A Conversation with Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson,
Saturday, July 2, 2005

Walter Isaacson: It’s our pleasure to have the honorable Barack Obama, who, as you know, was sworn in as a Senator from Illinois earlier this year. A graduate of Columbia University, the Harvard Law School, first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review, a community organizer. But you know what? That doesn’t even come close to talking about your life story. His life story, as those of you who have read this book Dreams from My Father know, his life story is what July Fourth weekend is all about. It’s a life story that inspires us with the ideals of America and, of course, that greatest sentence in any great declaration ever written about freedom: “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

So let me ask you a biographical question: How did a skinny black guy with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, become a senator from Illinois?

Barack Obama: Well, there are a lot of people who are still trying to figure that out, including myself. I just recently wrote an opinion piece in Time magazine because they’re commemorating Abraham Lincoln, and I mentioned that the only thing less likely than me becoming a US senator was Abraham Lincoln becoming our greatest President. But it’s a testimony, I think, to what’s possible in this country.

I moved to Illinois after college because I was interested in working as a community organizer. And there were a group of churches out in the far South Side of Chicago that were struggling with the devastation of steel plants that had closed. The entire Rust Belt ran through the Chicago region. And communities had been devastated.  People had been laid off. Parishes had been destroyed. Commercial strips had been abandoned, and these churches were trying to regroup and figure out how to patch neighborhoods back together again.

And so I moved there not knowing what to expect. I didn’t know a soul in Illinois. And it turned out to be the greatest education I ever received. We worked to help set up job training programs for the unemployed. We worked to improve the schools in the area, bring more city services and infrastructure improvements. But, most importantly, what it taught me was that ordinary people can do extraordinary things when they’re given the opportunity and they’re working together.

And it was that formative experience of working in those neighborhoods that sparked my long-term interest in politics, and so I knew going to law school that I probably wouldn’t end up being a long-term practicing lawyer. I worked as a civil rights attorney, ended up teaching at the University of Chicago at the law school there, and then served in the state legislature when it came up.

WI: You know, in your book you talk a lot about race and your growing awareness of race in your life, including even stories about your father, who I think left Hawaii when you were two, but you have stories about him and how he dealt with race in America. Tell me about your growing awareness of race and where you see it going now.

BO: Well, you know, if you look at my family or at photographs of my family, we’re sort of a walking United Nations. I’ve got a sister who’s half-Indonesian. She’s married to a Chinese Canadian.

You know, fortunately, because I was born in Hawaii, although it’s not the racial paradise that I think is sometimes portrayed — it’s not a perfect melting pot, but it’s about as close as it comes in the United States, particularly in the early ‘60s. I was born in 1961. At the time, my parents’ marriage would have been illegal in a large number of Southern states. It wasn’t until 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in Fleming v. Virginia that a state couldn’t prohibit a black and a white from marrying.  But Hawaii was an enclave that was separate and apart from what was taking place on the mainland United States. So that gave me a sense of protection.

I moved to Indonesia when I was young because my mother, I guess not having disturbed her parents enough by marrying a Kenyan, after divorcing him remarried an Indonesian. And so we lived in Jakarta for four years, and, again, that meant that I was insulated from some of the most tumultuous times of the 1960s.

WI: Kind of reminds me in a way, like Helen Keller, who didn’t learn language until late, so learned it with a different consciousness. You learned race late.

BO: Well, let me put it this way: I think the starting premise that my mother instilled in me, and my father even indirectly instilled as well, was that everybody was the same, and that people occupied different circumstances as a consequence of history, as a consequence of injustice. And so although all people were the same under the skin, it didn’t mean that different people didn’t have different circumstances and you didn’t have to stand up on behalf of those who were vulnerable or weak or being oppressed.

I became most conscious of that actually around issues of class because when I was in Indonesia, like many Third World countries, at the time there were huge gulfs between rich and poor. And so I think my sense of the unfairness of life and that people could be cruel to each other was understood more in class terms than it was in race terms.

WI: You know, you entitled your book Dreams from My Father, and yet you barely knew him in a way. Why was it called Dreams from My Father?

BO: For those who don’t know my background, my father left when I was two, and so I only met him once, when I was ten years old.

WI: He was a tribal leader on the shores of Lake Victoria, if I remember, in Kenya.

BO: In Kenya. He was part of that first generation of African students that would come to study in the United States.

WI: And he studied for a doctorate at Harvard, right?

BO: He ended up studying for a doctorate at Harvard, went back to Kenya, and I think represented all the optimism of the liberation movements in a lot of developing countries right at the moment of independence, and then experienced some of the disappointments of the post-independence era. He experienced the corruption and nepotism and spoke out, ended up being blacklisted by the government in Kenya, and ended up having a difficult time, and died a bitter man, a sad figure.

But because I didn’t know him — I think this is true for maybe a lot of people, certainly true for a lot of African American youth — I understood my father as sort of a distant figure.

One of the advantages I had, though, was that my mother still saw him and painted him in mythical terms. They, despite the differences they had with each other, still loved each other, and so she created this mythic figure. He was the smartest man in the world and the most honest man in the world and the most concerned with issues of social justice. And so I had this image of him that ended up shaping my childhood. And it wasn’t until I got out of high school and went to college that I realized that I had been shaped by this ghost, by this myth, and that I needed to understand exactly who he was so that I would understand who I was.

And so the book chronicles, I think, that part of my life where I’m still trying to figure out who I am and who he is and how our stories connect. And it ends in Kenya, with a recognition that some of the struggles he went through in postcolonial Africa are not that different, in fact, are connected with some of the struggles that people — immigrants and African-Americans and all people — go through here in America.

WI: You know, whether it’s Plymouth Rock of Ellis Island or Gori Island off Senegal, we all are facing that same tragedy and struggle.

BO: Well, one of the wonderful things about America is that we come from these different ports and these different places, and there is this sense that we can create ourselves, that our destiny isn’t determined by somebody else but that it’s determined by us and our individual initiative and will and luck. And that’s always been one of the unique qualities about America and one of the precious qualities about America.

Now, that myth can be overstated and sometimes distorted or twisted in such a way where people have the impression that this country has been built only on an individual initiative and not on us working together as a community. It sometimes ignores structural problems in terms of issues like race or class that are deeply embedded. But the basic ideal that we can remake ourselves is, I think, something that has appeal to immigrants from Europe, from Africa, from Asia. It moves us still. It still motivates us. And I think it’s something that is worth holding onto.

WI: Last year on this stage right now we had Sandra Day O’Connor, the justice.  And I think I speak for a lot of people in saying there’s a sense of loss that she decided to step down from the Court. How high is the bar going to be for you in terms of whether or not you would filibuster a nominee based on ideological reasons?

BO: Well, I have told my Democratic colleagues that there’s one way to prevent judges that we don’t like and that’s to win elections. So, you know, the strategy of filibuster or other parliamentary or procedural rules can delay and slow down a process, but it can’t stop it. And my estimation would be that there’s a decision that has to be made by the White House as to whether they’re looking for a less controversial candidate that can generate at least some bipartisan consensus, or do they want to send a strong signal to their religious right constituency that will involve a lot more controversy. I suspect that they’ve boxed themselves in and it will probably be the latter. People are very afraid, I think, in certain segments of the Republican Party that another Kennedy or O’Connor or Souter will be nominated. And the more explicitly ideological the nominee is, the more likely that Democrats will try to stop it.

WI: Let me ask you to take off your Senate hat for a moment because you teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Do you think it’s right for the Senate to block a nomination based on ideological reasons?

BO: I think it’s appropriate to vote against somebody who you don’t agree with, but I’m not sure it’s appropriate to filibuster somebody just because they don’t adhere to every aspect of judicial philosophy that you believe in.

I would say that there are circumstances in which a filibuster is appropriate if somebody is so far out of the mainstream that they are looking to radically rework our broad consensus about how the Court should function. If you have a judge who says, “I think we should overthrow the entire New Deal and go back to the Lochner era when basic regulation, basic zoning powers, environmental laws, child labor laws, et cetera, were considered unconstitutional encroachments on private property,” that’s a radical step and that’s not what I think most people signed up for when they were voting for President. They didn’t expect that you would dismantle the New Deal. And in that circumstance, I think a filibuster might be appropriate.

But I don’t expect that George Bush is going to appoint the same person that I would appoint or Bill Clinton would appoint. And that means that there’s space to find candidates for the Court who I disagree with, I might even vote against, but I would consider inappropriate subjects of filibuster.

WI: If your party filibusters, do you just assume you’ll lose the right of filibuster in terms of —

BO: Yes.

WI: Go ahead, explain.

BO: For those of you who have been following this, you saw that this nuclear option was averted at the last minute by 14 senators who said that we shouldn’t destroy the possibility of filibustering judges. But I don’t think that center will hold if you have a big ideological battle around the Supreme Court.

WI: So you’ll lose the filibuster if you filibuster.

BO: If we filibuster, I think the nuclear option, which would eliminate the filibuster, will be triggered, and I suspect that the Republicans will be able to get their nominee, regardless of the filibuster. Now that I think is upsetting to a lot of folks, and I may be wrong. It’s possible that these six Republicans who agreed to avert the so-called nuclear option remain steadfast, but I think they will be under tremendous pressure within their own party. And I’d be surprised if they can withstand that pressure.

Again, my hope, my biggest hope, is that the White House steps back and recognizes that they are representing the entire country and that particularly for the Supreme Court, we want somebody who can build a broad enough consensus as part of a Court majority that the American people feel their views are represented and that they are part and parcel of the judicial decision-making process.

WI: Do you have any suggestions?

BO: I suspect Karl Rove and George Bush will not follow whatever suggestions I have. It’s not a list I’ve spent a lot of time developing.

WI: I’d noticed that he did ask Senator Leahy and Senator Reid of the Democratic Party, as well as Arlen Specter and Bill Frist, to meet with him on July 11, which is a good sign.

BO: That is a good sign. Well, this has been the tradition, and historically, what a President would do is he’d generate a list, and then he’d put it before the leaders of both parties.

WI: That was good for us in the press because everybody would leak it, and so we’d have a lot of stories.

BO: Absolutely. But as a consequence, you obtained a sense of stability in the process, and I think ultimately that made the judges more effective.

WI: Why is there no longer that cross-party comity that you used to have? Why have we gotten so partisan? You kind of fought against that in your race.

BO: Well, first of all, Walter, you’re enough of a historian to know that there have been some pretty ugly battles in American history. Sometimes we have this nostalgia for this Golden Age, and anybody who thinks it was all peaches and cream should read some of the press reports about President Lincoln and the names they were calling him. It would even make Roger Ailes blush, seeing some of the names they called him at that time.

But I do think that we have an unwillingness to disagree without being disagreeable, an inability to think practically about problems without exploding in ideological warfare, that at least in my lifetime seems much more extreme. And I think that part of it has to do with the lack of a strong consensus around some very critical issues. The global economy is an issue that parties have very different visions about. I think the Republican Party right now — they call it the ownership society — its basic vision is one of stripped-down government: We’re going to simply refund everybody as much money as possible, and then you’re on your own — an unfettered free market is always going to be superior, and the more unfettered it is, the better it is.

The Democrats have a different vision. On social issues we’ve got some very legitimate difficult issues that we’re confronting. Abortion is an issue that is very difficult to compromise on because people feel very deeply about these issues. And if you believe that abortion is murder, then it’s hard to say, “Well, I’ll admit murder in some circumstances.” You feel that you have to go all the way and fight as hard as you can.

And so there are a set of issues that I think are difficult, but the one other thing that I’ve noticed in Washington is the degree to which the media, blogs, the Internet, astroturf groups, which are essentially groups that are fabricated, or fake grassroots groups that are generating e-mails and phone calls, are so well coordinated and so focused that it pushes both sides in their most extreme corners.

WI: And the same with congressional redistricting, too.

BO: Congressional redistricting is a classic example. I think that one of the worst things that’s happened in Congress is the fact that we have districts that are so gerrymandered that the average Republican or the average Democrat never has to appeal to the other party. And so you have a variety of these forces at work that have resulted in a lack of deliberation, a lack of conversation, and a reinforcement of a single world view.

The NPR listener is not talking to the Fox News watcher. And if you have an entirely different world, if you’re getting entirely different information — here’s a great example, one of my favorite examples just recently. We had the dust-up around Guantanamo, and you will recall that Newsweek got hammered because it turned out that the report that the Koran had been flushed down the toilet on Guantanamo was unsubstantiated, and Newsweek had to jump through a lot of hoops. About three weeks later, the Pentagon issues a report indicating that, in fact, although the Koran was not flushed down the toilet, it was urinated on, and curse words were written in it. And I remember I was watching Fox News. I was on the treadmill, and I saw the snail go by — the tracking news at the bottom. And it says, “Pentagon report confirms that Koran was not flushed down the toilet.” I mean, that was the news flash. And so — and I’m not picking on Fox News. But if that’s the information you’re getting, then you are going to be deeply offended by people who suggest that somehow the things that are going on in Guantanamo are illegitimate.

WI: We used to have a common ground of information, a common ground in which our Congressman or Congresswoman would have to appeal to, because there were not gerrymandered districts.

BO: Right.

WI: And even just sort of a common ground in the House and the Senate, where people would get together in the evening for a drink or whatever. And all of that seems to have dissipated.

BO: Daniel Patrick Moynihan had a wonderful expression. Apparently he was in a committee hearing, and somebody was arguing about some arcane issue with him. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a pretty good arguer, so the other guy was getting a little flustered. Finally, the guy says, “Well, you know, I’m entitled to my own opinion.” And Daniel Moynihan says, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

WI: That’s a good point, an important point.

BO: And part of what’s happened in our political dialogue is the notion that not simply opinions are contestable but facts are contestable — that there’s no way for you and I to sit down and, even if we disagree on a direction for the country, we can at least agree that the budget deficit is X amount, or we can agree that climate change appears to really be occurring. Right? I mean, we could still have some pretty robust arguments as to whether the marketplace is the best way to deal with climate change or whether we need some sort of command-and-control regulation or something in between. But now we’re having arguments about whether climate change is happening at all, and experts can be bought and sold and purchased and packaged in such a way that the American people I think oftentimes just don’t have a clear sense of what the baseline facts are.

WI: Let me challenge you on your favorite issue, education, and on your party. I suspect that you feel that No Child Left Behind is a pretty darn good thing. It’s a good bill because you need accountability, you need standards, you need to take the money and use that to enforce the standards. And yet suddenly the Democrats are against that bill. I don’t understand why somebody like yourself can’t say, “No, we need to keep at least the backbone of No Child Left Behind,” instead of making even education a partisan issue.

BO: Well, actually I have said that. And I think that my views are evolving. But what I can say is this: The Democratic Party right now does not have an agenda on education that I at least can articulate. I think there are some areas where Democrats broadly agree: smaller class sizes, early childhood education, some terrific programs that we need to support. But if you ask the average person on the street, “What are we doing about our education system?” — precisely at a time where if we don’t revamp our education system, we will continue to fall further and further behind in global competition — I don’t think the average person could give us a good answer.  It would be interesting to do a poll here and find out. This is a pretty well-educated, unrepresentative group. I think people would have a hard time figuring out what Democrats stand for in education.

And so what I’ve said is that a couple of basic principles at least have to be part of the Democratic agenda: (A) A school system in which a third of our students aren’t reading at grade level and only a third of our students are actually being prepared for the sorts of high-wage, high-value jobs of the future is unacceptable; and (B) the status quo has to be radically altered. That has to be a basic premise in the Democratic Party platform. And I think that No Child Left Behind was at least a step in a direction of saying that we have a national challenge that has to be met. Now, I think George Bush completely failed to adequately fund No Child Left Behind. I think there are all sorts of problems in terms of applying standardized tests as the only way of holding schools accountable. Most importantly, No Child Left Behind did not speak to what I think is the most critical issue in education, and that is, how do we encourage our best and brightest to continue teaching? And how do we substantially upgrade the pay and the performance of the teaching profession and the regard in which it’s held?

I’m a relatively young man. I can remember when I was growing up — this was not so long ago — if somebody told you they were a high school teacher, that was wonderful. That was a noble calling. And that sense of teaching as a noble calling I think has diminished, partly because the pay differentials between a teacher and somebody who’s an investment banker or a lawyer has widened so dramatically.

But part of the trade-off that we’ve got to have — and the Democratic Party has to lead this trade-off — is to be able to say to teachers we will pay you substantially more and in exchange, we’re going to have to make sure that the rules that govern how our schools work are not impeding innovation and are not blocking strong measures of performance to make sure that our children succeed over the long term.

I actually think that’s the kind of trade-off that can be accomplished, and I think it’s going to be important for Democrats to put forward that kind of proactive agenda and engage the teachers unions and others who are legitimately concerned about the public schools being starved for dollars into a broader conversation about how we redesign these schools to make sure they’re performing for our kids.

WI: Would you be in favor of charter schools that did not have teachers unions?

BO: I am strongly in favor of charter schools, and actually as a state legislator, I promoted them in Illinois. I think that innovation is critical, and when you walk into the schools that work, you know they work. And the reason they work is people who are working there feel a sense of ownership. They feel empowered. There’s a sense of mission in the school. And that’s hard to generate simply by a set of bureaucratic rules that are put in a binder. A culture has to be built within those schools. So I think charter schools have to be encouraged.

By the way, I don’t think that having a union is incompatible with innovation. But I think that the union has to be understood as a professional organization that is improving the quality of life for teachers and making sure that we’ve got strong standards of performance for our students.

WI: What about vouchers?

BO: You know, I am not persuaded on vouchers, and I’ve had a lot of discussions about them. I will say this: If I actually thought vouchers would work, then I would be open to them because, particularly in inner-city schools, right now the situation in many of these schools is simply unacceptable.

WI: So you’re willing to experiment with them to see if they’d work.

BO: Well, I didn’t — I’ve seen some of the experiments, and so far I’m skeptical. Part of the problem with a voucher system is similar to the arguments that are being made around health savings accounts or private accounts in lieu of Social Security.  The tendency, I think, is, once you privatize a social good, that over time there is a strong urge on the part of people who don’t really need the subsidy to say, “Let’s just scrap this thing.” And we have an experiment in vouchers in public housing. It’s called Section 8. People are given these vouchers, and over the last 15–20 years, Congress has systematically underfunded vouchers to the point where they are not serving the people who they were intended to serve.

Part of what we’ve always valued in this country has been a public education system that not only opens up economic opportunity but also creates a common civic culture. It goes back to the point that we were raising earlier. So we have some common frames of reference that allow us to participate in a deliberative democracy.  I think public schools are worth preserving, and I do think that over time a voucher system would ultimately result in public schools that were for those who had the fewest options and were starved for funding, and I think would ultimately result in a worse situation for those who really need public education.

WI: You were pretty brutal in criticizing President Bush after his Iraq speech last week, saying that they hadn’t laid out a plan and it hadn’t been thought through.

BO: I don’t think that’s brutal. Let me say this about Iraq: When I was running — this is back in the fall of 2002 in the run-up to the war — I came out very early, alone among the seven Democrats who were running in the primary in Illinois, and said this is a bad idea. And I said it was a bad idea not on the basis of ideology. I think that Democrats have to think when to assert our military force intelligently, and I think there are occasions where we have to do that. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t think Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. I specifically said in a speech in the Plaza in Chicago — about six months before the war was launched — I said, “I’m not on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but I don’t see any serious proof of weapons of mass destruction. I don't see a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. This is going to cost us billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and we’ll fan the flames of anti-Americanism.” And I think I’ve been pretty restrained in not saying, “I told you so.”

WI: Until now.

BO: Until now, right. But what I also said at the time was, once we were in, we would have to figure out how to make it work. And so I, like many Democrats, I think, have showed significant restraint in saying that. The analogy I use is, if a bus driver drives the bus into a ditch, you should ask questions as to how it happened, and you might want to fire the bus driver, but you’ve still got to get the bus out of the ditch. And there are only a handful of ways of doing it.

There’s been a lot of pressure about Democrats coming up with an alternative strategy. Well, the truth is that there is a limited range of options now available to us in Iraq. And my complaint with the administration is not that it only finds a limited range of options available to it, it’s the spin and the lack of forthcomingness that this administration engages in when it talks about Iraq.

Look, when it says that there are 160,000 trained Iraqi troops, the only trained Iraqi troops that matter are Iraqi troops that can replace American troops. Their estimate uniformly — if you ask military intelligence on the ground how many Iraqi troops are actually trained to replace one for one American troops — it’s certainly less than 10,000. And yet they throw out a number of 160,000.

Now, what that does then is it erodes not only their credibility, but it makes it very difficult for me to have a constructive conversation. Again, it goes back to can we at least agree on a set of facts? Given that we’ve got difficult choices, given that the American people are sacrificing both in terms of blood and treasure, are we able to agree on a set of facts so that we can move forward in an honest way? And that is where I —

WI: OK, but you say there’s a range of options. Let me pose —

BO: I said there is a very limited range of options.

WI: OK, a limited range of options. And on each extreme would be one that says the facts are pretty bad, like you say, and we have to keep our troops there or even put in more troops until we can stabilize Iraq. The other might be to declare victory and go home, to say it’s now their problem, we’ve deposed Saddam Hussein, let them work it out. Which side would you be closer to?

BO: I’m not going to buy into that choice there, Walter. But here’s what I do think we can do. I think that we are starting to step up our training of Iraqi troops, but it’s still going to take about a year and a half to two years before we have any kind of effective security force that can seriously supplant American forces. I think that we can engage the Arab nations in the region much more effectively in asking them how we can proceed and getting them to feel a greater stake in our success in the region. They’re offering help that we are not taking, partly because we want to control the situation there in a way that probably over the long term is counterproductive.

I think we have to continue to press the Shias to make sure that the Sunnis as much as possible are included in this constitution-writing process. I suspect that the constitution will not be completed in three weeks.

WI: It took us longer back then, too, though.

BO: So we’re looking at a constitution-writing process that’s going to take at least another seven months. And I do think — and I’ll attribute this to Carl Levin, my terrific colleague from Michigan — that we should send the message that all the parties involved — the Shias, the Kurds, the Sunnis — have to make this work because we’re not going to be there forever. And if the constitution fails, if this process of finding accommodation fails, then we will consider all options, including the drawing down of troops. And the reason I think that that is an effective message to send is because I think there are certain factions in Iraq, particularly the Shias, who like the idea of the Americans standing behind them and may not feel as great a sense of urgency about the need to siphon away some of the antagonism from the Sunnis as long as we’re there. And if they felt that they’re going to have to take on their own security more rapidly if they’re making those accommodations, then I think that that’s a good message to send.

The final thing I’ll say is this: This administration has been extraordinarily ineffective in its public diplomacy. Some of that is just the substance of its policies. You can’t spin what I think were ill-conceived policies. But some of it has also had to do with tone. And in the same way that tone matters in the United States Senate, tone matters in people’s day-to-day interactions in your family or your business, tone matters in international affairs. And if our basic tone is one in which we are happy to have the help of other countries as long as they are doing exactly as they’re told, then it’s hard to imagine that they’re going to feel invested over the long term in the sort of orderly, secure, and mutually advantageous world system that I think is in our interest.

WI: Is Senator Clinton your party’s most likely nominee?

BO: Yes.

WI: Why?

BO: Oh, there’s a murmur out in the crowd there. I think that there are some wonderful candidates. Half my colleagues are running for the Presidency.
BO: But I think what I said shouldn’t come as a surprise. She’s by far the best known. She has a terrific infrastructure. She’s extraordinarily intelligent and has shown herself to be a very able campaigner. That doesn’t mean that she wins the nomination. I think that it’s a wide-open field, both on the Republican and the Democratic side. But if you ask me who would be the most likely candidate — you know, they have these online odds makers who can can lay down your bets — I think that she’s pretty substantially ahead.

WI: Is she the strongest candidate?

BO: I was on there despite the fact that I said I’m not running, and that shows you that they probably don’t really know what they're talking about. But —

WI: Is she the strongest candidate?

BO: You know, it’s so hard to say what the situation is going to be a year and a half from now. Let me say this about the Democratic Party. I think that we can take a lesson from the Republicans in the sense that we seem to be continually looking for the next Messiah. I think that’s a bad habit. I think that we’re better off thinking about what is an agenda, what is a message that is going to resonate with the American people. And if we do that, if we do that, then I think that the leadership will emerge that can articulate that agenda in a powerful way.

You know, we’ve mentioned a couple of things that have to be on that agenda. I think education has to be on that agenda. As part of a broader message, how are we grappling with this new global economy in a meaningful way? Right now we are not doing anything serious to revamp our education system. We’re cutting our research and development funding. Our community college system and our higher education system is weakening as opposed to getting stronger as a consequence of disinvestment. How are we thinking about that so that when we talk to a steelworker in Ohio we can honestly say to that steelworker, “Your job may not be coming back, but new jobs are going to be created. We’re serious about retraining you. And, most importantly, we’re serious about preparing your child and your grandchild to compete.” And we’re not going to be able to simply draw a moat around America.  Chinese and Indian and Eastern European young people who have been liberated to enter into the world economy, they rightly should be allowed to compete, and we can compete just as well if we’ve made the investment.

That’s something we have to answer. We have to talk about foreign policy in a way that’s tough and smart, because my personal view is that the other party has the monopoly on the tough-and-dumb strategy. I don’t think that we can be more bellicose than the Republicans. But I think what we do have an obligation to put forward is a muscular, serious policy that is not simply talking about vague multilateralism for the sake of multilateralism, but is, rather, laying out a serious agenda for how we create the sort of security structures that we created after World War II and that lasted us through the Cold War.

And the third thing the Democrats have to talk about is faith and family and community in ways that embrace diversity and tolerance rather than exclude diversity and tolerance. Which, by the way, means more than just trying to drop a quote from the Bible into your speech. There’s got to be a sense of authenticity when we talk about values, and that’s something that I welcome having a debate about, because I think we’ve abandoned the field, and it’s been filled by James Dobson and Pat Robertson. If I look in the Bible, there are a lot more references to doing stuff for the poor than there are about gay marriages. And so we can talk about that sacred text. But if you’re not Christian, don’t pretend to be. I would rather have Democrats say, “Look, I’m a proud secular humanist, but I still have a set of values that I care about and I’m willing to debate people about what it means to treat people with dignity and respect.” And so that conversation I think has to take place.

If we do those three things — global economy, foreign policy, and faith, family, and values — in an intelligent way, then I think not only can we win the Presidency, but we can win the House and the Senate.

WI: Why don’t we go to the audience for some questions?

Audience Member: Senator Obama, my name is Eboo Patel. I’m the executive director of an organization called the Interfaith Youth Corps, a fellow Chicagoan. You just talked about faith. I wanted to actually ask you to illuminate that a little bit more for us. The United States is the most religiously devout country in the West and the most religiously diverse country in the world at a time when the faith line is what’s causing large quantities of bloodshed. I’m wondering if you could talk more about what you think public leadership in America would be around engaging our religious dynamics, and if you think that could have a positive effect on faith dynamics in the rest of the world.

BO: Let me try it this way: I think that some of the most important movements to expand and broaden our democracy have been animated by faith. That was certainly true of abolition. It was true of the civil rights movement. If you think about Dorothy Day and the Christian workers, Catholic workers, you know, across history there have been wonderful influences when faith enters into the public square and informs and instructs on how we can treat each other with mutual regard. I think that we get into trouble when we lose what I consider to be a critical component of my faith, and that is an element of doubt. You know, there’s a wonderful saying in Scripture that if you can see what it is that you’re hoping for, then it’s not hope. And part of what distresses me about our current religious dialogue is people are so certain, so absolute in their views, that they will not admit that which they cannot see. They will not admit the possibility that the other person has a perspective that not only should be valued but may be a different pathway to God or to faith. And so part of what I’m interested in is to try to reintroduce a sense of humility when we talk about faith. You know, Lincoln is wonderfully instructive in this. When you look at Abraham Lincoln and his writings, what’s striking is the degree to which he’s looking for some sort of divine plan but doubts his own ability to properly discern it and interpret it, and as a consequence is able and willing, in fact, feels compelled because of the nature of his faith, to try to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through somebody else’s eyes. That’s the only way that I think religious freedom and religious tolerance can coexist, is if there’s that sense of empathy that’s central, I think, to the American experiment.

Audience Member: Thank you for being here, Senator. I appreciate it. My name is Torre. I live here in Aspen. My question is: Is there a current national dialogue about election reform, how we are going to engage more of the voting population? And do those that are already elected really even care to have any voter reform?

BO: Well, I care. And I do think that there are a number of my colleagues who care.  I think that the most obvious issue in election reform is just making sure that your ballot is counted.  And there have been a number of bills that have been introduced — in fact, Senator Clinton has a bill, John Kerry has a bill. My office is working with a broad coalition of voting rights groups to develop a strategy, just to make sure that the ballot is counted. In some ways, that’s actually the simplest problem, although it’s also one that involves just, frankly, some partisan resistance. The Republican Party right now feels that the system as it is is working pretty well for them. And they control the Senate and the House. That doesn’t mean that all Republicans are trying to impede progress on this. It just means that it’s not at the top of their list.

But there’s a broader issue that actually Walter raised, and that is, the cynicism and sense that politics doesn’t work leads people not to participate in our democracy. And I think that involves a broader restructuring around issues like the gerrymandering of congressional districts. You know, this is an area where I actually agree with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now I think that in California he may be advancing it for immediate political advantage, but sometimes people do the right things for the wrong reasons, and it is true that the way our congressional districts are gerrymandered, creating 70 percent Democratic districts or 70 percent Republican districts, drawn in such a way that elected officials essentially choose their constituents instead of their constituents choosing the elected official, is a problem.

Now, it’s not that simple to solve because we have a voting rights reauthorization coming up. A lot of the members of the Black Caucus in Congress would not have been there had it not been for districts that were drawn as majority minority districts as a way of making up for racial bloc voting in parts of the South, and in some parts of the North as well.

WI: Well, wait a minute. Let me pin you down.

BO: Sure.

WI: Would you be willing to step back from the voting rights reauthorization in order to tackle the gerrymandering issue?

BO: The voting rights reauthorization is something that has to take place because it’s part and parcel of making sure that the vote in counted. But I do think that this broader issue of how districts are drawn should inform the debate surrounding the Voting Rights Act.

WI: Let me go to this gentleman here.

Audience Member: Thank you. Milton Sidley. I wonder if you could please comment about your position on what we do with the deficit, how we finance some of these things that you’re talking about, and what, if anything, you anticipate in terms of reducing the deficit and so forth.

BO: You know those tax cuts that a lot of you guys got? Let’s be honest. You guys were doing OK under Clinton. You really were. And you didn’t need those tax cuts and you weren’t even asking for them. I don’t mean to be glib because that doesn’t solve the entire problem. But I do think it stops the bleeding. I would not make permanent a host of the tax cuts that George Bush initiated, the estate tax being one of them. I think we could modify the estate tax so that it better accommodates small businesses, family businesses, family farms. But eliminating it entirely I think would be a mistake.

I don’t think that would solve the entire problem, obviously. We’ve got a structural deficit in Social Security that is not actually our biggest crisis. Why the President decided to spend all his political capital on that is not entirely clear to me. I think that this is a classic example — Ronald Reagan in 1983 got together with Tip O’Neill and figured out some modest tweaking of the system that made the system solvent for an additional 75 years. There’s no reason why we couldn’t do the same with Social Security.

Where we do have an enormous problem — and I don’t have a good answer to this — is Medicare and Medicaid, and the entire cost of health care that is being borne not only by the private sector, but increasingly by the public sector, particularly as companies with large legacy health care costs may start dumping and eliminating their health care plans. That is going to involve a bipartisan conversation in which we are serious about reducing costs; and that includes things like medical technology. It includes things that in some cases my party may have been resistant to, like figuring out how to rationalize the tort system in an intelligent way. And it’s going to involve us at some point rethinking basic health care delivery that involves a host of middlemen who are taking money out of the system. If we don’t get control of our health care costs both in the private and the government sectors, I do not think we can solve our structural deficit problem.

WI: Yes, thank you very much.

Audience Member: I believe that it’s time to reclaim the Fairness Doctrine. I think that media, whether it’s CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all of the media right now is controlled by groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Republican right, and they have it wired. I would like to see the Democratic Party take that on because until that’s taken on, we don’t have an American system.

BO: One of the biggest concerns that I have is not just the starkly partisan views of Sean Hannity — maybe because I don't listen to Sean Hannity. It’s not as much of concern to me as in mainstream media, including Walter’s former employer, Time, or The New York Times, where there is ironically an unwillingness to assert the truth because the idea is that we have to be objective and so that objective is expressed in terms of, “The Bush administration today said that there are 160,000 troops trained in Iraq, Barack Obama said that there are fewer than 10,000 troops in Iraq,” and then we go on to the next story, as opposed to the reporter saying, “And, by the way, on this point the administration appears to be wrong, and Barack Obama might be right.” And we could reverse it on other issues. The point is what I think a lot of reporters consider to be objective reporting now is just to write up the press releases of two sides of an argument instead of doing their own analysis of what is true. And I think that has to do with the culture of the media, and it can’t necessarily be legislated.

Audience Member: Senator, thank you very much for being here. It doesn’t rank in your top three issues, but would you be willing to give us or share with us your view on how we might get our arms around this very challenging problem of access and quality of health care in this country?

BO: Let me say this: It actually does rank in my top three issues because I don’t think we can be globally competitive as an economy unless we get a handle on our health care costs. I believe that very deeply.

So we basically have two problems. We have a problem of cost and we have a problem of access, and those two things are related, obviously. You know, people always complain about rationing in the Canadian system, but we, of course, have our own system rationing. It just works differently. There they have lines, and here we have 45 million people who just don’t get health care, or who get crummy health care or haphazard health care through the emergency care system.

So on the cost side, I’ve mentioned some things that I think can make a difference and that we could generate some bipartisan agreement on. Medical technology is a good example. It costs us in some cases $25 to process a medical transaction, where it costs less than a penny to clear your check at a bank, and that just has to do with setting up an automated system and a clearinghouse, an infrastructure that’s been constructed which has no equivalent in the medical system.

Audience Member: So you would push for electronic medical records.

BO: Oh, absolutely, and then there are all kinds of issues of privacy and hackers that we’d have to deal with. But the fact of the matter is that we can’t continue to have a paper system, partly because more people die of medical error than of AIDS in this country every year, and the reason for that oftentimes is people just can’t read the prescription that’s been written by the doctor or what’s on the clipboard, or in some cases because there’s on interconnectivity, one doctor may know that somebody’s allergic to a particular antibiotic and it’s not communicated in real time to another doctor. So that’s an area where I think we can get some bipartisan agreement. I think we can make some significant progress, as I said, in terms of dealing with medical liability in a way that less defensive medicine is practiced. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that I’m in favor of blanket caps, but I think there are ways of at least moderating the system, and there’s been some interesting efforts at the state level to do so.

John Kerry actually had — although not very many people paid attention to it — a smart idea with respect to costs that would have an impact on access, and that was taking out the issue of catastrophic care, dealing with that as part of the Medicare system, and allowing employers to offer a premium, a plan that provides basic prevention and care, but may not deal with catastrophic care, which is often the most expensive, the government picking up some of the tab on that. That would allow us to expand because the premiums would be lower, we’d potentially get more workers who currently don’t have health insurance at all having some health insurance.

Over the long term, I think that we’re going to end up with a system in which everybody’s got some basic care, and if you want specialty care, if you want liposuction, if you want LASIK surgery, you’ve got to pay for it, it’s not covered. And we’re going to have to make some difficult decisions as a society, particularly an aging society, about what those things we consider part of basic care are and what those things that we don't consider part of basic care. A classic example is hip replacement surgery. Is that part of basic care? It sure improves quality of life.  People may not require it in order to live their lives, but it’s an important issue in terms of quality of life. And so those debates I think are going to be critical.

Audience Member: My predecessor stole my question.

BO: Oh, no.

Audience Member: But I’m not going to give up my spot in the line.

BO: You know, can I just say this? You just expressed, I think, the philosophy of the US Senate.

Audience member: If you have this great message and you have to turn it over to the opposition’s message machine — it’s like if you’re in court and you ask the opposing attorney to explain your story — how do we overcome that?

BO: Well, look, can the Democrats do a better job delivering a message? Absolutely. But this may reveal some naiveté on my part, and so I offer this with some hesitance.  I don’t think that the Democrats will be effective simply by trying to mimic what the Republicans have done. First of all, we’re not as good at it. I think that if we express ourselves clearly, concisely, and are willing to take risks and describe what we believe in our guts as a party, then I think we can be successful. Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rapidly respond to untruths and that we don’t have to create an infrastructure to get our message out effectively. I think we do. And it would be wonderful if we had a network, so if you happen to have a lot of money, let me talk to you.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Jonathan [inaudible] Chicago South Side and live in Carbondale now. It’s been a generation since Shirley Chisholm ran for President, and you were just elected to the United States Senate. How do you believe that white privilege will either evolve or dissolve in the 21st century?

BO: This is probably a good place to end because, you know, one of the running themes in American life has been a cycle in which we expand opportunity and citizenship and then contract it during difficult times, where we think only about us and them, but then “us” sort of expands to include more and more people, and race has obviously been at the heart of that. And do I think that we’re going to entirely eradicate racism, tribalism in this country? No, because we are imperfect. That’s the human condition. Can we continue to make progress so that my children have more opportunity than I had and my grandchildren have even more opportunity still? I certainly think that’s possible.

This is probably a good place to end with a story. You say you live in Carbondale. When I ran for the US Senate, I was not favored. We had less money than a lot of candidates. We had to focus all that money in the Chicago media market where about 70 percent of the Democratic Party voters work, so we had to kind of husband our resources. We won by 30 points, much to our surprise, as well as everyone else’s, and now we realize that we’re just naked downstate. We haven’t run any television ads down in St. Louis or in the media markets down in those areas. And so the first thing that we decide to do is to take a downstate southern Illinois tour. And Dick Durbin, my senior senator from Illinois, agrees to accompany me on a 19-city, three-day tour of southern Illinois. And we went to every town in southern Illinois. We didn’t just go to Carbondale. We went to Caseyville and Edwardsville and Hillsboro and Murphysboro. We went to every “hill” and “boro” and “ville” in southern Illinois.

And one of the places we visited was a town that I’m sure you are familiar with called Cairo, Illinois. And some of you may recall that Cairo, Illinois, achieved a certain notoriety as having some of the worst racial problems of any place in the nation, as bad as anything going on in Mississippi or Alabama. And for those of you who don’t know Illinois geography, southern Illinois is the South. And during the ’60s and ’70s, you had lynchings taking place in Cairo. You had cross burnings taking place during that period in Cairo. You had de facto segregated schools. African-Americans had very great difficulty getting jobs beyond menial work.

And so Dick Durbin and I decided to go. As we’re driving down to Cairo, Illinois, he tells me, “You know, the first time I went to Cairo was during this period of tumult in the late ’60s, early ’70s.” Dick Durbin was then working for Lieutenant Governor Paul Simon, and Paul Simon had dispatched Dick Durbin to investigate what could be done to improve the racial climate in Cairo. Dick Durbin at the time is 23 or 24, a young lawyer. He takes the bus down to Cairo, gets picked up by a local resident there, is driven to the motel where he’s going to be staying. And as he’s about to get out, the driver turns to him and says, “Young man, let me give you a piece of advice.” Dick says, “What’s that?” He says, “Don’t use the telephone in your motel room.” And Dick says, “Why not?” He says, “Well, the local switchboard operator is a member of the White Citizens Council and is going to report on everything that you say.”

And this obviously makes Dick concerned, but he’s got a job to do. He checks into the motel, goes up to his room, starts unpacking his bags, hears a knock on the door, opens the door, and there is a man standing there just peering at Dick, a mean-looking guy. Doesn’t say anything at first. Finally just says, “What the hell are you doing here?” And walks away.

And now Dick’s really feeling nervous — and so am I because we’re pulling into Cairo as he’s telling me the story. So we enter the town and we’re winding down some streets. We come around the old courthouse, and suddenly we’re in a big parking lot. And there are about 300 people there. And I noticed that on first impression these are people of an age that they might have been active participants in one way or another in those racial difficulties that had taken place 30 years ago.

But as I get closer, I notice that about a third of them are black, about two-thirds of them are white. And as we approach and enter the parking lot, they’re all wearing these little blue buttons. And they say, “Obama for US Senate.” And Dick and I get off the van, and they’re smiling and taking pictures and offering autographs and offering us barbecue. And I look at Dick and he looks at me, and we knew what the other person was thinking. If you had asked Dick Durbin 30 years earlier — son of Lithuanian immigrants, father dies when he’s barely out of fifth grade, mother ultimately had to support him and died early as well. If you had told him that he would be returning as the senior United States senator from the State of Illinois and that he’d have in tow a black guy born in Hawaii, with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, named Barack Obama, and that not only would he be the Democratic nominee but that the people of Cairo would have a reception like this, he would have said, “This is unimaginable. It’s impossible.” And yet it was happening.

I think that reminds me of one of my favorite sayings by Dr. King, and a good place to end. You know, Dr. King once said, shortly after the walk over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and at a time when people were very discouraged about the corruption movement, he said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It bends toward justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own small ways try to bend it in that direction. We put our hand on that arc and we pull it in the direction of justice. And I think that if all of us agree on that basic precept, whether we’re Republicans or Democrats, then I think that’s the answer to your question.

WI: Thank you.