. and we are not guaranteed success but we are guaranteed

the right to work hard for success. [applause] they understood that and they understood that succeeding in america was not about how much money was in your bank account but it was about whether you were doing right by your people. doing right by your family. doing right by your neighborhood. doing right by your community. doing right by your country. living out our values, living out our dreams, living out our hopes. that is what america was about. [applause] and so when i look out at this crowd, you inspire me. [applause] and i have to tell you that the privilege of being your president is something that i

thank god for every single day. i said to you in 2008 when i was running, i am not a perfect man. you can ask michelle about that. and i told you i would not be perfect president will what i did say to you was that i would always tell you what i thought in where i stood and that i would wake up every single morning thinking about you and fighting as hard as i knew how to make your life in a little bit better. [applause] and over these last three and a half years, i know times have been tough and i no change has not always come as fast as you would like but you know what? i kept that promise. i have thought about you. i have thought for you.

i believe in you. and if he still believe it in me, if you are willing to stand up with me and campaign with me and make phone calls for me and knocked on doors with me, i promise you we will finish what we started and we will restore the basic element that built this country and we will remind the world why is that america is the greatest nation on earth. god bless you and god bless the united states of america. [applause] ♪

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[applause] >> tomorrow on "washington journal," jack markell. columnist charles hurt will look at president obama and mitt romney's campaigns. and whether schools in the united states are challenging their students.

"washington journal" is at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. >> hitler had no plan. when he realized these armies were not coming to his aid, that is when he collapsed and he realized it was all come to an end and it was only a question of suicide. >> historian antony beevor on hitler's final days. >> his main objective was not to be captured alive through moscow. he was worried about being ridiculed. he was determined to die. eva braun was determined to die with him. >> more with him on c-span's q&a. >> governors from across the nation are gathered for the

104th national governors' association meeting. they opened the meeting and highlighted the challenges facing state government and governor dave heineman urged president obama to make tough policy decisions. virginia governor bob mcdonnell hosted the event. this is from the old capitol building in williamsburg. this is about 50 minutes. >> welcome to williamsburg. i hope everybody will get a chance to see why that rich history of the virginia, 405 years old now, is still alive and well. i am delighted to be the host governor for this national governors' association conference and i am delighted to be joined by the chairman of the national governors association, dave heineman of nebraska and vice-chairman, jack markell of delaware.

you will hear from him shortly. this place is the old house of virginia. we're literally history has been made. since 1607 when 144 brave men and boys landed at jamestown, virginia, they began the greatest experiment in human freedom and free enterprise and democracy i think the world has ever known. we are excited about the rich history still being alive in virginia. in 1619, the settlers first started what would become the oldest continuing legislative body in the entire free world and that is the general assembly of virginia where they convened in a small church at jamestown which people be able to see tonight. we are excited about the governor's being able to see that.

the old fort of jamestown was just discovered in 1996 with a sophisticated technology. they found the old footings of the fort. they are removing artifacts as we speak today. this place for you are today is a place built back in 1705 after the old capital in jamestown was burned several times. they felt there was a need to move inland away from the river. so the capitol building was built. the edifice you are in was rebuilt in 1747 after several fires. this would have been the place where the house of burgess and some of the great names of american history would have sat in this room and participated in a democracy.

george washington, thomas jefferson, george mason and others would have been in this building, in this room. the first two governors of virginia during the time that this was the capital of a virginia up until 7099, where -- 1779 were patrick henry, and thomas jefferson, the second. they would have been in this place with the speaker sitting right behind us addressing those assembled burgesses . it is a place where patrick henry railed against the stamp act in his famous speech. this place and this entire premise is rich in history from williamsburg to jamestown. this also happens to be the place where i was inaugurated in

2005 as attorney general of a virginia. the first inauguration since 1799. it was a real treat to honor the 400th anniversary of this country to be honored in a place like this. i cannot think of a better place for governors to love the country, who love the rich history of america. whatever stake are from, i know they join me in believing this is the greatest and most prosperous country on earth and we want to do everything we can as governors to do things that are positive and effective in our respective states to keep things alive and well. this is something that i hoped will be a great source of inspiration not only to you but all of the governors. we have a lot of important

business to talk about. i will let the leaders discussed everything from health care to energy to sequestration and other issues. every meeting, we have inspiring speakers that come in to get us to think outside the box. now we will start with mr. collins who can inspire us about how we can manage our states. we have major activities that will take place in jamestown tonight analyst bert tomorrow -- and williamsburg tomorrow that i think will be very great for our governors. i look forward to joining my fellow governors. how we and our system, the states being the laboratories of innovation and democracies, we will continue to talk about the ways we can work together to work with our stand up to the

federal government if they overreach or deny give us the flexibility to govern well and hopefully have some positive things that both republicans and democrats can join in. regardless of what party we are in, we have this belief that this story history of our country and our long history of the experiment in freedom in the american republic now is one that we all share a great love for and want to do our small parts as governors to keep that torch of freedom burning brightly. i want to turn it over to the chairman of the national governors' association to make remarks, dave heineman. >> thank you very much. as you were giving those remarks about american history and virginia, if you could have given that when i was in high school, i might have gotten a better grade in classic.

i want to thank you for the update. good morning -- welcome to the 2012 national governors association meeting. i do want to thank bob mcdonnell and his wife for such a warm welcome. we are looking forward to all the events that will be occurring this week. we are very appreciative of all that you have done. i know your wife and my wife do more artworks then uni combined but we appreciate what they have done. i am also delighted to be here with a very good friend, the chair of the nga. jack and i have known each other for more than a decade. we have served together and i want to thank him for the support he has given me and we have worked together on a variety of issues in different

capacities and i have respect for jack and the things that he does as the governor of delaware. working with jack and of the governors is one thing that makes the nga such a unique organization. it provides a platform to have a candid conversation about developing improved approaches to governing. it has been a privilege to serve as chair and i am proud of our successes and i would like to share a couple of those with you. we were able to streamline the policy process and change the way we do business of the governor's priorities are at the forefront of everything we do, including lobbying on capitol hill. for example, governors work together to urge congress to ensure the establishment of a nationwide communications network for our first responders, providing them with access to the most modern

technology was and remains a top priority for of governors. the next step is implementation. nga held meetings with teams with nearly 50 states and territories to help policymakers examine and understand the challenges and opportunities related to implementing the public safety broadband. nga continues to support additional opportunities for state leadership on a bill that and governance. following our winter meeting in february, governors continue to work together to preserve our air national guard and protect it from damaging reductions. we fought hard to be part of the process and to provide a plaque -- path to meet fiscal responsibilities while protecting the personnel necessary to fill the mission

at home and abroad. we are also bringing group of states in a prescription drug abuse policy academy. the abuse of prescription drugs is the fastest growing drug problem in the united states. alabama governor robert bentley and the color of governor -- and the color of a governor are leading this exercise in strategic planning aimed at reducing the abuse. the recent supreme court ruling regarding the new federal health care law remains at the top of governor's mind. even though governors have different opinions on this issue, we will be having many conversations about this issue to throughout the conference. finally, states continue to face fiscal challenges which is why i chose a growing state economies as my chair policy initiative. economic growth and job creation is fundamental to our success and our future and it is the most important issue facing governors.

we want to help the private sector grow and create new job opportunities for our citizens. this past year, we held four regional summit attended by 10 governors and staff for more than 35 states and territories. we heard from the business community and education leaders at each summit. the goal of growing state economies is to provide governors of the policy -- and other policymakers to assess the economic environment in their state and strategies to foster business growth. high-growth businesses are one of the driving forces of the modern global economy and a primary source of job creation, prosperity, and economic competitiveness. a key component of growing state economies focused on how governors can foster an environment where small business and -- and neutrons can transform into high-growth businesses.

today, governors will receive several deliverable from my initiative. the first is a report entitled "a policy framework" which highlights six issues which can be refined to improve the conditions for job creation. the second is a report and accompanying pocket card that i brought with me that provides governors and other state policy makers with better policy directions and strategies to foster business growth. it emphasizes understanding the path away through which a small business becomes a fast-growing firm and the policies that support the transformation. finally, each governor will receive an individual state profile that provides a set of measures and information to help them understand where their jobs are coming from, of who

they're entrepreneurs and business owners are, and what they're likely sources of business groups are. we will continue to cover this topic throughout the weekend when we hear from author and management educator jim collins and author and professor steven blank. of like to ask a very good friend of mine and someone who has been supportive of our efforts this past year, governor year markell, our vice chair to say a few words. >> good morning, everybody. i want to start by thanking governor heineman for being a tremendous leader and his tremendous focus on state economies. he has, but a number of strategies that i think are helpful to states across the country. we appreciate your leadership. to governor mcdonald, thank you for hosting this. we love virginia, it is a beautiful state. for a state that came relatively late to the union, this is not bad. [laughter]

in case you're wondering, delaware is the first state. thank you so much for your hospitality. one of the things that is so great about being a governor is that the people of very clear expectations about us. it is not about the speeches we give or the rhetoric, it is about whether we're improving the economic climate in our states and whether we're improving schools and whether we are being good stewards of the taxpayers' money. that is what our people expect of us. that does not mean we don't have disagreements. some of them can be strong disagreements and i think that can be very healthy thing. i am thinking specifically, as an example, the affordable care act. regardless of the governor's decision about whether to accept the federal offer to cover millions of additional people for medicare expansion, medicaid does have a state chair and different governors have been looking for different ways to

try to find greater efficiencies including reforming delivery systems, expanding managed care, and handsome program integrity efforts. all that cannot stop the growth of medicaid so we will be talking about innovative strategies to lower medicaid costs during our health and human services committee meeting tomorrow. in addition to that, later this month, the national governors' association will bring together our whole policy advisers, medicaid directors, insurance commissioners, the people who are taking the lead in our states to develop the exchanges and bring in all those folks together to talk about next steps with respect to the implementation of the affordable care act. the affordable care act is really just one part of what will happen to hear this weekend. while it may generate some heat, there is so many other areas of agreement that we want to bring to light including results from our center for best practices, sessions focused on finding the common threads that bring us together as states and we can be heard by congress.

example, governors continue to feel the squeeze on their budgets because of constraints revenues, increased expenditure, pressures from reductions in federal funding, the need to replenish reserves and to provide resources for critical areas that had to be cut during the recession. the education and work force committee will discuss the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act, the economic development and commerce committee will focus on agricultural trade. the natural resources committee will talk about the role of states creating a modern electrical grid. the special committee on homeland security and public safety will discuss veterans

issues followed by a discussion on by a surveillance. the people in washington tell us the worst day in our states is better than the best day in washington. i think there's probably a lot of truth to that. washington may be caught in the grips of partisan paralysis but in the state capitals, we really don't have that choice. we've got to figure out ways to keep people working together so we can put our people to work. this weekend is a great platform for us as governors to work together across party lines to create new efforts to push our core priorities for word of better jobs and stronger schools. is a chance to get past the partisan gridlock that is so much defining our nation's capital and work together on solutions that will help drive each of our state's forward. it is great to be here and i'm looking forward to the meeting and i will let governor heineman take the podium and i will be happy to answer some of your questions. >> there is one final comment about delaware and virginia. in the mid 1860's, there were experiencing difficulties and needed a state to join a union to help them move forward so 1967, neb. join the union to

help these two states out. [laughter] we will be glad to try and answer your questions to the best of our ability. yes, sir? >> this morning, several of us in the room join you in a partisan political event as you gave your opening remarks here, you talked about the founding fathers and this hallowed hall and i wonder what you would think and your fellow governors would think that this is more of a bipartisan event but what do think they would think about the state of our politics in this modern age? and is it and evolution of what they practice years ago? >> >markell well that while we have similar challenges as ceo's and leaders of our states, we also have some broad

disagreements. we discuss those openly and some of our governors only meetings. the fact that we have similar jobs is not mean we don't have very different approaches. a lot of it is with respect to policies coming out of washington and how affects all of our state's on health care, energy, taxes, jobs, and regulation. i have been very clear that i think a lot of the policies that have come out of washington have been devastating to virginia on energy, jobs and health care. i have a different approach than governor markell has sent some of the maybe philosophical and some of them may be how the medicaid expansion would be good for his state but i don't think it is good for my state without reform. the debates that took place in this building 236 years or so ago were pretty vibrant. mr. henry stood up and started talking about the crown in 1765 and his rebellion against the stamp act.

he certainly did not mince words with that. my guess is the burgesses, when they were debating, whether we should have revolution, there are strong divisions between the likes of henry and washington on one side and some on the other side that took a modest approach. that is one of the biggest decisions ever taken in the history of the united states. having this discussion here, while we have differences of opinion between republicans and democrats, we also know that the buck stops and the governor's desk. we don't have the luxury of being able to borrow money in the way washington does. we have to balance our budget, 49 of us have that in our constitution. we cannot print money. we have various significant constraints that are put on everything from bar weighing to other things where we have to make very specific practical decisions.

we now have a different approach and philosophy, the specific and pragmatic decisions that every governor has to make on a host of issues are important. we have empirical measures on jobs, on surplus or deficit, on medicaid population, on any number of things we are held directly accountable for by the people of our state. there is a lot of common ground that we will discuss today -- everything from sequestration to energy to some of these wonderful joint initiatives that date and jack have put together in the center for best practices to say what is working in some states that are getting best results and we can tap into that and a state of virginia might not be doing things as well as nebraska or delaware. of course there are differences and we will discuss openly as we always do. there's an awful lot we learn from each other and i look forward to this. >> in my state, my focus the entire time, nearly eight years

that i've been governor, is on education and jobs. the people in my state expect me to get things done. the biggest frustration i have with the federal government is they never make a decision. they never act. we are forced to do it and want to do it every single day. we make those tough calls. we may differ on some of the outcomes or the decisions we make but i know jack and bob and i are willing to make those tough decisions and so are other governors and we would like the federal government to make decisions about the budget. we won't agree with every single one but we need to know that in order to move forward with our own budgets and other decisions. >> can you expand on how the affordable health care act is good for delaware? what would be like as a governor to potentially be getting money

from taxpayers in another state? >> math is matt. we spent a lot of time looking at the map and we also understand that there is a significant cost to do nothing. the way it has been for a long time is that people are not covered, they will get sick and eventually end up in the emergency room and they will get care in the most expensive place possible and that will cost all the rest of us who have insurance. it is called uncompensated care and the cost of that is really quite high. as we look at the expansion and run the spreadsheets -- this is not political. this is a financial analysis of what it means to cover an additional 30,000 people, in our case. what kinds of resources will be available to us from the federal government and what will it take from delaware tax payers?

my view is that we understand it all properly. this could absolutely be a good deal for delaware taxpayers. i understand the other states will make different determinations based on their own reading of the math. for us, as we understand it to this point, this looks to be a good decision. >> can you give us your position on that? if you had to make a decision today to opt in or not, what would you say? greg i would say that medicare expansion without reform is irresponsible. president obama said exactly the same thing in 2009 when he spoke to the senate democratic caucus in d.c. putting more money into a system that already is somewhat broken does not make sense. i think we have all talked to secretary sibelius and others of the need to do things in maintenance of effort and waivers in certain areas and the

lack of flexibility that the states have an more abilities to have managed care and be creative and entrepreneurialism our states to save money and set the program the way it works for us. we have been denied that so i don't think that i can make a decision right now. i wrote a letter that went wednesday to the president and secretary and ask about 30 questions on exchanges and medicaid expansion. it is a 3000-page bill and people are still trying to figure it out. until we get more information from washington on some of these bags, it is hard to make a decision. there were two things that came out of the court's decision that were not fully expected. one was that the decision would be made on the fact that it was a tax. we thought it would be on the side of the commerce clause. secondly, the 7-2 ruling that the court would say that it is not proper to penalize states to refuse to expand the medicaid program, not only deprive them of that additional money, but to penalize them with their

existing medicate based, that creates new options. the original act was very punitive for stays that did not expand medicaid. this now gives some options which a don't think a lot of us expected to be part of that decision. it is about 10 days past than and the secretary has announced new time lines and has given us two years to apply for level one or level two for exchanges and their host of issues about medicaid expansions. the nga just until letter of with five or six questions that we want to have answered. i have a number of other ones i propose. i don't think is responsible from -- for my state to make a decision now because there's more to be done. >> one place where want to comment -- i agree with governor mcdonnell that the additional reforms are important

but i also don't believe those additional reforms have to come from the federal government. we have to face the fact that in our state and in the country, we've got to move away from what has become a sick care system where providers and facilities are basically paid based on how many procedures they do and we've got to move toward a health care system where providers are rewarded basin whether or not they keep people healthy. that is not something that has to happen at the federal level. each state can come up with their own plan to do that. there is legislation now in massachusetts the governor patrick is working on to get away from the fee-for-service system and we're looking at that carefully and we have a couple pilots in delaware. in my view based on our understanding so far, the medicaid expansion is the right thing to do for delaware. we will have to continue to work to move away from the sick care system toward a health care

system. >> let me just add to that a little bit -- you are hearing a great discussion and what it means ultimately is there will be 50 different states solutions. i respect the fact that jack is going one way and bob is going another way and we will probably go slightly different late in the sense that in nebraska, we believe is on funded medicaid expansion will result in cuts to public school funding, to higher education and increased taxes and i am opposed to that. i agree with jack that we need to focus, for example, on prevention, will miss, and out comes. i hope everybody in this room got one, a pedometer to keep track of your steps every single day. as part of nebraska, we started well as program three years ago and the people, all of us are part of the wellness program have to do this every single day. our premiums have gone up less than 2% per year for the last three years.

we need electronic medical system in this country like we have an electronic financial system. we need greater hospital transparency. let's put out the cost of routine operations on the internet for every hospital in the country so consumers can compare. good, i can step out. >> it is interesting to hear you talk and a clinical sense about how you will discuss all these issues. nothing is as compelling this year as the aca and it is timely and it occurs not only after the supreme court ruling but in the middle of a presidential campaign that certain people on this stage could be front-line players in. [laughter] talk a little --

>> from this morning, the nga news conference. we'll take you live to the williamsburg lodge or they're about to get under way with the annual meeting and they will start this afternoon with a focus on leadership. jim collins will be speaking to the group. he is the chairman of the nga. they're just getting started live here on cspan.

>> we have talked about jobs where we have similar early in our approaches. that is something we try to emulate in virginia. this best practices center is

where we can learn from the best things going on in other states and incorporate those into our state. the impact of the presidential race cannot be overlooked. we have quote of the crisis. the will have a difference of opinion. i had dinner with my friend martin o'malley. it is not all about conflict. it is about work and learning with each other. the presidential race impacts e health-care decision. i did not want to pay tax payer money in building and exchange were spending a program that may look dramatically different in six months. gunrunning has said they -- day one, i will give the states broad favor from obama's health care. one thing for me practically, i

do not think i can look at the taxpayers of virginia and say apple spend a lot of your money. i do not think we're on a time crunch. there is no question that we will have debate and disagreement about who should be the governor's, for president. that does not mean there is not allowed we can learn from one another to help ourselves. >> you mentioned sequestration. you and other republicans have fought to put the blame on the president's shoulder for the fact that -- >> the president is the ultimate leader like we are the leader when we do not have a budget that is being done right in our state. we cannot blame the budget stator. we have to take responsibility.

>> house republicans voted for this. >> the president is the one that is insistent -- insisted this be split. this is an area where there will be disagreement. some of my friend who have a lot of defense jobs. they have the same concern that i do. $600 billion will weaken the united states military. secretary panetta said he is concerned. with no will plan on how that will be implemented for the department of defense, what are companies that are great to citizens, how are they supposed to act? how will they send out war notices by november 1? there is a lot of real uncertainty and and did the project and and predictability

which is devastating for the military. i think there is some real bipartisan concern with this because this was not supposed to go into effect. this was supposed to put pressure on everyone. we are five months away from janeway first. i do not see one side in congress right now that they will do anything from that on november 1, which is concerning. this is something in to to bring up. i say the president also flown across the budget. he put forth a budget that -- this year. governors, providence, executive branch is responsible for -- president, its second branch is responsible. >> i thought the prince of the question was a good premise prussian -- about the premise of

the question was a good permit a question. what it goes back to what i said earlier. the president and the congress need to act. they will not make a decision. bob makes some every day. jack make some every day. so this every governor in america. it is time for the federal government to make tough decisions. >> we are hearing a lot about uncertainty in the economic context. you have your difference lies in the presidential race. do you fill challenged by the coming to decisions that will be made? is that impacting the policy- making in the state? health care is the biggest example. are there other areas? >> it is always an issue for every state. we have the presidential election every four years. it is a very important concession -- decision that

every american will hopefully turn out and vote. i support governor romney because we need to focus on jobs in america. the unemployment rate has been above 8% for over 40 months. in nebraska, we have the second lowest in america at 3.9%. think if we had that in america. we would always -- we would all week -- we would all be moving forward. i will come back to -- i would prefer the president and congress make decisions, get tough decisions out of the way, and go on vacation for a couple of years. >> this is a very good question for different reasons. the uncertainty makes it difficult for us as governors, but it makes it difficult relief for business executives who are deciding to invest or not. we have heard a lot of the last few years about the hundreds of

billions of dollars sitting on corporate balance sheets around the country. businesses are concerned about making investments, hiring additional people. when that money gets free of, that will be good for all of us. i am supporting the president because he has -- we have had about 29 straight months of job growth. he has done some really important stuff on jobs, including signing the jobs? act. >> let's try to get to a few more questions. we are having too much fun. in town.t obama is th would you welcome him to come and address some of these issues regarding health care and

sequestration? would that be helpful? >> that is up to the chairman. we are always glad to have the commander in chief. i have had the honor of greeting him. especially when he talks about jobs for veterans. there is a lot of common ground on those issues between washington and we are trying to do in virginia. he has done some good opposition research. he is going to the two places where i lived -- green run in the glen allen. i appreciate him going to my old homes. i know the people there and what they are concerned about. they are concerned about jobs, debt, deficits, and energy and getting back to work and out of debt. i hope the talks about those issues. how we get there will be different. we have a 5.6% unemployment

rate with three surpluses in a row. this is what democracy is about. this is what happened here 236 years ago. people talked about different ideas, hopefully with the same goal of more prosperity and liberty and opportunity and choices for their people, but very different ideas. as iron sharpens iron, so do debates with ideas. they come out with one solution in a majority vote. that is what our system is about. yes, i welcome the president here. welcome mitt romney a little bit more. when he comes and speaks here is up to these gentlemen. >> next question. >> you talk about wanting to see reforms in the medicaid system. can you elaborate on that?

if the government taking more flexibility, what would you do with your existing plant? >> -- plans? >> i would prefer -- i wish the federal government would allow every state to determine -- determine the eligibility and benefits. what i want to do is different from what other governors want to do in different states. that is the first the. i would like -- step. i would like to see copays exist in our medicaid system so you have a little skin in the game. those are two ideas. >> the republican governors association created a medicaid reform blueprint last august. we sent to the president. we are still waiting for the answer. we sent to others in congress before the debt committee was

meeting. some ideas so we had were policy-based parent a number of our medicaid defectors -- defectors got together. it is rga.org. we are continuing to refine this. we agree on something important. there are many things that can be done apart from anything the federal government does that are unique to our own state on everything from revising distribution to preventive health care to skillful practice. we did that through our representative health initiative 1.5 years ago. on everything from school eligibles -- dual eligibles to things that governor heinemen

mentioned. unless we get federally, we will not be able to do some of the reforms needed. >> that is a very good question. two years ago when all of the governors met with the president's and democrats and republicans, he said to us at the white house, i know i am hearing requests for more request flexibility on medicare, the more specific. we should continue to have those conversations. we should continue to focus on things we can do in our states, regardless of what the federal government does. >> if all of the governors were together, we could find a solution. we wish the congress and president would do that. >> the supreme court ruled it would be coercive if they did not go ahead with the expansion.

our governor is going to speak this weekend about if they can challenge strings that are attached to other agencies? >> i would not be surprised if we do. >> are there any areas in particular? >> generally across every subject matter from the federal government. every governor would like less strings attached. to often the federal government has a one size fits all policy. they are developed for big cities. the more flexibility we can have, they are going to impose certain restrictions, regulations, but more but stability is needed. >> this is something that is true at the state level and the federal level. a number of states launched what we call a regulatory reform initiative. we will have each of our state agencies have a public meeting in each of our counties where the public and let them know about regulations that are a

problem for them. we will look at them and see if we can get rid of them. to their credit, a number of cabinet secretaries in washington have done the same thing. when the governors were to get the issue with the president, someone asked about relief with respect to the esea. the president's response was revealing. he said arnie duncan will be here today. secretary duncan is the most flexible guy and the world except when it comes to high expectations of students. we would all like similar conversations with each of the agency's. >> we can take a couple more questions. >> was he invited to the white house to the tent the function? >> neither him nor governor

romney were invited to this event. we always invite the presence of united states to our meeting in washington d.c. what is the nature of the conversation you will have this weekend about medicaid expansion? would you see some bipartisan statement that would be made to the administration or congress, or what do you hope will come out of this discussion? >> you can see from the conversation i would not expect a statement coming from the bga. nga. we are trying to -- is a whole series of questions we need answered. we need new federal guidance from the department of health and human services as a result of the new supreme court decision. some governors have sent questions to the secretary. we know we need more information before we make final decisions.

in many will like to know what would be the federal-state partnership if you move forward on exchange. how would that work? how much would they fund vs. what we would have to? how would you interface with our medicaid programs that it is trying to determine what are the unknowns and trying to get answers to those particular issues. >> who once the final question? all the way in the back. >> he said governor romney's records and not be part of his record. can you expand on that? >> were you there? >> no. >> what i said was -- he was employed for 15 or so years at bain capital. while the managing capital project director there, it is

fair game. that is about 120,000 new jobs, pertinent investment in new startup companies. you have the freedom to succeed or fail in america. sometimes you do both. that is the story of the american free enterprise system. what is absolutely wrong is to say that things have happened after but from the left bank capital -- bain capital when he rescued the olympics and ran the best in the program in 2002 in salt lake city. to attribute those things to the degree there was any policy that promoted outsourcing is not fair. that is not honest. if you have those things on the ads, he needs to pull them. i lived in these communities

from the question before in glen allen and deep run. they are not concerned about bain capital. they are concerned about tax policy of this president, which is increasing taxes about $500 billion through obama's healthcare that will take care -- take place for anyone who makes over 250,000, which is about a million small businesses. they are concerned about energy policy. the policies of the epa and the administration have been devastating to the coal and natural gas and nuclear and of share -- a sure companies. the president can pick on the record. just tell the truth. the washington people. factcheck. -- "the washington post" and factcheck.org said this was not true.

the president said this jury well when he was campaigning. -- the president said this well in 2008 and 2009. if you do not have the record to run on, you are trying to play small ball. that's exactly what he is doing. that is my broader point. jack and i and dave all agree on this -- the biggest issues facing the country is how do we get rid of this unemployment that is suppressing the american dream to 25,000 -- 25 million people. how do we get the greatest country on earth to have a handle on that that that is a byproduct some blame. for 30 years, every president has racked up the national debt. this president has done a more than any other president in history. we have to have leadership to get us out of this. >> i will be brief. >> jack once a rebuttal.

>> bain capital is fair game. mitt romney's record of governor is fair game. it was not a great record when it comes to job creation. you have a president who's trying to make shore -- he is focused on building a middle- class. he is focused on the tax policy that will help the middle class. we could have a long debate. it is not the point here of this session. we look forward to as governor's funding the leadership of governor heinemann is how we can try our own states and the country. >> let me conclude all this -- you are focused on 2012, but let me have the focus on 2016. i will let you in on a secret. i am working on a a bipartisan team that will run for president. i do not know who will be on the top of the ticket.

i have agreed to be their chief of staff to keep them in line. thank you very much. [laughter] >> you can watch more this weekend here on c-span. our live coverage includes a panel tomorrow morning on new strategies to lower medicaid cost. the governors will hold a roundtable discussion on veteran welfare. sunday the conference wraps up with the look at the way states can support business owners. that is live coverage of the nga this weekend here on c-span. what about the law on c-span radio, historic supreme court oral argument focusing on election issues. >> they for to us as being

independent, and professionally run. the candid knows who is helping him and why. these are code words for saying we are effected. because we are effective, however speak is about to be choked off. >> saturday from 1985, the federal election committee v. ncpac. 90.1 fm in washington and dio.org.. cspanra >> iverson looks on the text of the erm and and the people at 7:00 p.m. eastern. peter collier on the life of jean kirkpatrick. >> carter was covered with a magnolia accent. she saw the domino start to

fall. by 1979, she was in full-fledged opposition to carter. that appeasement. she saw the fall of the shop in and a couple of lacerating experiences. >> the political woman behind the reagan cold war doctrine sunday night at 9:00. at 10:00, license leaving the military. hotels hospitals and jails. all part of both tv this week on c-span to. 2. >> jim collins gave the opening address. he spoke about management styles and different strategies to become a great leader. dave heinemann and bob mcdonnell also spoke.

they were introduced by an actor playing patrick henry. this is just under an hour and a half. >> please, take your seat. good afternoon governors and distinguished guests. i call to order the 104th annual meeting of the national governors' association. we have a full agenda for the next 2.5 days. following this section the educational work force committee will discuss the reorganization of the elementary and secondary education act with secretary of education on the deccan -- on a debt than in the former secretary of education. -- on the duncan and the former secretary of education. we will then have a governor- only lunch in this session

followed by the meetings of the national resources committee and the special committee public safety. we will begin with a governor's only a graphics and business session. the annual meeting will conclude on sunday with a session on going the next big idea. we will have a special author. we are all looking for to all of these. let me start by saying we are very honored to be joined by several distinguished guests from the canadian parliament and a delegation of arab ambassadors. please, stand so we can recognize you. thank you for being here. i would like a motion for the adoption of the rules for this meeting. governors, as you know, we have streamlined our policy process. we do not anticipate any new

policies at this meeting. if the governors have questions, please submit them to the nga staff by 5:00 p.m. tomorrow . ay aye.favor, please sen i like to announce the appointment of the following governors to the nominating committee for the 2012 bga except to committee. governors walker, molloy, and o ther. thank you furthering to doing that. we are here in colonial williamsburg. we owe a debt of gratitude and thanks to governor bob macdonald and his wife. we had a great event last night. there are more to come. bob gave us a history lesson about the state of virginia.

it would have been nice if he had taught me that in high school. i could have gotten a better grade. he has some remarks for us in a very distinguished veteran governor who will join us. governor mcdonald. nell. [inaudible] [applause] >> thank you. >it is an honor to have you in the commonwealth of virginia. we are thrilled that nearly half of the nation's governors would choose to travel here to be a part of this. it was a treat. governor heinemann and the executive committee had this privilege. i want to thank the staff that has been working on this for more than two years. jean marie davis is here.

your first lady and my wife are out drinking wines for wine, having a great time after their difficult yacht cruise on the york river. we are delighted to have the spouse's here. i cannot think of a better place for governors to convene. whether we are republican or democrat, no matter what state you come from, we all agree on one thing and that is the usa is a marvelous country, perhaps the greatest country on earth, where more great ideas about human liberty and free enterprise and democracy have sprung. those things that have happened in jamestown where ideas were written 230 something years ago that are now still alive and spreading around the world. foris a source of pride

virginia residents. may 1416 07 is when those 144 men and boys landed after 144 days at sea. they were leaving england and arrived in jamestown virginia. tonight you will be on that spot literally where the settlers landed. despite 380 years of trying to figure out where that was, it wasn't until 1996 when using technology they found the footings of the original jamestown fort that you will see tonight. we will have dinner on those hallowed grounds. it is living history. they are still digging.

the archaeology there, they are still digging and finding artifacts and you will be able to see the museum where everything from remnants from the well that was just found to the well-preserved body of who they believe was captain r. solomon of gosnall. it is a marvelous piece of history and i hope you will be able to attend that even tonight. tomorrow night, in colonial williamsburg, we will be at the governor's palace, the place that not only colonial governors ruled for many years but also the first two governors of virginia, patrick henry, and thomas jefferson. you'll also be able see the house of burgesses where we had a press conference this morning where people like george mason and george with and george washington and others actually sat as elected members of the house of burgesses. this is where patrick henry gave his great speech in opposition to stamping. we are proud we were selected to be here because governors love the histories of their state but they also cherished these marvelous foundations of united states of america and much of that rich history going back 236 years to the founding of our country right here in williamsburg in jamestown. thank you very much for coming. i think it will be a terrific time. you get the great music of

carbon leaf, a great richmond ban that will play tonight. there will be fireworks tomorrow night at the governor's palace i hope there'll be good fun and good fellowship and we can talk about the compelling issues of the day dealing with health care and energy and budgets and so forth as we renew friendships with one another and learn from one another and take the best ideas from the states and important to our states and continued those traditions of jefferson and henry that have endured for many centuries. while i am merely the 71st governor of virginia, i have a special guest and that is the first governor of virginia law happens to be with us. will you please welcome, my good friend, patrick henruy? 1 thank you, your excellency. gentlemen and ladies, as i was accorded the high and very

unmerited honor to be appointed as the first governor of the commonwealth of virginia, it thus falls by happy duty and my very great privilege to bid you each and everyone welcome to this, truly the birthplace of american liberty, as his excellency has correctly stated. the seat of government, after all, of the largest, oldest, wealthiest, and most populous of its majesties colonies. it was here that good men and good women gathered together to lead the charge toward the direction of a new and very bold experiment, a new nation of united sovereign states conceived in liberty with the honest intention of justice under law for all men. it was a very radical notion which guided their feet. it was that all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights namely, the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the means of acquiring and

possession repossessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. it is our most earnest wish that during your endeavors while here that you agree with success towards the advancement of american happiness and i can assure you it is our sincerest wish that we will put forth every effort to provide for you the warm and gracious hospitality and reception for which the old dominion has long been famous. on my own personal note, it is my wish that you may be guided while you are here with those fundamental principles without which i believe no free government can be preserved to many people. justice, moderation, temperance, regality, and virtue. good luck, godspeed and welcome to williamsburg. i am your servant. [applause]

>> thank you very much. i want you to know that governor mcdonald was concerned that you might stay around for ever and resume your role as governor of the commonwealth. he wishes you the best of luck in your continued retirement. [laughter] at this opening session along with our discussion about defining great leadership, we will hear from jim collins in a moment. we will also honor our outgoing governors and recognize our 15 and 20-year corporate fellows. i want to talk about the initiative 5 lead over the past year which will set this up for jim collins. for all the tough issues we face today, economic growth and job creation is fundamental to our nation's future and to each of our state's futures. - 2, growing state economies, is about providing u.s. governors and state policy makers with better policy

options to assess the economic environment in our states and foster business growth. we understand how a new small business becomes a fast-growing firm and the policies that support the transformation. the growing number of policy makers here and abroad recognize the need to understand the effects of public policy on the entrepreneurial pathway from startup venture to a high- growth company to a global corporation. during this past year, we held four regional economic development summits in hartford, nashville, seattle, and omaha. i want to personally thank governor malloy, a governor has long, and governor gregg or for hosting these summits in their respective states and i was honored to do it in my home state. there were 10 governors, 35 states represented, we heard

from a variety of speakers from those in the private sector to academic researchers to other experts who shared with us the keys to promoting and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. i appreciate the fact that so many governors sent their teams to reach one of these regional meetings. you will see in the reports that are at your desk two different reports that we are sharing with you. one is 12 lashes for growing state economies and the pocket car that goes with that to determine which of those two actions may be appropriate for your individual states. the other report is entitled "a policy framework"is now to be a resource for you to be considered for your own policies or priorities in your individual states. finally, nga is providing each of you with an individual state profile that provides a set of measures and information to give you insights about where the jobs are coming from in your state, though are the entrepreneurs and business owners and what are the likely

future resources of business growth in each of your states. as governor, there's no question that all this want to strengthen our state's economic performance. we hope these two reports will be helpful to you. i want to say a special thank you to the staff and to my co- chair or vice chair jack markell in assisting me in this effort. this leads us to our keynote speaker jim collins. he is a student and teacher about great companies about how they grow and how they obtained superior performance and how good companies become great companies. having invested and nearly a quarter of a century of research into the topic, jim has author or co-author of six books that have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. they include the classic "built to last." the international best seller," good to great." "how the mighty fall"examines how great companies can self-

destruct. his most recent book is "great by choice, on certainty, chaos, and look and why some thrive despite them." based on nine years of research, it answers the question -- why do some companies pride in uncertainty and chaos and others do not. fortunately, we will not only have a presentation from him but he will answer every single question for us and by the end of the day, we will all know what we need to do to go from good to great -- jim collins. [applause] >> thank you, governor. good afternoon. it is a great privilege and honor to be here with the governor's. i thank governor mcdonnell for

being such a gracious host in his home state. i think governor heineman for leading the initiative in growing state economies. in his letter about initiatives, he focused on the role of new growing and strong companies as a core engine of economic growth. i would support that. we need in every state new entrepreneurial enterprises that become great growth companies who need -- we need good companies to make a leap to become great companies and we need great companies that can endure through wave after wave after wave of creative destruction. after years of studying corporations, i have come to the conclusion that we need more than that. i have come to see that if we only have great companies, and

it is important we do, that would not be quite enough. we also must have great k-12 education, great colleges and universities, great police department, a great military units, great cause-driven nonprofits, and great government performance, local, state, and federal. good is the enemy of great. good is the enemy of great. i have been privileged to be able to spend a quarter of a century of my leg on one question -- what systematically distinguishes a great enterprise from a good one? a great company from a good one? what marks the leaders who lead them? what makes them different? it is a data driven approach. we have more than 6000 years of

combined corporate history and our research data base now. it is like christmas. i love data. it is like opening up packages and seeing patterns and it is like christmas. across the four major studies the governor mentioned, "built to last"looks at and drink companies and "good to great" acid the conduct overcome mediocrity and that translated into the monograph in the social sector is and how those ideas extent world outside of business. "great by choice"is all about thriving in chaos and many of you in your world wrestle with every single day. this study put special emphasis on our entrepreneurs and small- business people which goes right back to what we were talking about in the growing state enterprises and growing state economies initiative that can navigate an uncertain landscape and that uncertainty will not go

away. to build some of the greatest companies of all time, how do they go from little tiny start- ups into the greatest companies of all time? if you get more of those in your state as pistons of economic growth, they will create jobs, they will create economic results. how do we get more of them? finally, my own personal favorite because i have a dark side -- "how the mighty fall," a forensic examination of train wrecks and how companies brought about their own self destruction. it is not inspiring but it is fascinating. i come to you here today in the spirit of service. service to you at this table and in full recognition that i'm not an expert on the unique challenges of being a governor. i don't want to pretend to have

that. i hope to share with you a bit of what we have learned about what makes these great companies to take so you can think about how to cultivate having more of them in your state. also to share with you some of what we have learned about how the executive leaders and governorship is executive leadership, how these executive leaders who built the great companies led differently them less than great leaders who did not create great companies. i would ask you to consider what might be helpful at what might not be helpful. in your own quest to lead as a truly great executive in the role of governor. as we think about this, i might ask you to consider a question -- think about this as a governor -- if you have to allocate 100 points in terms of what will most define your governorship as to whether it will go down as a truly great governorship into two buckets

-- bucket a is executing with tremendous discipline the plans and goals and agenda that you bring with you and bucket b is successfully responding too big, unexpected events that hit you and your state as governor hickenlooper and i have just experienced in colorado. how many points you allocate to execute your plan with discipline and how much of it is determined by how you respond to the unexpected things that will inevitably hit you along the way? i will return to this later about what we learned about how our leaders wrestle with these questions.

it is very dangerous to study success. so we don't. we study the contrast between success and failure. between endurance and collapse, between great and good and that brings us to one of the biggest lessons from all of our work which is if you rewind the tape of history, we find enterprises that were in the same spot and same potential facing the same landscape and yet one becomes greater and the other does not. the driving factor of greatness was not their circumstance. they faced the same circumstance. that is how we do our research. we look at those who are at the same starting point that had different outcomes at least inevitably to a key lesson -- all of our research, to one point -- greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance. it is first and foremost a matter of conscious choice and the discipline.

what did we learn? what might be helpful to you? first, we learned through the lens of our research -- i don't know what is the same for you -- it all begins with people. when we did the good to great research, we expected that the way a good company would become a great company is you would have some kind of charismatic visionary leader who would set a new direction and motivate everybody. actually, what we found was they walked in and said i am not going to figure out where to drive this bus until i have first figured out who should be on the bus and who should be off the bus and who should be in the key seats. once i got the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus and the right people in the key seats, i will figure out where to drive the bus. as we zoom back from all the

years of research data in the business sector and your world may be a little different, if i were to step back and say out of the 6000 years of data what is the most important executives killed these three leaders had -- it was the ability to make very rigorous people decisions and to make sure that all of their key seats were filled with the right people. it is an interesting question. don't know the answer to this but i will post to you to reflect on. how would a great governor actualize the idea of the right people in key seats? how would a great governor do that different than a good governor and held a great governor do that different than a business person? when faced with an ok person in a key seat, what a great governor spend more time trying to develop that person into the right person or act more decisively to replace that

person with the right person. perhaps later we might chat about that but everyone of you around this table at this moment have at least one question of whether you have the right person in this absolute key seat. and my right? what to do about that? dwight developed or replace? how patient semi and as a different and how patient can you be in the role of governor as distinct from business? i don't know the answer to that i oppose it to you as a question. we spent a lot of time thinking about leadership. it is a challenge to speak to great leaders about what we have learned in data about great leadership. we puzzle on the question of what is the x factor great leadership? for the lens of our research,

we found it is not personality. we confuse personality and leadership all the time. some of the greatest leaders we ever studied, near as we can tell, have no personality. they had a charisma bypass. people like darwin smith who took over kimberly-clark committed to a great company was reserved and shy and almost nerdy. he said was just trying to become qualified for the job at the end of his tenure. we find some leaders are very charismatic and were great leaders our research like ann mulcahey who saved xerox. she had a very measured view of herself. i never expected to be ceo, she said. she had the burden of responsibility. like all the great leaders we study, she was constitutionally

down to the deaths of her court constitutionally incapable of capitulation. what did we find? what did our data show? we found it is not so start as leadership or not but we saw it as a level of hierarchy. level one is individual capabilities and level two is good team skills, level 3 is effective punishment, leader foot -- level for is leadership. what we found of our greatest leaders, the ones to produce the results over time, they went to a different level. we can't call this level 5 leadership. -- we came to call this level 5 leadership. the difference between four and five is the true x factor of great leadership. that x factor surprised us. it was humility.

humility combined with an utterly ferocious will and not humility necessarily in a self- deprecating way. these leaders did have a strong ego and they had confidence and they had ambition and they had drive and they had that relentless everybody around them exhausting and would you let us sleep energy. they have all this. the difference between them and those who did not build great companies is all the ambition and drive and energy and motivation was channeled into being service to something bigger than them. it was a channeling of that energy into something out word, not to what they would get, but to what they would contribute to some cause or gold or purpose or ambition or set of values that was bigger to them and in which they were in service.

when we turn to look into the lines of the social sectors, we find something quite interesting. i always find it interesting when people suggest that we should simply import business thinking to the social sectors. they are very different environments. government is different than business and certain ways. those of you who have been in business and are now government recognize that. i personally think that leading in government and leading in the social sectors is an order of magnitude more difficult than leading a business. why is this? it is in part because the power map is different. if you are sam walton, in 1986, and you drew a power map of wal-mart and said let's allocate one other points to a bubble of power, there is one big bubble named sam. if one -- of sam wanted wal- mart to write it would go right and of the one it to go left, it

would go left. if you step out of that unusual case of concentrated executive power of the business executive, we get what a friend of mine who ran a university said -- i have to deal with tenured faculty and that is leading with 8000 points of no. in a diffused power map and armond very rarely does one executive have enough power of to make things happen. a lot of people have not-power to stop things. therefore, the leadership becomes true leadership. it was some doubt that leadership only exists that people follow when they have the freedom not to follow. in that sense, a step up requirement from business to government might be a very big

step. "mcdonnell and i have wrestled with an interesting question which is -- does humility and will apply to elected office? i don't know the answer but i posed to u.s. a question. -- i pose it to you as a question. when they came in, what did they do different than their comparisons. how did they lead differently? what actions did they take? one is getting the right people in the first task was to say what are my key seats and do i have been filled with the right person. there is another interesting thing -- you would think the great leaders we study it would sort of start with a broad inspiring vision. that would eventually have that but where they really began was picking up the rocks, looking at the squiggly things underneath, the ugly, brutal fatcts and saying our first job is to confront the brutal facts.

there's a line from churchill -- the greatest mistake and public leadership is to hold out false hopes soon to be dashed by events. our leaders never wanted to have that happen to them. when we were writing, we coined the stockdale paradox. with all our challenges, i would like to share that with two because all of our leaders have it. it was taught to be by admiral jim stockdale. he was the highest ranking military officer in hanoi hilton and shot down in 1967 and have the burden of command inside to 1974.

he was studying philosophy at stanford when i was teaching in the business school. i had the privilege to get to know him. in preparation for my first conversation with him, i read his book, "in love and war," which is alternating chapters of his life and were when he was captured in camp. i found myself getting depressed because we can endure anything but we know it is going to come to an end but it began to dawn on me that when he was there, he did not know if it would ever come to an end. how on earth did he deal with that? i asked him. how did he not get depressed? he said he never got depressed because he never wavered in my faith not only that i would get out but that i would turn my years in the camp into the

defining event of my life. in retrospect it made me what i am. we were walking to the faculty club to have lunch and his leg did not quite work right. there was a comfortable silence now walk for a long time and never said anything. finally i said, who did not make it out as strong as you? he said that's easy, it was the officers. he sounded early optimistic. he said i was not optimistic, i just never lost faith. what is the difference? the optimists are the ones that say we will be out by christmas. christmas would come and it would go and they would say we're roby out by the next christmas are things getting and it would come and go on when it happened enough time, they died of a broken heart. that is when the admiral grant and by the shoulders and said

you must never confused danita on one hand for absolute unwavering faith that we can and will prevail in the end with the other discipline on the other hand to confront the most brutal facts. we're not going to be out of here by christmas. everyone of our leaders had this duality, faith and facts, the ability to put those together and be able to wrestle with both of them at the same time. in learning about your states and asking nga folks, almost every state has tremendous fax and a long road and the only way we can deal with that is with the stockdale paradox, confront the brutal facts and not capitulate. i used the word discipline. being rigorous about people, having humility and will, living the stock dale paradox.

these are all forms of discipline. when we look at the best performers, discipline ruses for the data. i want to be very clear that the motion of the culture of discipline is not a business idea. actually, disciplined people who engage in disciplines thought and to take disciplined action, this is a great loss idea, not a business idea. of'll find a culture discipline if you look at a great symphony orchestra and puts together a perfect symphony and you feel the notes go in your years and down your spine and you could goosebumps. that is discipline. we define discipline in the day in the carter institute waging war on cancer.

we find a culture of discipline in any great school that produces outstanding educational results for every kid. you find a culture of discipline in the best of our armed forces ended the expired young cadets that i see of west point and and all of our military academies. you'll find a culture of discipline and the most successful companies and you will not find it in the mediocre. the critical distinction is not between business and government, between great and good, between the discipline the and the undisciplined. in the second chaka want to share with you, want to turn to the question of uncertainty in dealing with forces out of our control. my colleague morton hansen

spent nine years asking why some of their leaders tried and uncertainty and others don't. we studied these companies that were young and vulnerable and went on to become 10 times more successful than others in their industries. they were huge banners in on certain and chaotic environment. these entrepreneurs face big forces out of their control, often fast-moving, a significant level of uncertainty and full of unexpected events. let me go back to that list. i'm curious what it feels like as a governor. that is our world. how did our leaders deal with that kind of world? different from those who did not do well in that kind of world? i want to introduce you to a

couple of sites of this equation. there is a duality that goes back to the third questions i asked and how those play together. let's talk about the agenda side. in 1911, two teams of explorers left within days of each other. same environments and same conditions, but had radically different outcomes. almondson and his team got there first. they made it back to base camps safe. scott and every member of his

team diet 11 miles from the supply depot. same conditions and radically different outcomes. the difference have to be in the behaviors and decisions and ways they dealt with them. in research, we found that companies and leaders that did well looked like almonson and not likes i -- like scott. they had a productive paranoia. what i would like to chat about is the discipline side of this. this idea called the 20 mile march. imagine you want to get to the other side of the country. you are walking from san diego to maine. you say, the weather is good and i want to go as far as possible. when the weather is bad, i will sit in my tent and wait for

better conditions. or you can say, i have a 20 mile march and it does not matter if it is cold, or hot. we are going to stay on our 20 mile march no matter what utterly relentlessly as we move across. we saw when we looked at almondson and scott, they faced circumstances unpleasantly. almondson said, it has been a bad weather day. but we are closer to our goal. staying on the 20 mile march is already hitting -- always taking your march.

it means never going to bang far. there was a point when he was 45 miles from home. he could have made it in one big push. they did not know where scott was. he said, we will still do our march today. they did 17 miles. he knew if he overreached and then got hit by an unexpected storm, they could die. the 20 mile march means having the discipline to stay on march like clockwork. when you look at a company, what is the number 1 best performing country from 1972 to 2002? you might think it would be walmart or ge or intel or berkshire hathaway. all of those did exceptionally well. the number 1 best performing

company of all publicly traded companies is southwest airlines. 63 times the market. an industry that is characterized by forces and disruptions and changes and yet they march. they have a march that they will be profitable every year no matter what. no matter how many cities are clamoring for our business, we will only open as many as we can handle. this notion of discipline -- and this is interesting about government environments -- we see tremendous consistency in any truly great enterprise. the signature of the accuracy -- mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.

in a political world, how do we create consistency? i do not know the answer. i want to briefly comment on the relationship between innovation and discipline and then go to the unexpected side and then we will have a chance for a conversation. if you look at a company like intel, they did not have the most innovative chip in the industry. yet it beat its industry by 46 times. it was quite the innovator, but it was not the most innovative. john brown in michigan lead in medical devices. their philosophy is, we strive to be one step behind. it is not that they were unno they give.

they landed creativity with -- uninnovative. they blended creativity with discipline. i would argue, based on our research data that perhaps we have misread the american strength. we tend to think the american strength is innovation per se. it is our ability to scale innovation, to take the idea of a microprocessor or a memory chip and build a company -- scale a company around it. to take the idea of medical devices and scale a culture around it. that is our strength. if that is true, i would raise

a scary question. what happens when we lose our ability to scale? when you think about job creation, intel added four times more jobs band is -- in its third decade of life than it did in its first second or third. stryker was creating just as many in a single year. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

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the president of south korea said, by biggest challenge is that my parents are too demanding. my poorest parents demand a world-class education. i have to spend billions of dollars each year to bring in thousands of teachers a year to teach my children english and the first grade. i wish we had a lot more grass-

roots pressure. this is not a washington movement or a governor's movement. we have not crossed the rubicon yet. to sustain this for a long haul, i think we need the pressure. our biggest battle is not ideological. our biggest battle is complacency. complacency is the enemy right now. >> amen. >> thank you, bill. thank you for the amazing amount of overlap and agreement. you were tough, candid, and non-partisan approach when it comes to excellence. you deliver some very tough messages to the nea. i really admire what you have

done. let me ask you about teachers. most would agree about the empirical evidence about the results you get from early childhood education, tremendous evidence about what a world class teacher does and means in a classroom. we've tried in virginia on some reforms. merit pay, trying to recruit teachers at based on the subject matter expertise. we have run into some roadblocks from the educational associations and unions. what is working? how do we best recruit these world-class teachers? how do we elevate the competence and the esteem in which we hold that profession? you made a little bit of money as a professional basketball player, yet we do not pay teachers at all.

what are the things that are working that we can do to get the world class people involved in the profession? >> we started this conversation with reauthorizing no child left behind. we have the baby boomer generation retiring. a million teachers, a third of the workforce. it is a once in a generation opportunity. i have spent a huge amount of time to do it. there is a grand bargain to be had, which is tough on everybody. we need to not tolerate a failure. we need to reward excellence. we need to move out those where

it is not working. we lose far too many other good teachers to pay. we have not talked about schools of education. this is not just -- people look at tenure reform as one slice of the puzzle. to me, it is the whole spectrum. the pool of talent is not anything where it should be. the training they receive is woefully inadequate. they do not have career ladders. we have to take on that entire establishment. we have to do it systemically. the grand bargain is a lot more rewards, compensation, making a true profession. there are a lot of trade-offs that have to happen. singapore, finland, 100% of their teachers come from the top 10% of graduating class is.

100%. 90% of folks to want to teach in those countries cannot. we have demonized the profession. i am spending a lot of time looking at other countries. england is an interesting country. this significantly elevated the status of the profession. if all we do is put a lot more money into it now without changing the conditions, we do not get there. if all we do is tenure reform without greater rewards, we will not get there either. we're competing with all kinds of other fields. what if you could make $100,000 a year as a 30-year-old?

people wake up and pay attention. we have to create the climate and conditions. we've launched a respect initiative. we want to help to drive this. this should be led by teachers. we want to get teachers to take ownership. it has to become a profession, we have to treat it as such and respect it as such. right now, that is not where we are at. >> we have to be smart about how we allocate talent and resources. we do not do that now. often, our best people are doing the least challenging work. yes, that runs afoul the bargaining agreement, as you

know. it is a local and state problem. you are the wind that is writing the framework for the bargaining agreement. just like any other enterprise, having our best people do the most challenging work. >> that is so important. when the president went after osama bin laden, he did not send in a bunch of rookies. he sent in the navy seals. what are we doing? we have a million disincentives and very few incentives. not individually, but en masse. i talked to a principle of --

principal there their, was asked to go to a low performance goal. -- performing school. it is the most moral and ethical work i have done in my career. i am so thankful i had that big a badge of honor to work in the communities that need the most help. getting the talent where we need it, that is a big piece of it. >> i want everybody to be as concise as possible. >> so you waited for me to say that? [laughter] >> i will try to do that. the discussion has turned to points i wanted to make. we absolutely know what works. in many cases, we lack of

resolve, more often on the local level, to replicate what works. we'll have -- we'll have the examples. every one of my feelings school -- failing school districts had a great school. they did not go out and repeat that across the board. reality about what we are doing in higher education is that because we caused this divide between a career and education -- we do not teach that in college. we do in some of our community colleges. we do not counsel people to define what actually they will be good at it early enough in life. we have to get back to doing that pretty quickly. one example, i had a program in one of my community colleges

that had a 98% placement rate for 12 years. september 1, there will be 3 more community colleges doing that. they will replicate that very program. i want to swing back to the point that i became convinced of in my own state from discussions i had with educators at the various state universities and the private universities that produce some number of teachers in our state. most of them have failed to collect data about the jobs their teachers are doing once they leave. in some of those cases, there is a conscious effort not to collect the data. in many cases, they are sending out teachers who are going to

fail within the first, second, or third year their teachers. to correct that data and have to report it would be a very scary proposition. we have to make some very rapid changes in how we educate teachers and how we prepared this teachers. waiting for the third or fourth year to put someone in a classroom, it is trapping a person in education. if they had that experience as a freshman or sophomore, they could have directed their educational model to a different degree. i would ask the two secretaries, who i want to begin by thanking. where are we? where are we in preparation of teachers? you just made reference to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace the overwhelming number of teachers in public

education in the united states, but the reality is, the preparation has not changed a lot. if you could comment on that. >> i wanted thank you for the huge courage you have shown. i do not know if anyone has taken on any more than you. that would not have happened without you putting your neck way out there. i appreciate that. 64% of young teachers say they're unprepared to do their job. two-thirds of our teachers. if two-thirds of our doctors were unprepared to practice medicine, we would have a revolution in this country. we have some skills and challenges. wwe have some challenges. i think we have not done enough to challenge the status quo. two big complaints, not enough real education.

i talked to all these great teachers who are using all these formative assessments to take their craft to a different level. they are learning that on the job. they say, why did not learn that when i was in my school of education? we have not done enough to incentivized those schools better doing the right thing and to move the resources from those who are not. i am happy to talk more about this, i am conscious of the time. we want to do a lot more about shining the spotlight on those who are doing a great job. you guys have a lot more power and authority than you realize in this area. no one ever closes down schools of education. i urge you to look at that.

on data, louisiana tracks tens of thousands of teachers, hundreds of thousands of their teacher-student data track that back to schools of education. they are changing their curriculum in the schools based upon the real data. there a couple of other states moving in that direction. i do not understand by 50 states do not do that. this is nothing unique. it is a lack of courage. louisiana probably does this as well as anyone. >> a couple of quick adds. tfa another alternative certification models allow us to wire around some of this and create some different approaches. i would commend you all to make

this a priority. the dirty little secret is you know better, colleges of education or a cash cow. they are a low-cost operations. everybody wants to cut a ribbon at a health center, but pay attention who is minding the store. the incentive is, let's get more of these people in. this is going to sound odd, this is a place where you can work with your unions. they are as frustrated and ill served by colleges of education as anybody. it is a place where governors of all stripes can find common cause on some of these reforms. >> i yielded my time to gov. malloy.

[laughter] >> is this an east coast conspiracy? >> i have something i will end with. >> you were talking about what i was going to ask about. we have taken a lot of education reform steps in oklahoma. children have to read by the third grade. we have taken a lot of great steps. we measure our students and how they're performing, the greater our schools, but it goes back to what has been discussed. how do we measure the quality of the teacher in the classroom to make sure our teaching degrees that colleges get from our college of education -- i think that is where we have to look at some of our reforms as a nation.

that they are not just a default degree. they mean something, too. a teacher's certificate from a college of education degree means something, too. >> the ability to take -- now that we have all this infrastructure and this data to look at -- where was she prepared? you all have treasure troves of data that can be mined for this sort of finding. you should do it. louisiana is a good example. >> this is a perfect segue into a lot of the challenges with our budgets.

medicaid is going of 20% a year. we have had enormous increases. a lot of us have cut our funding in higher education. 46 states. when the congress reauthorize the higher education act, there was a mandate that possibly could end up penalizing us in terms of college access. there is a waiver process. are we going to be able to work with the department on that? be able to get back to where we were? >> we are working with many

states. i do not know your situation specifically. where states have to make cuts, we totally understand fiscal reality. we're trying to make sure that higher education was not cut disproportionately. we have to take it off line. our goal is not to remove funds from states. our goal is to continue to invest. >> part of the situation, unless you are -- you have to continue your medicaid. when it goes up 20%, the cuts to become disproportionate. that is the real issue. some states, like wyoming, are still sitting on surpluses. how do we resolve this? most of us are working hard to reduce our incarceration cost.

that is not significant in terms of the same scale. >> happy to sit down with you. >> we have been discussing eliminating the entire border between colorado and wyoming. >> you have been discussing it more than i, governor. [laughter] >> you all been terrific. you talk about running a marathon. we have been here a while. if anyone has one last point they're dying to make -- you all have been terrific today. it would be a consensus of opinion that both of you have been the ideal of how cabinet secretaries should work with states.

we're grateful for that. [applause] with that, there is nothing else we have to do right now. thank you very much for your attendance. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> we will continue bring you coverage of the meeting later today as martin o'malley and wyoming governor matthew mead hold a roundtable discussion on veterans welfare. join us today on c-span.

>> throw to live on c-span radio, historic oral arguments focusing on election issues. >> throughout the brief, they referred to us as being an anomaly, professionally run, the candidate knows who was helping them. these are code words for saying we are affected. and that because we are affected, our speech ought to be choked off. >> today, the feral election commission at 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span radio. nationwide on xm satellite radio 119 and online as c-span radio. -- at c-spanradio.org. >> president obama spoke at a campaign rally in virginia. it was held in the city's fire station number one and as part of his campaign tour of

virginia. it was the first time that a sitting president had held -- in 2008, president obama became the first democratic candidate to win in virginia in 44 years. this is a little over an hour. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> hello roanoke. [cheers and applause] it is good to be back in virginia.

there are a couple of people i want to acknowledge. first of all, you have one of the finest senators and public servants in the country in mark warner. give it up for mark warner. [cheers and applause] mark was a great governor for the commonwealth of virginia. now he is a great senator. i just want to point out we have another great governor of the commonwealth of virginia. he is going to be a great senator. we are thrilled to have them both with us today. i want to thank mayor byers who is here. the fire chief. [cheers and applause] all of you are here.

[cheers and applause] i could not ask for a nicer setting. it is beautiful flying into roanoke. let me just say, unless you have managed to break your television sets, you are probably aware that it is campaign season. i know it is not always pretty to watch. we are saying more money flooding into the system than ever before. more negative ads, more cynicism. a lot of reporting is about who is up or who is down at the polls since of talking about things that matter and enter your day to day life. i know all this makes it

tempting to turn off the tv set, turn away from politics. there are some people betting that you lose interest. the fact that you are here tells me you are still ready to work to make this a better country. [cheers and applause] you are still betting on hope and you are betting on change and i am still betting on you. [cheers and applause] i love you back. [cheers and applause] >> four more years! four more years! four more years! >> let me just say this. if i win virginia, i am going to get four more years. [cheers and applause]

that i can say with some confidence. the reason you are here tonight is because no matter how petty and small politics seems sometimes, you recognize that the stakes could not be bigger. in some ways the stakes are even bigger than 2008. what is not at stake is just two people or two political parties. what is at stake is a decision between two fundamentally different views about where we take the country right now. the choice is up to you. now, this is my last political campaign. it is true. there is a term-limit thing to the presidency. you get two. this will be my last campaign. it makes too nostalgic

sometimes. i started thinking about my first campaigns when i was traveling across illinois. illinois is a big state and it has cities like chicago and small towns and rural areas and suburban areas. and you meet people from every walk of life -- black, white, native american. you stop at diners and go to churches and go to synagogues. wherever you go, you are going to have a chance to meet people from different walks of life. when i think about the first campaign. what strikes me is that no matter where i went and no matter who i was talking to, i could see my own life in the life in people whose vote i was asking for. i have met an elderly vet and i

think about my grandfather who fought in world war ii. my grandmother worked on the bomber assembly line. i think about how would my grandfather came back home, because of this country he was able to get an education on the gi bill. they were able to buy their first home using an fha loan. i would mean a single mom somewhere and i would think about my mother. i never knew my dad. he left when i was barely a baby. my mother was struggling and she had to go back to school and raise a kid. later raising my sister. she had to work while she was in school. despite all of that, because

she was in america, she was able to get grants and scholarships and her kids are able to get grants and scholarships. they could go as far as their dreams could take them. you know, i have talked to some working people. i think about michelle's family. her dad who was a blue-collar worker and work that day water filtration plant in chicago. her mom was a secretary. despite never having a lot, there was so much love and so much passion. her dad had ms so he had to wake up an hour earlier to get to work. he never missed a day of work. he took pride in the idea that, you know, i will earn my way and look after my family. i see that same pride in the

people i was talking to. what this reminded me of at the heart of this country, its central idea is the idea that in this country if you are willing to work hard, if you are willing to take responsibility, you can make it if you try. that you can find a job as supportive family. you can find a home you can make your own. that you will not go bankrupt when you get sick. that may be, you can take a little vacation with your family once in a while. that you can find a job that supports a family. and find a home you can make your own. that you will not go bankrupt when you get sick. maybe you can take a little vacation with your family once in awhile. nothing fancy but just time to spend with those you love. maybe see the country a little bit. maybe come down to roanoke. [applause]