the youth movements that populations challenges -- demographic challenges in the world and how they contribute to the problem of terrorism. just to come at it from a skeptical point of view, which is the way we often do these things, it seems the problem with al-qaida, i do not know if it is getting worse, but it seems to be moving from one part ofwhat seemed to be originated from one area now seems to be spreading from north africa down and to africa. you have these areas and yemen and small yet that people are concerned about. -- and somolia of people are concerned about. is that a tremendous leap for the edible problem to tackle through in proving that development of the poor all over the world? it seems however laudable the

goal may be and however wise and others in the western world to invest in the, is it really an effective strategy of combating terrorism? >> it is actually cheaper than building [inaudible] [indiscernible] . what goes to fighting poverty is worked compared. i actually think it is larger. i am not saying i do not think the defense part is important, but in the long run, we need to tackle these issues. let me give you a few facts.

the president is looking at the tradition of the country. the question of the ask yourself is how do you explain that? it also helps you define the factors that make the country's such a right place for al qaeda and others. let me just give you four facts. the first one is the countries are mostly young. you have 55 percent of the population of the arab world. two-thirds is less than 30 years old. although they spend a lot of money on education, it is the quality of the education system that is the report. when we do the global test for math and science, the 14 arab

countries have participated and not one of them was average. they are all worried -- they are all way below average. if you look up the youth situation, they have the unemployment inworyouth the world. egypt, 850 dozen entrants into the labor market each year. it 70 percent of them have high school or above education. -- 70% of them have high school or above education. it takes about five years for them to find a job. three-quarters find them only in the public sector. they have vocational workers and

no job security. you have this huge youth population that sees very little opportunities for them. the second fact, and it has to do with politics, those same young people do not have any way of expressing themselves or participating in the social or political lives of their country. there was a survey done in agent in 2005 -- this survey done in egypt in 2005. it takes them six months because they have to go through all the different layers by the security people. only avenue open to them was through the islamic groups.

young people do volunteer work and so on the some of them spread crazy ideas. the majority of young people in that are notviews tolerant, especially not cholera of people with different religions, they've and so on. you have a whole political system that suppressed young people and spread it tolerance. fact, a huge sense of unfairness. before i came here is looking at a paper done a year or go on to any show. egypt has been growing fast in

terms of gdp and so on. if you look at the grass. one is gdp per capita gross. the other one is a question asking people how do you side? how do you explain this? take up the majority of those countries are middle-class. the middle-class has been totally left out of the growth equation. 85 percent of what is considered middle class lives on less than $4 per day. this is your middle class. it is the size of the number of

people who are living on $10 a day has not changed. the middle class has been suppressed. the big sense of unfairness, add to this a lot of corruption, and then there is also a sense -- this is the point that is important, a sense of international and fairness. that is especially linked to the palestinian issue. you have those four facts that create -- you need one of to crazies. as steve was saying, 0.01%.

so if you really want to deal with terrorism, i believe you need to have a policy that includes defense issues. it includes a partnership for development, and not just any development inclusive development and fairness. the partnership for democracy. this includes a democracy for peace. you cannot just focus on one aspect and not all of the others. this will have a huge impact on whether this will have an impact in the future.

you create vacuums were al qaeda thrives. the egyptian transition was having trouble. it was weakening and weakening. it is a real danger that if this transition fails, we could end up with more terrorist bases around the region. the success of the transition will help change this situation and will have to change the statute of the united states in the region and the nature of the relationship. >> how tight and direct do you

think the relationship is between development and terrorism? your know, and the paper itself a acknowledges that many of the individuals to of carried out terrorist attacks have been middle-class, or maybe even above or up for middle class. -- or even upper middle class. some say a little education is a dangerous thing. someone totally uneducated will not be able to pull law of sophisticated underwear bombing inside of a plane. it does seem like a lot of the people that carry out the attacks have studied in london or their father was a head of the oil ministry. you did not hear so many about people who were shepherds coming out and suddenly becoming a suicide bomber. what is your answer to folks who say i do not think there is any real connection?

to go there is a connection. -- ." there is a connection. you need a four-pronged approach. you need to deal with the social political issues, not just the economic ones. first of all, the middle class person and say yemen would be a poor person compared to [indiscernible] ].span.o then the issue of education, it is not just learning to use a computer and this or that, but also, an education system teaches you the basic rights of

being a citizen. it teaches you civic education. all of this is missing and a system that is autocratic. trying to make sure that everyone follows the leadership roles and so on. what happens is exactly what the survey, the 2005 survey shows. this speaks to a whole i generation there partially educated and find difficulty in it and are acting and respecting others. people with other views or with different backgrounds. >> one more thing, and it does

relate to the campaign. one area where mitt romney has made his position very clear is that he is in the camp of people but believes the u.s. needs to be more explicit about talking about the threat of terrorism, emanating from islamic radicalism and an element of political correctness in the unwillingness of the obama administration to publicly talk about islam being the cause of terrorism. do you think he would follow through on that? do you think he would move more to the bush second term formulation, which they would abandon the ideas and went for a softer approach? do you think he is just blowing smoke on that? what would be the impact of the u.s. started speaking more about islamic terrorism being a

threat? >> q. did a great an entire religion based on the backs of a few is a poor policy. -- to denegrate an entire religion based on the acts of a few is poor policy. the reagan -- arabian peninsula will have a very warped view of the tire religion is a mistake. i think that probably comes from pressure within his party. the right wing of his party to make this a political issue, but i think it is misguided, and is bad policy.

>> it is very unfair to norwegian white supremacy. [laughter] we have had a couple of really dramatic terrorist attacks that should stand for the idea that this is a problem without a particular ethnic or religious or regional badge on it. i think it is possible to keep in mind the idea, as it pertains to the exercise of war powers, but congress has authorized the use of force against certain groups and not other groups. when you think about who is the united states fighting a war against? that will actually frame it not

been anti-islamic terms, but the united states has authorized the use of force against al qaeda, taliban, and associated forces, all of which are islamic groups of one sort or another. to confuse that with the problem being one that is essentially religious in nature will spear -- samir a lot of people in this a lot of terrorists. to go the critics would say something like the fort hood shooting, a potential terrorist attacks the were overlooked out of an abundance of political correctness were people were so fearful of being labeled as biggest that they did not say things about a colleague that they should have. ." >> you may be right on that.

if you have someone talking in a very violent way, animated by what ever concern, and you suppress those concerns because you are afraid of an allegation of prejudice against the group he is speaking in a very violent extreme way as purporting to represent, i suppose you probably earned the criticism, but that does not mean that group alone is the problem, -- you can reverse engineer a lot of bad logic out of that. when you look around the united states, the state substituting shootings that have happened recently is also a reminder that what you want to define as terrorism and what you define as that incidents of violent crime kids into a definitional

question that's probably is not very interesting. and i do think there are real reminders this is not a set of problems we should principally think about in religious or ethnic terms. >> if we look at this is a medium to long-term issue that needs to be resolved, [indiscernible] the u.s. has been seeing as fostering autocratic leaders and support of autocratic leaders. as a result today, it has very little credibility. i was looking at a poll that shows 70 percent of egyptians would prefer not to receive any economic aid from the united states.

the country is going bankrupt. this just gives you a feel for the extent of the bad blood there. you want to change that. it is important that you change that. you will not succeed in doing that by starting to label them all in a group and as your enemy. >> if you look up some of the real problems of muslim majority countries, it has been governed. it has been really poor governance where we aligned with the bad guys, the poor leaders. we of a chance to rearrange the deck of play a different role. let's play a positive role in trying to change educational systems and trying to change political systems. >> but i just ask you one thing and then we will go to the audience.

i want to switch back to the more concrete areas better under direct control of the u.s. legal system and executive branch. guantanamo, you throw a little bit of a hand grenade and say not only should guantanamo be kept open, but it should be expanded. i am wondering if you might tell us why it is leaving guantanamo should be expanded, which i think is probably a fairly unusual position among the think tank set in washington, and also, does that mean you disbelieve the very earnest pronouncements from all levels of the u.s. government that guantanamo is the number one recruiting tool for al qaeda? >> the second question is yes, i disbelieve guantanamo is the number one or even a significant

recruiting tool for al qaeda. my co-author is better position to talk about the role al qaeda place in propaganda than i am, but the basic feeling is the relevant question is are you holding people in extra criminal detention? if you are, what ever the facility you do that in will be a bad word in certain circles, and you will just have to live with that. if you move them to the illinois, people will find out it means the very same thing as guantanamo. once you decide you work going to engage in certain types of redemption, there will be consequences into that. i think where you do it makes very little difference. that is just my opinion. let me clarify, when obama said

he was like to close guantanamo, i did not oppose the decision. in fact, the only things i wrote at the time were about the logistical challenges and political challenges associated with getting it done. i accepted it as a worthwhile, although not the goal i would have set for an incoming president and this space. i'd always thought it was a bit of the tail wagging the dog. that is to say, the relevant question should be where and under what circumstances and according to what rules will you engage in military detention, not the location of the facility in which you were born to do it is. it always seemed to meet closing guantanamo was talking about the location of the policy, not the substance of the policy.

to this day, i did not care if you do it at guantanamo bay or somewhere else. the relevant question is what are you doing and how are you doing it and what rules are you willing to live by in the course of doing it? >> i observe guantanamo is not going away. the political problems actually turned out to be insurmountable, given the president's willingness to put political energy into the subject, which was extremely limited. he was willing to issue an executive order on the second day of office. he was willing to give a speech of the national archives of few months later. he was willing to make a few phone calls. now he is not willing to talk about it at all unless us about in a press conference and caught off guard. if that is the level of political energy you were going to put into it, you are not going to get it done. the sooner you acknowledge that,

the better. guantanamo is not going away. it is not going away because congress cares more about keeping it in the president cares about shutting it down, and that is all there is to this story. anyone who tells you there is more to the story than that is fooling themselves. the question is given that we're going to have guantanamo, the question is under what circumstances will we have guantanamo? here is the irony of what the president has done and why he deserves a lot of blame for it. starting under the bush administration and a continuing under obama, there has been a revolution. guantanamo, while we were all talking about closing it, has turned into the exact sort of model facility we talked about closing it in order to say we were going to create. detainees at guantanamo have access to counsel. they get to have their court case, file habeas cases to have

an independent judge reviewed. those get reviewed all the way of to the supreme court of the united states. journalists from all over the world is it this facility. -- visit this facility. there is a lot of public evidence that it gets released in the course of these litigation's. once they are found to be properly detained, they then have a continuing review process for as long as they are held there. it promises to be quite rigorous. no one really talked about this much, because we're talking about how we should be closing it. the question is, what are you closing it in order to do? are you closing it to resume it somewhere else with the same set

of procedure -- procedures we now have there? i think the president acknowledging he is in fact not closing guantanamo should rather embrace it and should say i wanted to close this, but there is a cord that branch of government that does not let me do that. what we have done is turn it from the thing we objected to to the thing we aspired for the circumstances of detention to be. the irony is that if he made that argument, there would be certain process consequences to it. there are a bunch of people in theheld elsewhere al world that do not have the same sort of general -- generous rights. i think we should bring anybody we are holding and you were in the world in military detention, other than in very specific theater complex, but if we are

holding people in bahram, i think they should be in guantanamo where they should get the benefit of the additional procedures that you get at guantanamo bay you do not get at the detention facility there. i think a lot of good things would come, presumably in a second term, if we could have more of an honest conversation about guantanamo, which is that it is not going away, and we have really corrected the made us want it to go away. having just come from the democratic convention in charlotte, the rhetoric was exactly as he called it. still calling for the closing of guantanamo, though in a less forceful way and the president said not a word in his

convention speech. to go there was a wonderful article the other day is that to the effect of 168 guantanamo detainees were released into the democratic convention in charlotte. [laughter] >> if there are questions of audience, we are prepared to go there now. just raise your hand. identify yourself and try to make it brief and a question, as opposed to some sort of statement. this fellow way in the vaccine to be the first hand that i saw. >> thank you. i work for voice of america my question is about afghanistan. how do you see positions of the campaign on afghanistan? >> anyone want to jump in on that?

>> on afghanistan, what puc as the position of thdo you see ofs and how would it look different under the potential candidates? >> there has been sluggish for mitt romney to push for a longer tradition. -- there has been some push for mitt romney to have a logger transition. i think mitt romney in a first term would continue the current policy, which is to draw down in a way that hopefully leaves behind afghan security force that could take care of the challenges presented by the taliban. >> my view is this is another area where mitt romney has rattled by some -- isolationist and more hawkish flank of the party.

d not mention afghanistan = in his convention speeches. you go to the speeches and you did not actually find a discussion of the issue. you find him say we have 75,000 troops in afghanistan, which is not a policy going forward. i think that will have to change somewhat, either in the speech he is about to give tomorrow on security issues, or certainly on the debates of foreign policy we will hear during the month of october. that gentleman right down here. >> my name is joe guggenheim. i am concerned about the u.s. policy and the use of drums. i want to get your a valuation on the panel whether the extent of that is helping or hurting in

terms of eliminating the number of terrorists facing the united states, the negative impact of drones versus the actual impact of what terrorists were getting and what changes might be made if you agree the problem is getting worse because of the drones. >> dennis blair has made headlines over the past year or so at various times by saying he thinks aggressive use of the drones is causing more long-term damage for the u.s. been the short-term benefits. >> i do not know how to evaluate that. the relatively easy question to evaluate is are drones and effective way of killing the enemy? the answer to that is pretty sick to the answer, and it is yes. -- pretty easy to answer, and it is yes. the reason it isn't it

attractive choices they can extend power into areas that we do not have significant troop footprint it can deliver with an astonishing accuracy equal to other means of attacking things that are quite remote. -- the reason it is an attractive choice is it can extend power into areas that we do not have significant troop but printed. by most accounts i have seen, the impact on the court anime groups has been very substantial, both in terms of the occasional high-valued kills, but probably more importantly in terms of the devastation in an ongoing way of the middle management of these groups. to say that that has been very effective, and most analysts agree it has, raises this other

question, which is, is the replenishing affect greater, lester then, or the same as the take out affect? i did not know how to answer that in the short-term. it is pretty clear to me that al qaeda, the core of al qaeda has not replenishes itself in a terribly effective way. it is not clear to me the other groups are not coming up in this sort of splintering metastasis going on that will be as dangerous or more dangerous. i think that is a time will tell kind of question. as a strategic and political matter, it is very difficult for any president tuesday while this is another effective strategy at neutralizing a threat we face today, i will forebear against

the use of it because of the possibility that it may generate in the long run more people who dislike us and to will therefore constitutes some greater threat in the long run. this is, i think, part of the paradox of this conversation, which i actually do not disagree colleaguesing might twmy two have said about the need to focus on governance development and poverty as big pieces of this puzzle. similarly, they have both said they do not disagree there are these activities you have to engage in in order to neutralize or deal with or capture immediate-term threats. so you end up with this and sense that this is not

immediately reconcilable with one ofanother and some of the tools will make it harder. with respect to the drone that use, there is the open question, which i do think if you go back to josh's question of whether guantanamo is the principal recording device of al qaeda, no, right now drone use is. that reflects the revelations -- prevalence of it in our strategic arsenal right now. >> a strategy that is based mainly on drone use and ignoring all of the other factors what ultimately be successful in the long run. you have to use more and more drones over time. >> this guy would be dark. -- the sky would be dark. [laughter] >> that is my problem with the

debates of the issue. everyone is focusing on one issue, which is the security aspect. they are forgetting in order to really defeat terrorism and the long run, you need to deal with the recourse of it, and these are the social political and economic. >> to obama's point on this, and he actually had an insight, whether positive or negative, quite a while ago. everyone listened up during the campaign when he talked about closing guantanamo and restoring their role of law and all of the other things, he was talking about strategics target targeted killing during the campaign, and

he talked about it in a debate with the king. he said to begin very directly you say you would fire -- follow him to the gates of hell, if you would not follow him to the cave he lives in. we did not know that you lived in this city at the time. [laughter] -- did not know that he lived in the city at the time. obama came to office wanted to do a much more targeted, lightfoot print division of operational counterterrorism. the problem he was thinking of is how do you take out the bad guys without invading all countries? i think a huge part of the answer, the reason why the drone of strategy develop the way it did is it provides an ear to the question, albeit a very imperfect one. left with there

question of how to use the drones. it is clear they are highly lethal and effective, but clearly also cost. you can only imagine if there were flying above us right now the sense of violation we would feel, the sense we would have that our sovereignty is being infringed upon and the our ratre we would have if one of our relatives was accidently killed, so you need to strike a balance. my understanding from colleagues is the number of strikes have gone down and pakistan, in part out of recognition there has been blow back because of civilian deaths. and just because of the high usage of drones, and we're using drones of their more

targeted. most of the drone strikes right now are in yemen, which we are much more active and engaged that we have been in the past. >> this is also due to tensions in the u.s./pakistan tensions were we accept the killed several of their troops on the border as well. >> good afternoon. human rights first. you suggested whoever wins the election, the president will continue to invoke war powers. does that mean we are caught in a perpetual war frame? if not, what does success look like in the war against al qaeda and affiliate's? >> it is an excellent mother of all questions kind of question.

so there are pieces of the war authorized that it is relatively easy to imagines at conception will end to. the most obvious is that we are fits and startsds and start with the taliban. the taliban is one of the enemy groups, and you can imagine a situation in which you reached some sort of political accommodation, and for legal purposes, i think that would be the end of the conflict, at least with the taliban. it is very hard to imagine a negotiated end to the portion of the conflict that is with al qaeda. so the question you're really talking about al qaeda about the

circumstances in which you would acknowledge a defeat of al qaeda such that the war is legal and strategic purposes over. the secretary of defense on a number of occasions has said within a few deaths of strategic people and al qaeda, i've a feeling there were people in the pentagon that may very nervous. i say that without any information, but if i were an attorney of the to argue that these were available, having the secretary of defense it we have almost got them -- that sort of goes to your question, i think there is some point, and whether -- with the legal doctrine where the point has been crossed i do not think anybody really knows. ultimately the last thing the

supreme court said on the subject, in the early 1950's that it is a political question that the courts have no room deciding, i find it harder to believe the further and further to get away from there is such thing as al qaeda and the more the president wants to rely on the war powers, the last legs a decision like that will have. on the other hand, that is the state of it for now. we do not really know the answer to that question. the final component of the question is what about the other affiliated groups? so you can easily imagine a conceptual end to the war with the taliban. you could imagine a strategic defeat of al qaeda. there are all these associated forces, and that raises a very tricky question, if you defeat

al qaeda, what does it mean to be associated with it? this is very uncharted legal territory, both as a domestic matter and international law matter. i think we just do not know the answer to a yet. -- to it yet. >> if we came to a point where strategic defeat was announced by the u.s., what would be the implications of it? president clinton fired missiles at osama bin laden before we had evidence. would it mean if the figure popped up we would send a force in to try to arrest him rather then hit him with a drum or drop a bomb on him or only matter to the various lawyers and international scholars who like to debate the issues? >> the answer is you would remove the statutory authorization for any military activity once you say you are no

longer -- once you say the war is over. the president, of course, claims the inherent power under article 2 of the constitution and under the self defense doctrine of international law to protect the country against imminent threats. so there is some residual power to respond to threats that arise. i think -- this is one reason dan and i conclude the paper, part of the conclusion is that mitt romney during the primaries articulated an idea that is very worth the next president's taking very seriously, which is the idea of really prewriting to describe the conflict we are still fighting, rather than the one we started fighting 10 years

ago, and we have attenuated rather far from. i suspect he would not support that particular idea. i do think there is a lot to be said for the idea of having an authorizing document for the conflict that is responsive to the conflict that you actually see yourself on a day-to-day level prosecuting. >> this would not make the lawyers very happy, but in my own vision of the endgame is when al qaeda sees is to be -- ceases to be relevant part of the conversation in the muslim world. i think largely through actions not of our own, but because of the arab spurring we have moved spring o that -- arab we have moved closer to that. there is another way of charting

a future path of getting rid of these authoritarian leaders who have really mucked things up for so long. >> and another question from the german and french. -- gentlemen in the front. >> we have been talking about the middle east, underlying islamic groups. 70 percent of the muslims, islamic population live in indonesia, turkey, south asia and so on. obama and this administration have made it very hard -- problems in pakistan, but in general the past 3.5 years the kind of relationship that clinton and obama have been nurturing is extremely [inaudible] . there are some problems that

should not cloud the success obama has had in this area. >> is what the gentleman says correct? >> there is a very important point. there is a very good example indonesia that we should be looking at when we study what is happening in the middle east. indonesia went through an autocratic leader, with a crisis, with very strong islamic groups. the first elected president was also [indiscernible] ./ \ as the country has been more and more successful, both the economic transition following

the fall of the president and the east asia crisis, and also the democratic transition where we had successful elections with a change of leadership, we see exactly that, a country becoming much more stable, prosperous, and with excellent relations with the west. i think there is a lot of lessons to be learned from the experiences of asian countries, and particularly indonesia because of the similarities. >> these are places where al qaeda and al qaeda operatives have not historically taken

refuge in carried out even a major terrorist attack? >> the bali bombings but a very robust government effort to shut down extremists within indonesia. >> may be one final question. the lady back there. >> hi. amanda batista, student at american university. in terms of long-term counter- terrorism efforts made by the u.s., how important is the american image, particularly in middle eastern states? if the american image or reputation is important, how can we make it better? is it through drones or financial purse strings? >> how central is the u.s. to this discussion? can we have the air of spring and terrorism debate take place

without uncle sam automatically being the face of this debate? >> i think the u.s. has a role to play that is very important, a critical role to play in the region. because of the historyer, and baggage [indiscernible] . most of the population comes tunesia.nesia indonesiand they did not want to see u.s. support for political institutions in the country, which is normal. you would not want to see a man support political institutions

in the united states either. the u.s. has to play a role of supporting democracy and try to build more, even in the economic work, at least to build more ties with the people of civil society, the people trying to reach directly the beneficiaries of the projects as much as possible. a state trying to keep in the background and not pushing too hard. the people in those countries armature and know what they want. they can do it on their own with some help from friends. i think this is really the main

point is that we should just leave those people -- these people need help in the process, not all from the united states but from other international organizations, from different countries. from amongst themselves, among the different countries in the region, which is very weak. so they can learn from other countries like indonesia, as we mentioned. so the united states needs to reconsider a little bit how it operates in those countries and the types of relations it wants to build. finally, i think the israeli conflict will always be a source

of instability. that is an area where the u.s. can play an important role in trying to bring out a peaceful solution. >> we're going to start to conclude. my concluding question has to do with the fact that tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. i am wondering if you gentlemen think the debate or discussion over these terrorism-related issues in the u.s. has matured, become more detached, more thoughtful and strategic as time has gone on? and is there any prospect for us seeing any of that in a helpful way or wade that advances the policies, as opposed to demagoguing as we go into this part bought last seven or eight weeks of the campaign? >> i think the general answer unfortunately is no.

the answer to any question, can you expect it really richer discussion of the issues in the last weeks of the campaign is presumptively know. s no. we talk about two modes, one that is distant, and the other where something awful has just happened. in the former situation, as we've seen in the campaign, we just do not engage it. i think we can expect very little discussion of this issue, other than you do remember that i killed osama bin laden, and a lot of i would have done that, too. beyond that, i doubt we will have a lot of discussion of it, unless something terrible happens, in which case we can reasonably expect the quality of

the discussion to be exceedingly immature and unserious. i actually do not think there is a lot of reason for confidence in the american political debate in the electoral terms. the good news is beneath the surface there is actually a much more serious conversation, and fortunately, wathat can sometims create groundwork for policy that you would not know from the surface conversation is really available. >> steven, any thoughts? >> gallup has asked how much you know about muslims and its slslams? and the response has been consistently about half of americans say not much or

nothing at all. i think that is a tragedy in and one area where we have not made progress since 9/11. american muslims have been the other in american culture, and i think that is unfortunate because of how it renounce on us as a country, how we are perceived internationally, and it just in terms of the plight of an important community in america. >> any thoughts? >> maybe because i am not following this closely as my colleagues, just an economist, i get the impression the debate has matured, because it is nowhere near where we ought to be, it tends to focus very much on the short-term with no

strategy how we're going to get out of this. but compared to 10 years ago, nine years ago, i think the debate has matured and people look at different aspects of the problem. if that does not mean -- that does not mean what my other colleagues that is wrong, but maybe i am just seeing the glass as half full rather than half empty. >> i think the debates might serve to produce at least some discussion, which might its -- by itself may be somewhat useful for these issues because of the power of tv time in the national audience. they will simply run out of time if they do not cover terrorism and some of these national security issues, so we may actually see an interesting, if

not a robust debate and some of the issues discussed. the president does not seem to want to talk about some aspects of this debate unless he is asked about it directly. mitt romney have shown almost no interest in discussing these issues publicly. they may find they have little choice but to do that. i would like to thank everyone for coming who was here in the room and everyone on c-span or watching on the internet was joined us for this discussion. on behalf of the brookings and panelist thank you for being here. thank you a lot. take care. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> watch and engage with c-span

as our campaign coverage continues toward election day and the presidential candidates prepare to face off in 390 men october debates. wednesday the third, domestic policy is the focus from the university of denver. a town hall meeting on that tuesday october 16. also, watch the vice presidential candidates debate thursday the 11th from center college in danville, ky. through the election we will also cover key house and senate races looking at the control of congress. follow our coverage on c-span, c-span radio and online at c- span.org. >> coming up in 45 minutes, >> coming up in 45 minutes, enator mark bigbegich