 Wel, rhaid i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell a'r Llyfrgell Pwyllgor Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae'r rhagorau a'r gwrthodd, rwy'n gweithio'r gwaith, yng Nghymru, Donna Edwards ac Charles Bustani, yn ysgolwch ar gyfer cyflawni a'r cyflawni'r gwaith o'r bydau o'r cyflawni o'r Llyfrgell Pwyllgor Llyfrgell. Mae'r rhagorau a'rifeil Cymru fyrdd yna, ni i ddim o'r eithaf يndig i gyflawni'r mynd i'r ddiwethaf a'r cyflawni, gyda i'n defnyddio ammhlygon ac y pryd eich cyflawni a'r Rhagorau a'r Ymwysg. Dyna fyddi'r ymwysg a'r cyflawni i'r ddaf o'r bydau o'r bydau, ac rhi'r obfwni am fydd yn ei fod yn hyn syl y brifence. A'u gwirionedd, wrth gyd, i'n gerchwyn mewn gweithio'r bydd. Felly rydyn ni ddigonwydrwydd fod yn gweithio ddweud ar y dyma yn yr Oed. Ond yna'r amser hynny chi'n yn fwyannau ddim yn ddechrau'r ysgriffa. Dw i'n lawer o gwyfaint y cwestiynau ar fynd yn y Gymru. A'r yfnod olig wrth ei gwleidio'r ddwy дляr gweld, ac mae wefnod y cwestiynau. Dwi'n amser gallwch chi nid o gyfer swyddion give mewn cyngwyllt. Felly ddim wedi rhoi ei falw ymddirionedd a chyfyddechrau'r cymdeithasol yw. Rhyw hand yw pob iawn i'r newydd. ac yn meddwl, rydyn ni'n adnod o'r gwybod wedi ychydig i cion, mewn gwnaeth ar gyfer gyfer ymdeithas, dweud i'n fïrth pergynig, fel ydych yn eich gwybod? Prydych yn angen i'n adnod yma. Rydyn ni'n wneud i chi ydw i… Mae hyn yn fan hyn a ph sansyn am digwydd y preonon i'r bob yn ymddangos. Mae'n iawnio'n gael i fynd i'n gwneud i chi ar gwygon. Rydyn ni'n adnod, Edward, cyfan ar bob gyfodol gyda five-tyfr ar gael 2008-17, I described myself sometimes as an accidental congresswoman. I lived in my congressional district, which is right outside of Washington, D.C. in the state of Maryland, and I was very active in my community. And then finally just got really annoyed with my congressman and decided after asking a whole bunch of other people to run against him, and nobody's saying yes, because he had been in congress for I think at that time seven terms. And then I said, well, if nobody else is going to do it, I'll do it. And so I signed up, I wrote a check for $100, because that's what it costed my state to run for congress. And I didn't tell anybody about it all weekend long, including my family. But then I decided that in order to be a congresswoman, I would actually have to start telling people. And so I ran, the very first time I ran I actually lost that election. But because it was very close, I decided I would run again. And the second election I won by 23 percentage points, having lost by two points before. And I served on a number of committees, we'll be able to talk about that later on. But I will say that holding elective office and being in congress was one of the greatest privileges that I've had. And the ability to make a difference in people's lives in big ways and small ways. And so I'm excited to be here with you today. And you all can ask us anything at all. And I'd love to take your questions. Thank you very much, Cara. Well, my name is Charles Bustani. I represented a district in Louisiana famous for hurricanes. And I made a decision to run for congress at a time when I was very busy, married with two children, both in high school at the time. And I was a practicing cardiovascular surgeon. I did open heart surgery, lung cancer surgery. Had never really been in politics before, but I was interested in it and I followed it. And around the time that I made the decision, the news, this was in 2003, actually late 2003 before the 2004 election. I was very disturbed by our drift with the Iraq war and the problems that we were seeing in Iraq and the mistakes that were being made. Two young men who were in high school with my son had been killed in Iraq. And it really disturbed a lot of individuals, families in our community. And then being a doctor, I saw all the problems with the healthcare system. And I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping one night thinking about all this. It was sort of floating around in my head. And I got up very, very early in the morning and I went to the kitchen, got myself a cup of coffee. And as I started looking at the newspaper, I was getting angrier and angrier about what was going on and dissatisfied with the fact that I'm down here in Louisiana. All these things are going on and I want to do something about it. So right then and there I made a decision that I was going to run for congress. And my wife later came into the kitchen wanting to know why I was up so early. And I said, well, honey, we need to talk. And her face just went completely blank. She got very pale. I could see fear like what's coming. Oh my God, he's got cancer. He's leaving me. There's some bad news here. And when I said I'm going to run for congress and she just stared at me and then her face got beat red. And then we had a three day argument. And finally she said, I've known you since we started dating in college and you have a very hard head. And once you make up your mind, you won't back down. So go ahead, run for congress. I think this is a terrible mistake and when you get 15% of the vote and get totally humiliated, I don't want to ever hear about this again. Get it out of your system. So I was excited being the optimist that I am and then I realized I don't know what I'm doing. I've never run a campaign before and I realized, OK, well, I need to hire some people who know what they're doing, which means you've got to raise money. And so then I started working on that and ultimately put a very good campaign together, stumbling through it for the most part and ultimately beat three very well established politicians through the primary and the general election. Nobody thought I could win, but we worked very, very hard to gain the trust of constituents one after another and just outworked everybody. And I won 55-45 in that first election. I was the first Republican ever elected to represent that district, but I was able to bridge the trust gap by making personal contact with people and continue to do that and continue to win elections. The last one in my constituency, I won with 80 percent of the vote. Then I got greedy and ran for the U.S. Senate with an open seat and I ended up losing that race by a small margin, but politics had shifted in my state and the Republican Party went much harder to the right in the state, which I'm more of a centrist Republican and so ultimately lost that. Here I am, as a former member of Congress. As Donna said, all questions are on the table. Thank you both very much for those introductions. I thought I would just get us rolling. I was wondering what surprised you most when you first got to Congress? What do you think you misunderstood looking from the outside in? What was the most surprising thing? I would say I think a lot of members of Congress were really hard, but I was actually surprised at how many members really were not readers and students. That shocked me because I would take everything home and read it and study. We did the health care bill when I first came into Congress and I was one of those who took that couple of thousand pages home and I read every single page and I'm a lawyer by training. I went to law school and was licensed and I put tabs on the side and wrote notes and flipped through every single page of it and I thought everybody did that and it turned out that wasn't true. I would agree with that. I also surprised me because my background as a doctor had to study hard to become a doctor and then I felt a strong sense of obligation that if I'm going to vote on something I need to know what it is and I realized a lot of folks had a very shallow knowledge of what was actually being voted on. It was funny, I remember when I first started because I'd never been in politics so I was very fortunate to hire a very experienced chief of staff who helped me build the right kind of staff around me to be effective and he told me on the very first day he said, keep this in mind, Congress is like high school. It's like a big high school campus and there are clicks and people gravitate into these little clicks and you get this little herd mentality here and there and I thought a very, very accurate description of how Congress operates internally and so by kind of keeping that in mind it helped me to understand some of the politics that play out internally in the halls of Congress, who's talking to whom, why are they making decisions the way they do, why this little group is deciding they're going to vote against the leadership even though it's in the same party, those kinds of things but then it also forced me to realize that people come from very different backgrounds they represent different types of constituencies and it's important to understand that too to really get to know the people you're working with. Thank you, so do we have any first questions from the floor? So for those who are in here, my colleagues have our roving mics so don't be shy. Don't be shy, this is an opportunity to learn now. Okay, lady at the front. Given that you were not previously a politician do you think there's a specific thing that constituents like to hear from you to gain their trust? Yes, I think I mentioned earlier that I was the first Republican to ever win that office and all the local politicians told me, oh we like you, we know you're a respected doctor but wrong party but I kept working hard reaching out to people across, I had a rule basically, I'm not going to let anybody that I pass, I'm not going to ignore them, I'm going to walk up to them, I'm going to shake their hand, I'm going to ask them for their support and I'll tell them about me and so often times when we were on the road we would just stop in a small grocery or filling station and I would do that while my person with me was filling up the car or whatever I would go and talk to everybody. Half the time I ran into people who were not even constituents that were from different states but it was a great exercise and when you do that you start to really meet people and understand what motivates them and by doing that I was able to circumvent the political establishment and to gain such support that once I got through the first round and went into the second round I was actually able to convert many local democratic political office holders in my corner because I developed this trust. Being a doctor helped as well. Physicians have a certain level of trust, it was relatively unusual back then for physicians to run for political office and so that helped me as well. I would say, I'm not a physician, I'm a lawyer and there are a lot of lawyers in Congress but I had never been in politics before and I actually thought that was an advantage because I ran against an incumbent member of my own party which is just not done and so the party apparatus was completely opposed to me and I did what Charles did, I went around that and went out where people live in their neighborhoods, communities or grocery stores at the gas station. Any place that I could find people, shake their hands, introduce myself, ask them what's important to them. I also shared my story and my history because although I'm a lawyer and I obviously had an opportunity that a lot of people don't have, I started from very humble beginnings and at the time I had been raising my son who's now 30 but at the time he was in high school as a single mother raising this young man and I was able to share that with people and identify with them in their own lives and I think when you're in politics when you open up your own life and your life story people just see you as a regular person and it endears you to them and so when I won that second election it was because I really connected with people and then thereafter won my elections with almost 90% of the vote in my district but I think it's really about those personal connections. So you've obviously done quite a couple of terms over the years. How did you guys, how are you managing to not burn out and keep going in terms of just not stopping after one or two terms? What was keeping you going? For me it was the work. I mean for me it was the ability to get in and to get some things done. When I ran I think like Charles a huge part of my message was around the Iraq war and around the foolishness of going into Iraq and I actually ran against a gentleman who supported the Iraq war and it turns out that our constituencies our constituents really did not. I ran on an agenda of bringing healthcare to people I shared with them that there was a time when I didn't have health insurance you all don't sort of have that system here and I found myself in an emergency room without any health insurance and I ended up with thousands of dollars of healthcare bills that almost bankrupt me and I wanted to go in and fix that system and so it's doing those things that really kept me going and I went on a foolhardy adventure too I ran for the United States Senate in an open seat that's what we shared Charles and lost that election but continued to figure out ways like this to continue to serve the public When I was in medicine and would perform open heart operations and helping a poor person who was scared to death of what they were facing and their families were afraid and then to help them through that and see them come back to my office six weeks later feeling good feeling much better than they did and it inspired me that I was helping people and my time in politics and I served six terms, 12 years from 2005 to 2017 and the ability to help people on a bigger scale always gave me enthusiasm I woke up in the morning every day I was in Congress enthusiastic about the work I had to do and even when I was tired in the evenings ready to go back at it I was very inexperienced I was having to learn the ropes how Congress works how to be in politics other than just being somebody who related pretty well to people My area was hit by two major hurricanes Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita and I traveled around the district I was getting maybe two or three hours of sleep at night for weeks on end because so many people had lost their homes they had lost their businesses because there was a lot of poverty in my district and the fact that I was able to help so many of them made a difference I'll never forget we were driving in a very rural part of my district which had been hit very badly by hurricanes and I saw this man, he was elderly and he was carrying all this stuff across the front yard of a house and the yard was all mud where a nice beautiful lawn had probably been before and he was slogging through the mud and I made my staff person stop and I walked across the mud to help him carry this stuff to the front and we started talking and I said would you show me what happened to your house and he said this is my daughter's house I'm helping her because she had to go to work and the kids had to be sent to a different school outside of our area to continue their schooling he took me in there and this was an area that had been terribly flooded there was a large kitchen appliance that had been completely thrown across the room and wedged under a counter there was this much mud in the house and we walked through that house and it smelled awful, it was just a terrible scene and I'll never forget this walking in a living room and the only thing that was kind of normal was a picture of the family sitting on right above the fireplace it was splattered with mud but it was still there and it just struck me and I told the gentleman I said that is symbolic of who we are your family and in that picture it shows that they've withstood this and they will be back in this house and this house will be cleaned and that kind of stuff just motivated me to go hours on end with fatigue and until I would get home that's when I'd realise how tired I was because when I was helping people it didn't stop, you wanted to do that it gave you this strong sense of mission I'll just pick up on that obviously there's a balance between needing to do your job in Congress and needing to be at home in your constituency how did you balance that how did you make sure that both parts of that job you thought you were doing them effectively well I mean obviously you have your congressional staff on Capitol Hill and then each of us have a staff to handle day to day problems in the district I was very fortunate because my district was very close to Capitol Hill so I got to just live in my district at home all the time spent time going to schools to visit school children and places where seniors gathered and all across the district visiting with businesses and I did find that having a congressional district that was close to Washington DC meant that I almost never took off in fact I actually didn't have a vacation I didn't take a vacation I didn't realise this until after I got out of Congress for the entire time that I was serving I don't think that's a good way to balance things but I didn't really notice it to be quite honest with you and there are things that you see when you're on the ground in your district as Charles just described that remind you of why it is that you're serving Congress you're not serving to introduce some bill that somebody else introduced that's never going to get passed you're there to serve the people in the best way possible you know in their daily experiences and most people are concerned about just a couple of things where their children are being educated how they're earning a living what their healthcare is and they want you to make sure that their children's lives are better than theirs I mean that really is very fundamental and I'm sure that's true here in the UK as well and I think when you're a member of Congress and they focused on that then you don't pay attention to all the distractions My constituency was quite a bit of distance from Washington I had to take two airplane flights and I would fly from Washington to Atlanta sit in the airport for a few hours and then take another flight down to my hometown in Louisiana so if everything went well with the flights it was about a six hour you know a period of time six or seven hours at one time it took me 23 hours to get home the most important thing in fact when I was in the district with the constituents I was always even busier than Washington so I never had time like Donna I don't think I took much time off it was a seven day a week situation often times flying back and going straight to an event before you even go home that kind of thing but the most important thing in all of that because the schedule is so busy is to have a scheduler who understands the district sympathetic to your constituents needs and know that your constituents come first so the way we if I was in Washington the top priority obviously was to cast votes on the house floor or in committee but if I had constituents who had flown up even if I was in a committee meeting I would step out to say hello I might have staff address the major concern and spend more time with them but I always took the effort to step out and ask them how they were doing if I knew some family members or friends of theirs I would try to make a personal connection it's a very demanding schedule and it leaves no time for yourself because what little time you have you want to give to your family we would try to block out Sunday morning for instance or at least one meal on Sunday when I was back home to spend with family the rest of the time I was going to events and it's quite a busy schedule and in Washington for any 30 minute block of time you may have six different demands on your time and you always have somebody leading you leaving something earlier than you want to to go to something you have to go to and then before you finish that you're off again to something else it's a very hectic schedule and that was hard for me because as a surgeon it was always okay I'm going to see this patient I've got this operation then I've got my rounds to make on the hospital patients then another surgery it was a very linear schedule it was nothing like that in Congress Wonderful Any more questions from the audience? Having seen things from the inside what would you say is the biggest failing in the current American political system for example in the UK people often point out the shortcomings of the first past the post system what would you say needs fixing or changing in America or could be changed if anything? I think we probably share this but I think that the biggest problem I think that contributes both to inaction and to conflict is structural it's the fact that members of Congress especially if you're in a competitive district you have to spend between 35, 40, 50 hours a week on a telephone calling people to raise money to campaign and that begins almost from the moment that you're elected and so if you can imagine a work week if 40, 50 hours are spent what we describe as dialing for dollars calling donors to ask them to give you money doesn't leave a lot of waking hours to do other things to get to know your colleagues to do your homework to pay attention to constituents the way that you need and so I think that we have to change the money system and allow members of Congress to come in and really focus on being members I fully agree with that so I won't repeat what Donna said that is an absolute fundamental flaw in the way our system is set up now but it's made worse by the fact that current American law allows for these outside groups that could be single issue groups or maybe just a few core issues to put together an organization and raise unlimited amounts of money that they use to put pressure on members of Congress not to deviate from those issues and it's a very polarizing atmosphere they drive division they raise a lot more money than Donna or I can raise for our own campaigns because we have limitations put upon us on that so you're limited in your ability to counter it and if you couple that that type of scenario with that money and those influence groups that social media a 24-7 news cycle gives you no space there's no political space to build relationships and to work on some issues in a more substantive way right now everything has to be put into a tweet or even a bumper sticker type of slogan so the opportunity to do the substantive work to solve the problems that everyday families are dealing with around the kitchen table and healthcare and education even foreign policy issues that affect communities those things don't get addressed in a thorough manner in which they should be addressed because all the pressures are placed on you politically and there's just no political space to actually work on those things I would like to ask you about your personal experience with partisan polarization and how you deal with that when it comes to complications about voting on something within Congress I mean it's a real issue I think one of the structural problems that we haven't had a chance to talk about is when we do apportionment we count the number of people divide up the congressional districts and then those districts are drawn many of them are highly gerrymandered they're highly drawn so that there's a concentration of Democrats in one of the other districts and because of that there are very few districts where you find that happy middle so that you can have ground for compromise and so that's something that we have to work on and I would add to that I recall a circumstance where I was working on our science committee overseeing the national aeronautics and space administration funding that should not be a partisan issue funding space but it became a partisan issue and what I found is that when I stepped aside and made a phone call to the chairman and said let's sit down just the two of us and talk this through and we sat down with some coffee and on a napkin highlighted the things that we each wanted to see then we went back and wrote a bill and then we passed it unanimously and then it went to the floor and it passed unanimously that should have happened in the beginning but it did happen because the two of us had a relationship and we were able to step back away from the cameras and sit down and really do the work One time we were trying to get this bank called the Export-Import Bank reauthorized and set up to operate and what that bank did was it provided help for small businesses who were trying to export and it provided financing and some insurance and so forth it became a very hot button political issue because there were outside conservative groups that wanted to cut government cut government spending and get rid of programs so they targeted this program even though it wasn't really directly funded by the government it was a self sustaining entity and every country in the world uses it to a great advantage even Ronald Reagan father of modern conservatism with a Republican party used it extensively to help promote American business interests around the world well the chairman of the committee who is entrusted with the reauthorization of this bank wanted to get rid of it for political reasons he wouldn't even have a conversation a fellow Republican on why it's so important and I had 160 small businesses that depended on this in South Louisiana and they were going to be threatened by an inoperative bank like this and so I tried to have a conversation with them it was all for naught we knew that there were enough Republicans and Democrats combined that if we took it to the floor for a vote it would pass easily but the chairman was blocking it and the Republican leadership didn't want to do anything about it and so we knew there was a kind of a little used tool to bypass the congressional process and force a floor vote and if we could do that we could win so the key was we had to find enough Republicans and we were going to have the courage to go sign what's called a discharge petition to force the bill for a vote and that is never done by people in the majority going against their own party leadership so I decided among a few others that we were going to do that and our Democratic friends welcomed it and we went down publicly to the house floor and each one by one signed that book and we got to the necessary 218 votes which required about 30 or so of us on the Republican side to do this and we forced that vote and we won there were some arch-conservative fellow Republicans who came to me and called me a few names on the house floor called me a traitor and what angered me more than anything was the fact that they didn't even understand how the bank worked and I had done my homework and the sad thing is the arguments about this is how this works this is why it's necessary they weren't willing to even listen to those kinds of answers and that's a problem but it always took a level of courage to do those kinds of things and then they'd be able to take the heat sometimes you had to vote against what most of your constituents wanted because it was the right thing to do for the country and ultimately for your constituency but you took a lot of heat for that and those things requires a level of courage to do it Did those things ever really come back in primaries? Did you find yourself... Repeatedly Now go ahead I was just going to say I had them come back repeatedly on television ads but then as you start to accrue more and more of these it gets to be a problem that's ultimately one of the factors that contributed to my loss in the Senate race even though I think if I'd have run for reelection my congressional district out of one again but in the Senate race it was just too much to overcome Well I was just reminded that one of the tough votes that we took was following as the great recession was taking place and the entire world economy was caught up and we had to pass emergency legislation under the George Bush presidency to really save our economy and to this day Charles can probably go out and I do, some people actually still think I'm in Congress but to this day people will walk up to me and ask me about that tarp vote because they still remember it and that was one of those things where it was $700 billion and that's a lot of money and a lot of people didn't want to spend that money but it was absolutely necessary to do or the entire economy would have collapsed and I believe that, I believe those arguments but it is one of those votes that cost you politically I voted for that too and I think it was one of the most important votes I ever took and 80% of my constituents were vocally against it and I heard about it in every subsequent election but people like Donna and myself and others who were doing our homework and trying to understand what was really happening rather than just the politics of the day we took those hard votes and I'm convinced it helped our country from going into a depression Gentleman in the middle If both of you are entering politics today running for office for the first time today how do you imagine that might be different when you did first enter politics maybe running points or alignments? I'm not sure how much it would be substantial policy but I will say the environment has changed when I ran for Congress it was really at the beginning of the use of social media in campaigns and I would say now that in terms of spending resources to run a campaign far more emphasis would have to be placed on figuring out ways to reach potential voters through social media and you know voters now are so segregated into small groups groups that you can reach on Facebook in this way or Twitter in another way or Snapchat and Instagram and I think that makes it more complicated it also makes your message as a candidate more complex as well because it is tough to drill down a complicated policy issue into 280 words or something where people will read a paragraph on Facebook and it really does our politics I think a great disservice to try to drill everything down into such a narrow cast and so I think that that environment changes the way that one would think about running a political campaign today Right, Donna is absolutely correct with the proliferation of social media and all the different avenues to communicate it gives you an opportunity to directly communicate to your constituency but also because of all the other things going on other groups and other entities can do the same and reach the same constituency so it's created a much more anarchic campaign environment it used to be conventionally you would run your television ads you'd send your direct mail to reach out to constituents and do town hall meetings that kind of thing and as a candidate you could control the message coming from your campaign now because of all the money combined with all these forms of communication you no longer can truly control your campaign and so it becomes a race to see whether you can present the image in the platform that you want to project or somebody is going to define you from the outside that's the big challenge what has not changed is you're still trying to win the trust of your constituency it's just a much more complicated environment in which to do that and I would say on that trust element there's so much distrust of politics and politicians these days and I think it takes some special people to try to restore that and restore the value of public service there's a lot of energy that's spent at least in the United States by outside groups sort of banging on Congress and on government all the time and the net result of that is that people have lost the confidence in their public institutions to be able to solve big problems and so I think one of the challenges I think for your generation is to think about politics in a different kind of way to begin to restore that kind of trust in our institutions and the people who want to serve so if you want to run to become an MP here and look you're here because you're interested in politics you're eager to learn and you're probably here as well because you care you want to do something you believe that public service is something good even at my age and having done this I still think it's one of the most noble things a person can do so I hope you do it and you learn a lot about yourself when you do it be authentic care about people learn the issues and don't be afraid to express what you believe and I think you can build trust but your generation is going to have a big task ahead in rebuilding that trust as Donna has said because we have seen the trust level in our democracies completely eroded whether it's here in the UK the US and the US nobody respects expertise anymore for the most part they denigrate it everything has become reduced to slogans and name calling as opposed to let's talk about real substantive issues and problem solving so I'm glad you're here and I hope your generation can step up and do some good things to restore that trust in institutions I found it quite interesting how you mentioned one of the challenges within campaigns now is stopping people from labelling you from the outside and obviously labelling people are something that Trump's quite good at so considering that do you think anybody could run a successful campaign against Trump in 2020? Well I think on the Republican side it's going to be at least it will be very difficult for anybody to challenge him because he has kept the same level of support in the core Republican group that existed before whether they had when he started and so the conventional wisdom in Washington now and among many who watch this do not believe you will have a legitimate primary challenger now on the Democratic side of the aisle and Donna can speak more authoritatively on this than I can but there are a lot of people lining up to run against him and I think there is a possibility depending on a number of factors that a Democrat could beat him in the election but a number of things have to happen and this is going to be this is going to be a very unconventional campaign cycle and it's going to be quite interesting to watch but as a Republican I don't recognize the kind of party that Donald Trump has put together around and that's not my positions are more like the first President Bush George H.W. Bush who served in the 80s who took a more expansive view of a number of these issues behaved as a gentleman with civility respected both his rivals and his friends and conducted himself above board and I think we need more of that you know in politics we're going to disagree on issues but there's a way to do it in a way at civil it's polite it respects boundaries and that's what's deteriorated today and that's what Donald Trump is taking advantage of well I mean I certainly think that the President is beatable but you don't beat a person by being him and so I think it's going to be really important for whichever Democratic candidate emerges to display that authenticity and to be smart and to rely on facts and to reach out to the public I think the argument is there to be made and when I look at the range of candidates that are already in the field for one it's exciting for me because I think there are five women who are have either now announced or running for President of the United States I believe that that space for a woman nominee in our party that that ground work was laid and opened up because of Hillary Clinton and she took a lot of the arrows as a result but I think it opens up the field for those women but I see more talent on the Democratic side in terms of the numbers and the diversity of candidates and I have seen in a really long time people have served in the United States Senate people have had other life experience before they came to the office as they hold and I'm absolutely convinced that it's the kind of primary where at the end we will have emerged a really solid contender for President of the United States and it will be their job to unite the Democratic Party I mean there's every opportunity to divide it but it will be the job of that nominee to unite the party and I think part of that unification comes because we've engaged in a very spirited primary and that that process is going to lend itself to having somebody who's going to be able to go toe to toe without going down into the mud with the president in this upcoming election I know you've already touched on campaign finance but given the fact that legislation has failed before do you feel there is a way to present a bipartisan piece of legislation that will withstand what has already happened to the other ones So long before I came into Congress I think over 25 years ago I started working on issues of campaign finance reform for a non-profit a non-governmental organization and the very first debate I ever had on national television was against the current majority leader in the senate Mitch McConnell on campaign finance reform so it's been a long slog but I do think it is possible because I think the public has reached a point right now where they are absolutely sick of this system and on the Democratic side in the House when the Democrats took the majority in January their very first piece of legislation HR1 that passed in this session of Congress was about campaign finance and ethics reform and that's a first step but we need a compliant senate which we don't have yet and we need a president in the White House who's going to sign it and so we probably are still a ways away from doing it but it's not because it's not what the public wants I would agree that public attitudes now have shifted significantly and I think they are really tired of this and probably across party lines I think there are still Republicans who because they see an advantage in the current system that they are vested in wanting to protect the current situation status quo I think the senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is one of them and he's going to draw the line and he controls the agenda this potentially could become a campaign issue I think in 2020 I hope it does because I personally based on my level of experience with elections and what happens I think it's needed because the money has really infected the system and it's distorted it terribly and I think if you had an honest conversation even with many Republicans now who've been through tough elections and have had attack ads coming from entities where you don't even know where the money is coming from but it's seemingly unlimited I think they would in an honest conversation with you say we've got to do something the biggest issue that is somewhat of a hurdle is how do you deal with this given our first amendment situation but I guess you could argue the opposite side of it and say okay well you can't hide behind first amendment rights to protect all this money because at the same time you've got a lot of people who are being disenfranchised or being hurt by the fact that their voices aren't being heard in the system one of the most important things that could happen would be to have full disclosure of where the money is coming from that would be an interim step and I don't know why anybody would ever be against that to be honest with you but I think there are still people in my party who are against that and I don't understand it it's interesting because many years ago when I had this debate with Senator McConnell he said oh we'd love to just have disclosure why can't we just do disclosure and now here he is there was actually a bill that passed for full disclosure and he's opposed the bill now for full disclosure that's how you fast forward 25 years but to your point there have been several of the 2020 candidates on the democratic side who have come out and said I'm not going to accept political action, committee money and I'm not going to accept independent expenditures that are spent on my behalf I don't want that to happen and I think the more candidates who do that kind of thing then the more likely it is that we're going to end up with somebody in the White House who's willing to sign that kind of legislation Do you think that the USA would benefit from a multi-party system instead of the dominant two-party system that they have come up with? I don't and it's interesting because you know there's been this talk of Howard Schultz who owns Starbucks founder of Starbucks is going to run as an independent and in the United States it's never really been the case that somebody running as a third party has or an independent has actually kind of lasted very long I think that will be true again and really those kind of parties after Ross Perot ran an independent campaign back in the 90s and then he attempted to start a third party after that and it really just fizzled out and that's happened multiple times over the course of our history At the presidential level election wise third party candidates oftentimes become spoilers for one or the other candidate and the two dominant parties but there's an interesting development on going right now in the legislature, the congress because on the Republican side through the speakerships of John Boehner and then Paul Ryan we saw the emergence of a tea party faction which then transformed into the freedom caucus so you had about 40 very arch conservative, ultra conservatives who oftentimes blocked the Republican agenda while we had the majority in the house because things weren't good enough they wanted the unattainable they wanted something hard right when many others didn't go along with them and so it divided the Republican majority so that they didn't have a workable majority so that division is crept in to the Republican side and with the last election a lot of the more centrist Republicans in the house lost so there's more party purity now on the Republican side interestingly that same type of development now occurring on the Democratic side of the aisle where you have a very strong left progressive wing represented by Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and others and then you have a more traditional wing of the Democratic party and those differences now that they're in the majority are starting to emerge Speaker Pelosi has done a wonderful job I think in holding it together to win the speakership but now there are some divisions cropping up on procedural votes that just happened in the last week or so she's having a deal with that you may have more insights into that issue but we're seeing this balkanisation in both parties which effectively sort of acts like a multi-party system on the Republican side when we had the majority we often talked about how we don't have a unified Republican party we got two separate parties within a party I would say that on the Democratic side that group that is way to the left is probably significantly smaller than the party Freedom Caucus faction in the Republican party my experience in working with Speaker Pelosi and I was part of her leadership team when I was in the congress but my experience of working with her is that her style of management of the Democratic Caucus is very different from Paul Ryan or from John Boehner where she individually meets with each of these individuals groups and figures out sort of where the leverage points are within those members and so that's how she's been able to hold that together and I do think it poses a challenge but I also think that there are significant numbers of people who describe themselves as the progressive caucus but who also are very connected to the leadership which is again a little bit different from the Republican party but it is going to be a challenge but I don't see those things emerging as official parties even though within the two big parties they can't operate as competing factions I would agree with that I don't think it becomes institutionalized I think we will have a two party system for the foreseeable future and part of that is because we have a presidential system and it tends to break out in two parties and that sort of follows through downstream We're already very concerned that congressional authority has been so limited that it's created an imbalance in the branches of government that if we were to see parties emerge that would just be another way of empowering the executive to the detriment of the legislative branch in my opinion Commenting on what you were saying before about the styles in which politicians like to discuss their ideas in what ways do you think civilization in modern day politics has eroded That's a loaded question It's a lot to it too The biggest issue is civility It's driven such harsh rhetoric that people get entrenched and it becomes a zero sum game I think that's the problem In years past in the parties you had Republicans, Democrats and there was a considerable overlap between the two and the people serving in Congress who whether you had some liberal Republicans some conservative Democrats their views were very similar and it created the opportunity to work together and you didn't have the other things that drive division the money, the social media the special interest groups out there that were empowered by social media and money and grassroots opportunities kind of have conspired to create the partisanship the harsh rhetoric and the zero sum atmosphere and I think that's where things have deteriorated If we're going to salvage our our democratic institutions we're going to have to reverse that trend and it's not going to be easy but it starts with having a conversation about it and Donna and I who both served, we've been through those fights we did our best to counter some of the really more extreme sides of our parties our respective parties to find ways to work together you know, we've ended our official political careers now all we can do is speak out about this and encourage the next generation to take up the mantle so that when you do run for council position or parliament here in this country you'll keep that in mind and recognize that when you hold public office you have a higher obligation to not stoop to that kind of level and not make it zero sum all the time there are going to be differences there are going to be space for people to say okay we can agree on these sets of issues let's go fix these problems here's where we really disagree and let the ideas clash but in a way that's respectful it's missing and I would say there are some systemic reasons that members of congress no longer have quite the ability to communicate with each other to become friendly with each other and one of it is about structure so for example it used to be the case that most members of congress during the entire session lived in Washington they brought their families to Washington their families interacted with each other they socialized together in addition to legislating they developed relationships that actually allowed them then to work on issues now members come in for three and a half, four days they leave there are big breaks in between and when you're in Washington the only thing that you really have time to do is go to your committee sign let's go to Florida to vote and raise money and so it doesn't allow for that kind of personal interaction with one another anymore there used to be a lot more congressional travel where bipartisan groups would get together and they would travel to different countries on fact fighting missions but a lot of the non-governmental groups beat them up and said you're wasting taxpayer money why are you doing that well one of the purposes that Paul serves is so that members can understand the world together visiting the UK together visiting Afghanistan Iraq together they understand the world in a different kind of way when they do that together that contributes to good lawmaking it also helps people to build relationships with each other one of the ways that I got to know the former speaker Paul Ryan and his wife was on a congressional delegation travel to Saudi Arabia together and that shared experience meant that when we came back to Washington it didn't mean that I didn't agree I agreed with everything that he said or wanted to do but it meant that when I was engaged in a debate or a dispute it's really hard to beat upon somebody once you've known them you've met them or with them and you've met their wife and children and so I think that to the extent that we can begin to return to that kind of normal kind of activity that it would actually contribute to the ability to work in a civil way I have similar experiences through travel and when I first got on to the House Ways and Means Committee which is a very important committee in Congress that makes a lot of money decisions we were in the minority and there was someone who was in Democratic leadership who also sat on the committee he represented a Los Angeles district that was heavily Latino I represented a Louisiana district in the south more rural very different constituencies but I saw him as a very smart person and I contacted him one day and I said let's go have breakfast together and we did and you know it was an interesting conversation I respected him because I thought he was a really smart guy he respected me we said look we're going to disagree on a lot of things but if I understand your district and you understand mine better we'll know where each other is coming from so we agreed to meet regularly from time to time for breakfast and then we kind of expanded the group on our committee and we developed a little bit of a sense of collegiality that we sort of pledged to each other that when we have a heated debate in the committee we won't attack each other personally and we pretty much held to that one time it got right to the edge and he got really testy with me I got testy with him and we immediately caught it it was almost simultaneous we caught ourselves and backed off of it and so when that debate was over with it was sort of a race to see who could get to the other person quickest to shake hands and really apologize and we always sort of had that kind of working relationship but it requires you to put yourself out and to try to meet others one other anecdote along those lines one time we were walking back from votes and I was walking back with some Republican colleagues and somebody asked what do you think the Democrats are going to do on this particular issue and I had some insights into it because I had been talking to friends who are Democrats and so my colleagues said well how did you find that out and I said well I just asked and they said well who did you ask and I told them and they said they talked to you and I said yes we're friends and these were Republicans who never took time to go get to know somebody on the other side of the aisle but there are pressures out there that prevent that and I'll give you one last example without really belaboring this but one time we were having a very vigorous debate on the floor of the house I was leading our effort on the Republican side Democrat who was actually the chairman of the committee at the time I was leading the debate we were both scoring points in the debate and it was a good debate so as soon as it was over I walked over to the other side to where he was, to Shea Cans this was all televised and c-span and I had constituents who saw this who were very partisan and next thing you know the phones ringing constantly in the office email starts coming in social media just chastising me for speaking with the enemy and being friendly with the enemy and I'm thinking really? that's not the enemy it's a fellow member of Congress who I like and we just happen to have different views on some things but that's the kind of outside pressure that comes to bear I'm afraid to say we've run out of time but I think that was a really wonderful lesson for all of us in talking to each other and the value of listening and discussion which I hope you've all enjoyed today I'm just going to say a few last words to explain that this event has been part of our Congress to Campus UK program which is a program that brings former members of Congress to the UK to meet with general audiences and to talk about contemporary US politics and I'd really like to say a big thank you to all of our partners who've helped make this possible the US Association of Former Members of Congress of which both Charles and Donna are members in Washington help select the members to come to the UK but in particular our UK partner the Rothamere American Institute at the University of Oxford who've done the lion's share of the organizing for this week and also our supporters at the British Association for American Studies and in particular the US Embassy in London who've been really helpful in getting this session and this live stream off the ground so will you all join me in thanking our guests Donna and Charles thank you so much and thank you very much to all of you for your wonderful questions and to those who've been watching us online so thank you very much