alexis herman deserves applause for being here because her flight was canceled, so she jumped in a car and got here at about midnight. [laughter] [applause] she has promised not to take a nap until the panel is over. [laughter] alexis herman helped organize the 1992 democratic convention and with bill clinton won that she became the deputy director of the transitional office in the white house. she handled the white house office of public liaison in clinton's second term. bruce reed was the chief advisor, and the director of the domestic policy council, and he has been the chief of staff for vice president biden and left recently to focus more on k-12 education, so we welcome him. finally, we have andrew rudalevige of bowdoin college, thanks for being with us. we are going to take some of your comments. as i said before, you look like a reasonably smart group, i don't want to go to far, so all of you have these cards, so if you want to ask a question write it out in a legible fashion and we will get to it later in our program. i want to ask you, this is a question that was asked in ano