 Evening, everybody. Thanks for coming to an experience I think you'll value and enjoy very, very much. It's just such a treat and thrill to welcome to Purdue, someone I have admired a long time and known personally for most of that time. Someone all of America knows is one of our premier public journalists. And I think she's earned the, I'm going to say, rare, nearly unique esteem in which she has held the old fashioned way. Marlison has for a better part of three decades been one of the premier reporters covering the most important events in our public life. On the Hill, White House and everywhere in between, governmental activities, politics and the rest. And through it all maintained and built a reputation for fairness, for insight, for savvy, that it's certainly not surpassed by anybody I can think of. I have to say that she represents to me increasingly unusual traits that were maybe once a little more common. She has a healthy skepticism for people in public life and for their claims and for their pretensions and so forth. But at least in my observation, maintain some sense of empathy for those people who do enter the arena and each in her or his own way try to make our national life better. And secondly she has I think maintained a scrupulous objectivity that never once, I'm confident this is true, never once has anyone suspected any sort of agenda of her own. And sad to say in my opinion that's not always so true anymore. She is maybe emblematic of that. She occupies important reputorial positions simultaneously and has now for 16 years or so at National Public Radio and Fox News. Only someone who is understood to be truly impartial and truly interested only in the public interest likely to bring off that sort of double. She's a graduate of Brown University and again has been now for apparently since she left Brown because it's been almost 30 years a central figure in our national life. Please welcome our good friend and one of America's most important journalists, Mara Larson. As has been our practice at some similar forums, I'll ask a few questions for a while but we have microphones on both outside aisles and after a few minutes certainly invite anyone present, students get preference but anyone present to step to the mic and we'll alternate sides and let the audience drive the most of the discussion. Mara, I'm sure prefer not to talk about herself but I'm going to insist that you do just for a little while. You've led a remarkable career and I'd like you just to talk a little bit to the audience about that career, what led you to seek it and maybe some of the changes you've seen. Thanks a lot. Thanks for that incredible introduction. I just want to say I'm really happy to be here at your impressive university and I'm thrilled to be on stage with Mitch Daniels who I really enjoyed covering when he was his former self and national politics is poorer for his absence so it's Purdue's gain and the rest of ours loss that he's no longer in the political arena but he's doing really important work here. So I'm really happy to be here and the boring part of the program is when I tell you about my career such as it is, I went to Brown, I majored in American history so I've always been interested in history and politics and how changes made and how people make it and after while I was in college actually I got a summer internship at the Vineyard Gazette which is a little newspaper on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. I worked there in the summer and then when I graduated I came back and I worked there year round and after that I took the Greyhound bus for $55 and a bunch of tahini sandwiches out to California to look for a job and I wanted to work for a bigger newspaper and I didn't find a job out there, I got a job for a non-profit organization which I did for a couple years and then one day I was driving over the Bay Bridge, I turned on the radio and I heard a friend of mine from college on the radio. His name was Michael Curtin and he I think ended up getting a PhD in teachers' communications in Michigan or something but anyway there he was on the radio and I called him up and I said Michael how did you get to do this, he was working for a community radio station in Berkeley, he said come on over, we have volunteers, I'm going to show you how it's done. I went over there, I volunteered, around that time NPR was starting a bureau in San Francisco, I got a job there. At that time all the public broadcasting stations in California formed a consortium, we had a Sacramento bureau covering the state capitol, we put out a daily show that was modeled on all things considered but it was shorter, it was called California Edition and I was the host producer, janitor and bottle washer so I did that for a while then the California Public Broadcasting Commission got line item vetoed by the governor and I freelanced for a couple years, I'm going to try to make this really short and then in 1985 NPR hired me to be the morning edition newscaster and for those of you who listen to the program there's a five minute hard news insert at the top and the bottom of the hour, I was the bottom of the hour, I worked from 3 a.m. to noon for one year and 11 months but who's counting, I was counting every single minute and then I became the weekend duty reporter so I really did climb the ladder there, the weekend duty reporter works Wednesday to Sunday, I did that and then I was got a journalism fellowship at Columbia and I went away for nine months. During that time just to tell you a little bit about NPR and the kind of incredible female role models that I had when I got there, Susan Stamberg, Nina Totenberg, Koki Roberts, Linda Wertheimer, I mean there were incredible women journalists there, a lot of people asked me you know about my experiences as a woman in journalism, to me I followed in the wake of the greats and maybe it was because NPR paid so poorly that we had so many women in top positions but they were there and they were really wonderful and while I was at Columbia I literally have been helped up the ladder by these women literally Koki called me to say whatever they offer you don't take it because there's gonna be a spot in Congress you know working with me so I get the call from the news director we want you to move to Atlanta and I said no I can't take it you know and I'm sure he was stunned but anyway I did exactly what Koki told me I came back and I started work and I got the job on the hill with her covering Congress. In 1992 I was assigned to cover Bill Clinton who was running for president and sometimes when you cover the guy who wins you get to become the White House correspondent so I covered the White House during the Clinton administration and at the end of it I became the National Political correspondent which I am to this day and I am since Barack Obama was elected I'm part of the White House rotation which means every there's two other people who cover the White House with me. Every third week one of us is physically there doing the daily stories the the other two are doing features analytical pieces in election years I travel around to do stories on races I just came back from North Carolina where I did a piece on field operations get out the vote efforts which have become extremely high-tech at the same time as they are very much like people did it in the 19th century going door to door talking to their neighbors but they got a lot of algorithms behind them so that's what I do and I've had a wonderful time there I've worked at NPR since 1985 I always say I started when I was 12 and I started working at Fox I appear as Mitch explained I appear on the week about once a week on the weekday program special report and then sometimes on Sundays I've been doing that since 1998 and I think later we'll talk a little bit about political polarization but the media is polarized too and I feel like I am the exception that proves the rule people say MSNBC and Fox don't even cover the same natural disasters but you know I feel very comfortable showing up on Fox working for NPR I don't say I say the same things wherever I am and I feel that that experience has really enriched my reporting even if it's given heartburn to some of the listeners of both outlets so I'm having I have I'm having a wonderful time there have been a tremendous number of changes obviously in my profession but I do think there is always a place for straight ahead down the middle analytical reporting I mean I really do despite everything else every other centrifugal or centripetal I'm not sure force in politics and journalism there's still a place to be kind of firmly anchored in the middle let me ask you about one of those changes that you never I'm going to say succumb to never engaged in at least starting somewhere in the last couple decades or so it's become first it was startling or noteworthy exception then it became more common now it's entirely common place for people in journalism to go through a revolving door into active political activity and then sometimes come back again as though and we're supposed to accept them as though they're fair balanced and impartial even though they may have just come out of a highly partisan activity is that a healthy trend is that is an acceptable trend how do you look at that first of all we're not so but I don't think we should accept them as fair balanced and impartial because usually they're not now I think there's it's one model to be a William Sapphire right speeches for Nixon and that be a conservative columnist that's okay I mean you know where he was coming from before and you know where he's coming from afterwards that's okay it's one thing to be in of course one of the reasons people do this now is there's a huge explosion in the punditocracy where there's a lot of you know there's a market for people who have strong opinions and are partisans on either side that's one thing but the model Mitch is talking about is a little bit different where you literally kind of go back and forth across the line as if you can be impartial as a journalist I really don't think you can maybe one 180 degree revolution will accept but the 360 I think is just too much and it's funny because that's never ever crossed my mind I mean literally never crossed my mind because it's just completely different now there are people David Axelrod the president's former political guru he was a journalist but he got bitten by the bug of polling and and politics and he left and that was it and he never came back so that's why I'll take the 180 degrees I just don't want the 360 no in fact I talked with David about this once and and he and I remember a time when it did happen there's something to be a but that was it you were tainted goods you could not come back because no self-respecting yeah yeah news you were you were from that point on you were marked man or woman so so you mentioned polarization which bothers a lot of us and bothers us in terms of I think in two ways one is just the simple harshness and coarseness and negativity that it tends to accompany it in our in our public debates and in our campaigns but maybe even more important the way in which it may get in the way of addressing major national issues that are not going away how do you look at it is and is it really worse as we tell ourselves it is is it really worse than many periods in our history where as they say politics was never beanbag I think that the partisanship was ever thus the gridlock is something new and I make a distinction I mean people have always had brutal nasty campaigns and at least now they're not beating each other up with canes on the Senate floor that's one thing there always was extreme partisanship and divisions but now we're not getting anything done and I think that's something that's completely different it's fine to have very different opinions different beliefs about government but at some point you've got to come together and make a compromise to do basic things that need to get done in the country I'm not talking about one side capitulating to the other I'm talking about making a hard-fought principle compromise and I think that's what upsets people the most it's not just that politics is mean and vicious is that nothing is happening in Washington and I do think this I mean academics who study this say this current Congress has been the least productive Congress ever when you see the most basic functions passing a budget you know confirming nominees I mean you know increasing the debt limit keeping the government open I mean these are basic basic functions that's what I think is different statistically we've all seen these studies would show that the overlap in terms of viewpoints or votes cast there was once a rather extensive overlap members of the Democratic parties many of them would would often vote with certain members of the Republican Party and vice versa statistically I think it is now demonstrable that there has been there's never in recent memory been this kind of separation there's no doubt the the I think based on the voting records of the current United States Senate there is not a single Democrat with a more moderate or conservative voting record than a single Republican and as Mitch explained there used to be plenty of moderate or liberal Republicans you know Jacob Javits people like that on the Democratic side there were lots of moderate to conservative Democrats and the overlap between those two wings of the parties made the center of the political spectrum and that's where deals got made and compromises got made and for there's a whole lot of reasons why there is now just a big black abyss between the parties I mean in the House part of that is how district lines are drawn I think right now 93% of Republicans in the House of Representatives represent a district that Mitt Romney won and 96% of the Democrats in the House represent a district that Barack Obama won there's absolutely no overlap at all and the tragedy is to the extent that there are any moderate to conservative Democrats left a big handful of them are going to lose this year and we're going to be even more sorted out and in 2016 when you've got a lot of Republicans from blue states up for reelection a lot of them are going to lose too so I don't see anything kind of reversing that trend there are in addition to Jerry Mandarin in the way district lines are drawn the population is even sorting itself out some of this is our fault people tend to live near people who think like them they listen to media that they agree with and there was a recent poll the Pew Research Center took a poll and they found that 49% of Republicans and 33% of Democrats said they were would be very unhappy if their child married someone of the opposite party so you know this polarization I think is one of the most important dynamics in American life today I should have tipped you that I might ask this question but it occurs to me to ask can you name somebody one one one from column A and one from B one Republican one Democrat in currently serving in Washington who you think might be who is admirable in this respect who is willing to work across lines who might be a model or the initiator of some sort of movement under the right circumstances I think there are people who really want to do this I mean Ron Wyden from Oregon has made plenty of deals with Republicans and done good constructive work as a matter of fact I think when he worked with with Bennett from Utah the guy lost his job because he worked with Ron Wyden I mean the problem is is that it's now become sacrilege to work across party lines John McCain sometimes sees a hyperpartisan but he and Lindsey Graham have worked across the aisle plenty of times there are a lot of there's actually more members than you think who are willing to do it but the forces pulling them apart are so severe Marco Rubio made worked very hard to pass the immigration reform bill in the Senate four Democrats four Republicans the gang of eight and what happened after that bill was passed he got torn to shreds by conservative talk radio and he had to disavow it and you know I think that's really unfortunate you know you've got the basis of both parties that thing compromises a dirty word and you know it takes real real leadership to buck those trends your history major and you're on a college campus so let me ask you a question that I know you've given some thought to because we talked about it briefly survey out last week hardly the first one we've seen they come out about once a year revealing an unmistakable historical and civic illiteracy among the American people including graduates of some of our most prestigious schools can't answer the most basic questions that one once upon a time any middle school student could tell you the answer to big problem small problem what do we do about it huge problem and it scares me to death I mean it just just really does I mean that just basic civics you know understanding that one third of the Senate is up for reelection every two years you know understanding how things work I mean I don't I think it's a huge problem I think an uneducated historically financially illiterate population is a very bad thing for democracy how we solve it I think you have it has to start in in grade school there should be civics education there should be I mean I don't want to get into a hornet's nest but the common core the idea behind it that there are basic things that every kid should learn in America I think that's what we have to do so I'm gonna ask Mara to do a little bit of prognosticating and the elections season is here in fact it's right upon us but as I do it'd be a good time for those of you who have questions to migrate to the mics and and we'll we'll move to the the audience's interrogation just as fast as we can so Mara you say you just back from one of these many Senate races talk to us about the impending Senate election and and and I hope as part of it when you're done forecasting that you'll tell us if as many accounts suggest if control shifts what's that likely to mean what would what would how would it change things if at all in a in a next Congress if the if the if control of the US Senate shifted okay that's actually a really good question because some people a lot of voters say how would we even know nothing's happening now you know what does it matter who controls the Senate but I'll get to that in a minute okay so just little historical background no president has ever hung on to his if he had one a Senate majority in the second term midterm unless you count lbj who didn't really have a second term so history tells us the Democrats should lose the Senate this year and I think they probably will and just to give you a little picture of what the map looks like the battleground looks like the Republicans need a net six seat pickup to take control of the Senate and the Senate is the big prize nothing's gonna change in the House Republicans might get anywhere from 8 to 12 seat pickup if they do by the way if they get 13 I think 12 or 13 they'll have the biggest majority since the 1940s of that any Republican majority anyway in the Senate I think that when you look at the pool that Republicans are fishing in to get their six seats it's a pretty big pool I think they'll get the three red states where Democrats are retiring Montana South Dakota and West Virginia the next tier are Democratic incumbents in red states Alaska Arkansas and Louisiana in all those three states Republicans are ahead in the polls there you have six right there however much to Republicans surprise and everybody else's surprise they Republicans could lose the seat in Georgia not clear but Michelle Nunn who's the daughter of Sam Nunn is running ahead in the polls there that's a state that's pretty red but it's trending purple maybe not this year but that's where it's headed in the future and then you've got Colorado and Iowa those are two states unlike all the other ones I just listed those are two states that are blue states that Obama did win and the Democrats should be holding on to those but they're very very very tight races and the Republicans are hopeful about those two so even if they picked up their six lost Georgia they could still get Colorado and Iowa so they had they have some room for error and this is a battleground just by luck of the draw the class of 2014 mostly red states these are states that Mitt Romney won and one of the things that we always look at an election year is what is a president's approval rating because that's that one of the biggest most important political indicators for how his party will do the president is relatively unpopular he's hovering around 40% he is a drag on Democrats but in the Senate battleground in these red states his approval rating is even lower and I think the Republicans have hit on an extremely simple message this year that they think is going to work for them and it really is just two words Obama bad and that's you know that's kind of what they're arguing and the Democrats are trying to hang on by the by their fingernails by trying to make these races into into choices between two candidates so my prognostication is Republicans will probably get the Senate question is what difference will it make a narrow Republican majority why would anything more get done then under the current narrow Democratic majority where nothing is getting done first of all it does matter who controls the Senate I think the president's life will be a little more miserable if the Republicans control the Senate but there is a theory that divided governments are more productive and recently I saw a chart that showed how the productivity of divided government where one party has the White House and another party has both houses of Congress that's the most productive model believe it or not even more than unified government when one party has the House Senate and the White House and certainly more productive than what we have now which is a split Congress Democrats have the Senate Republicans have the House so it is possible that if Republicans have control of Congress they'll have some responsibility for governing their first priority won't be just to block the president's agenda and the president with only two years left will be very interested in his legacy maybe there'll be some compromises on things that everybody everybody agrees has to happen even though they disagree on the details I don't think we'll get a grand bargain on tax reform and entitlement reform but that would be something that would be a great thing immigration reform investments and education and infrastructure maybe some trade deals those are some basic things that maybe maybe both sides would be willing to compromise on the other kind of interesting thing is that in 2016 lots of Republicans in blue states are up for reelection presidential elections are harder for Republicans than midterms and maybe those blue state senators like Mark Kirk in Illinois or Patumi in Pennsylvania will be motivated maybe to look for some compromises as they get ready to run for reelection in a environment that will be more favorable to Democrats so that's the that's the rosy scenario the other side probably more realistic more gridlock but more clarifying gridlock because once we'll at least have clear lines drawn White House isn't you know Democrat Congress is Republicans and whatever happens in the next two years will lay the groundwork for the 2016 presidential race the White House you covered was certainly an example where a whole lot of things happened after the executive and legislative branches were in different hands you know Bill Clinton no doubt about it as a matter of fact that was a pretty productive time worked out pretty well for the president yeah worked out well for the president of course Republicans overreached which really worked out well for the president but even so the point is divided Congress's divided Congress's can be productive and let's hope if we get one that that's the case all right well let's let's start over here I think you were first up so please ask the first question and hi I'm Spencer Gaville I'm an engineering student here at Purdue how do you think the lack of participation by our own age group the college the 18 to 25 year olds has affected the political climate in Washington and also the effect on our lives as young adults well I think anytime someone doesn't vote or participate it's bad for the country it's bad for their generation there's just it's just bad now we'll I will say this that that I'll expand your generation a little bit 18 to 32 year olds the millennials are very soon going to be the biggest demographic slice of the electorate bigger than the baby boom was they're going to be 40% of the electorate by 2020 that is a huge huge chunk of the electorate and I think that young people do participate they don't participate in the numbers of older people but they tend to participate more as they grow older and both parties are working really really hard to engage them the Democrats to keep them because of course they already vote two to one for Democrats and the Republicans to figure out how do they reach out to them and this is another thing that I find really really interesting you know I'm old enough to have covered the Democrats finding a way out of the political wilderness after they've lost the White House many many times in a row now the Republicans are in a very similar situation where they've lost the popular vote in five out of six of the last presidential elections and may and I believe that if they are going to find Republicans are going to find a way out of the political wilderness find a way to appeal to the rising American electorate young people minorities single women they are going to have to make some changes and maybe they'll end up following Mitch's advice he gave plenty of it to them when he was there when he was in the business of giving advice and I just to be shamelessly flattering of my host here you guys should just go back and read the CPAC speech or listen to the CPAC speech that he gave what year was that that was early 2011 2011 it's really worth reading it's really worth listening to a reading because that's exactly what I think the Republican Party will end up doing if it's going to remain viable and so but that's what I'm watching for you know how how the I think young people will be engaged and they're going to determine they will be the balance of power in American politics very soon thank you over here hi my name is Giovanni Malloy I'm a sophomore in industrial engineering and so my question is who's been the most interesting person or your favorite person to cover and why might that be hmm well there have been a lot of interesting people you know as Mitch said earlier if you cover politics you can't be cynical I mean there's plenty of ridiculousness you can get disgusted you just can't be cynical so there've been lots of really interesting people I guess Bill Clinton Bill Clinton was so just there was so much about him that was interesting and furiating you know admirable smart exasperating you know he was pretty he was really interesting to cover thank you you know Lily Tomlin once said no matter how cynical I get I can't keep up that's pretty glad you never did yeah hi my name is Tyler Preston I'm a freshman here studying mathematics and computer science with a minor in Spanish and my question is given the trend that when presidential candidates win their party generally tends to do well in the Senate and in the House do you think that in the next presidential election given that the Democrats do lose in 20 did this election that they could possibly regain the Senate and possibly the House in the following presidential election okay I think it is possible that they could regain the Senate in the next presidential election just given how many Republicans are up this year you have many more Democrats up for reelection than Republicans 21 Democrats I think in seven of them are in red states but in 2016 you've got a ton of Republicans up and very few Democrats so yes I think it's possible they could get the Senate back the House I think is just a little tougher until the next census because the way district lines are drawn they're just very favorable to Republicans Republicans had the very good fortune of surging in 2010 when they made their historic gains in the House 63 seats they surged at the perfect year if you were gonna have a big surge you want to do it in a census year you know in a year where we're redrawing congressional districts because they took over a lot of state legislatures and were able to draw some pretty favorable districts for themselves so in the House I think the the walls that they've built are the barriers are pretty high and it might be till 2020 till you see any big shifts in the House just to give you an example of that in 2012 the national vote for the House of Representatives all the Republican candidates combined versus all of the Democratic House candidates combined the Democratic candidates got 1.4 million more votes for the House than the Republican candidates but the Republicans still maintained a 34 seat majority in the House of Representatives and that shows you the power of redistricting but yeah pressure on that a little bit though because two sides play that game oh you bet and they do yeah and they do and and a lot of people I confess being one think this is a fundamental structural flaw we've got that leads to the polarization you talked about they ever they draw safe it's I don't think it's a problem of one party playing this game better than the other they make a deal they they protect each protects their incumbents yep and you wind up that's one thing I think that back to the earlier question that harms political participation they're not too much to vote for if it's lopsided if it's totally lopsided in a given district and and and then you get people playing to the extremes Democrats to the most liberal extreme and Republicans the opposite isn't this the biggest problem with redistricting I think that's that is exactly the biggest problem and the the thing that's interesting about that is that it's definitely a mutual incumbent protection you know racket and it has some really bad effects even for the party that's benefiting from it right now you know Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote 71 to 27 percent in the presidential election and the House of Representatives hasn't passed immigration reform the Senate has in the house I think only 25 only something like 10 percent of Republican House districts represent populations where Hispanics are more than 25 percent so they don't have to appeal to Hispanics because and that's a problem the Republican Party should have to appeal to it to a diverse electorate but there are some remedies for that California has an interesting experiment going on they've passed something called well couple states have nonpartisan redistricting processes that's not brand new where instead of having both parties conspired to protect their incumbents a nonpartisan Commission draws draws lines that presumably would lead to more competitive congressional districts but in addition to nonpartisan redistricting in California they have something called the top two primary so in these districts there's one primary everybody can vote in it Democratic Republican independent and and they vote for candidates from all parties and the top two winners go on to the general election could be two Democrats could be two Republicans or it could be one of each now the result of that and it's pretty new so academics are studying this California is a very blue state it hasn't really changed the makeup of the state legislature which is still heavily Democratic but what it has done is send more moderate Democrats to this to Sacramento who aren't afraid of crossing the aisle and making compromises because they're not afraid of getting a left wing primary challenge and the same thing would be true with from Republicans they're not afraid of getting a tea party challenge because they're going to participate in this big wide open primary so that to me is a positive reform that I think would help a lot my name is James you're asking and I'm a sophomore and electric engineer and my question was about a few months ago child deportation and their mothers was a big issue and I remember listening on NPR where there was a lot of talk about an executive order being about to be issued and it would happen in a few days or next week and I don't know if I lost it in the message or if did the White House kind of step away from that issue what exactly is your whatever happened to that executive order I'm not sure I'll tell you okay the president because the house wasn't going to pass immigration reform announced that he was going to issue some executive orders deportation relief basically like what he did for the dreamers I don't know if you're familiar with that but the dreamers are young people who are brought here as children illegally and if they went to college or enlisted in the military they could get deportation relief only as long as the president's in office because executive orders only last as long as the president's term he had announced that he was going to expand that offer additional deportation relief before election day anyway as has happened so many times with this White House oops they reconsidered the child crisis at the border happened it became a huge campaign issue Republicans were using it against Democrats they got a lot of complaints from Congress from their their members of their party who were running for reelection and the president said okay I'm still gonna do it but I'm gonna do it before the end of the year you know after election day I believe he still will and he will issue some kind of immigration reform by executive order some more deportation relief maybe some reform of legal immigration H1B1 visas there's a lot of things that the business community would like done in immigration form none of this is a substitute for passing legislation because it's not permanent but I yes but that is gonna happen it's been delayed well that's a great question let let me use it as a point of departure to ask you a civics question there been an explosion of executive orders in this administration that to an extent I don't think anyone ever contemplated before rewrite laws healthcare laws the best example where the plain language of statute has been at least postponed and no one's found a legal way to intervene and say how do you feel about this divorcing you know the merits of any one decision they may all be sound decisions but as a matter of of our constitutional system and the separation of powers how do you feel about how should we feel about this are we being desensitized to action by fiat that ought to be done by representative well you know that's a really good question and some of these executive orders are being challenged in the courts and I think the courts are gonna have to adjudicate this whether these things are overstepping the executive's authority or not but you know executive thought authority is a mutating and malleable thing and it you know there are many Republicans who've tried to expand it and and there's a big debate about how far you can go I actually tend to think that for the most part president Obama's use of executive authority is out of weakness not strength I mean he's doing this because he can't get anything done and most of the things that he does by executive order are very narrow and in some unsubstantial I mean he can raise the minimum wage under some federal contractors he can't raise the minimum wage nationally but he is using a lot of them and he's doing it because he's frustrated because he can't get anything through Congress whether or not this is leads up to executive overreach and something that's that's threatening our constitutional balance of powers I'm just not sure hi I'm Shubhanker I'm a sophomore in mechanical engineering president Daniels here mentioned the thing about a civic literacy I wanted to ask you how does money in politics play a part in that playing field does it help educate people or is it doesn't help misdirect people hmm well money there is now a lot of money in politics a lot of unlimited anonymous money I don't think it helps educate people it would be wonderful if you know George Soros and Michael Steyer and the Koch brothers would give a big grant to the League of Women Voters that's something like that I'm a League of Women Voters offspring that my mother was in the League of Women Voters when I was growing up I don't even know if it exists anymore it's yes okay but I don't think that it helps the Supreme Court has ruled that you know it's it's constitutional to do this and I don't want to say that they misinform people because I'm not aware of that I think that they are the money is advocacy money and it promotes a point of view on both sides and but I don't think it helps civic literacy well my name is Jonathan we met earlier brother Daniels house I'm a senior political science my question is about the democratic value of the United States government and its viability with the obvious demonstration of the power of political power by a single party in gerrymandering with the slackening of regulations on campaign finance rules and all those increasing amount of executable or is we think about the viability of American democracy does it seem like it's decreasing or that we're becoming less democratic as we move on are we doing just fine hmm I don't know if we're doing just fine but American democracy is very viable I mean I don't feel like like we're coming to the end here I think that American democracy is completely viable I think that there's not too much that can't be solved by some real leadership I think the American people want their representatives to work together people understand what the problems are that they want solutions to I mean I gave a short list before but I think if you know you had tax reform and entitlement reform and infrastructure investment and education investment and and an immigration reform I think you know that would be a great thing and so I don't think it's because people don't know you know what the problems are I think the things that you mentioned are not good things for our system but I don't think that they threaten the foundations let's go over here Joe cross a local and danger Democrat precinct commitment I'd like to know what you could tell us about what you order your colleagues and others picking about the effect of the voter suppression acts have been taking place throughout the country which incidentally sort of again in Indiana there are a lot of new voter ID laws and there have been some curtailment of early voting and I think the the effect of that is being studied really closely and we just don't know yet one thing that happened in Florida the last time when early voting was curtailed it caused a big backlash and even more African Americans turned out to the polls so we're not quite sure what the effect will be there's a patchwork of new laws some of them have been stayed by the courts some of them haven't and I think the answer is we just have to wait and see after election day and then there'll be plenty of data on this about what effect it really had thank you my name is Kamal I'm an international student from Algeria I'm a PhD student in English Purdue has recently conducted a survey with the Pew Research Foundation and they found that students who receive feel like they receive a great deal of emotional support from professors end up with basically great lives and great careers that's my understanding and it seems like you have had a great life and great career so I wanted to ask you do you feel like you have received you know emotional support from you know your professors in college do you feel like they have supported you personally and support your dreams and those kinds of things and secondly what can Purdue and Mr. Daniels do here at Purdue to provide that kind of support if you feel that's important to students I'll answer the first question I'll leave the second one to Mitch yes the answer is yes I have been really blessed I had some really great teachers I mean I would say I had one in grade school one in high school and one in college people who are really really important to me and I can tell you who they were Mrs. Nick Tauser my fifth grade English teacher she looked just like Anne Landers you know with the the little curly black you know she was just fabulous really tough and she really taught me how to write in high school there's a guy named Werner Feig he was a refugee from Germany he was incredible he taught American history and he was just super inspiring and I had a wonderful wonderful American history professor in college John Thomas who I wrote my thesis with and I don't know about Mrs. Nick Tauser but Werner Feig and John Thomas are both passed away but they were great and I couldn't have asked for anything better or you know more inspiring I actually was very honored and pleased to be asked recently to contribute a little essay to a the Brown University reader it was just a thing they published on the 250th anniversary of Brown I wrote it about about Professor Thomas but yeah so the short answer is yes you know these are people who not only wanted to hear my ideas they expected me to have some and you know they were they were all they were kind of all three of them were formidable and scary but really warm and encouraging in other words I think that's a great combination you should be a little bit scared of your professors but then within five minutes you realize that they are really just completely mush inside and you know and and and have your back in every way but I'll leave the second the second question to you mush inside well no you know what I mean they're just you haven't spent any time in our mechanical engineering to borrow maybe no no I couldn't never I couldn't have made it in your mechanics you know come all that it's such I'm genuinely glad you asked it's a really important question for us all here you're quite right it's the Gallup Purdue index that you're referring to it did find that the strongest single correlate with lifetime success not just with material success but in the five domains that Gallup measures for countless clients was was among those who said that there was at least one professor one one faculty member in college who inspired them or with whom they they felt they had a some sort of a mentor relationship and so the two things that come to mind are we we're trying to promote that idea it's something that most of our faculty try to do I know but we can't we can't stress it enough on the flip side I I say to many many to our students everywhere I encounter them don't be bashful if you seek out that faculty member who who you admire or who is teaching something you're intensely interested in and you know don't hang back and you'll probably get the response you're looking for if you do approach that person but this is really important and we are trying in every way we can think of to spread that data around encourage encourage our faculty to act on it you know when we went out and surveyed the Purdue alums recently to see this was the whole point all along anyway to be accountable and to have a national benchmark to compare to and we didn't come out particularly well on that and we're a big school it's harder to do here of course and at a much smaller university but it doesn't exonerate us of our of our duty to do it as much as possible and I just hope it it works there both from the push and pull and thanks a lot yeah well my name is Tom August I'm on the local clergy I've been listening to NPR since my mom first turned on my hearing as a little itty bitty person and thank you more for your years of service to the community it's been sort of my sense I'm not particularly you know wildly politically educated but it's sort of been my sense that the tea party is rich themselves and that are there perhaps maybe even on the way out I love your opinion and I am also sort of concerned for our the phrase you used as diverse you know diversity of opinion that in some ways this this bickering which personally makes me extremely tired is where everybody's at extremes you know that that you know that sort of also pushing people to the fringe turning people off I just want to appreciate your thoughts well in terms of the tea party I don't know if it's kind of disappeared I think it's been more comfortably absorbed inside the Republican Party than it was at the beginning I think when you looked at the Republican nominating process in the last two cycles and then this cycle you can really see the establishment taking back the reins and it was kind of like the Empire Strikes Back I mean they weren't gonna the last two cycles Republicans basically snatch defeat from the jaws of victory I mean they lost a lot of Senate races they should have won because tea party candidates were nominated either they were too extreme or they weren't ready for prime time but this year that didn't happen I think the tea party hasn't really gone away I just it certainly had an effect on the Republican Party it moved it to the right but I think it's been absorbed pretty nicely inside the party that's usually happened what happens to movements like that because our two-party system is so vibrant and resilient it we don't we don't end up with a third party it just gets absorbed inside one party and then what was the other question was just about being that seemed to me to be sort of an example of the extremism of the political spectrum yeah well you know that's that's a problem I mean parties do best when they have a big overlap with the center of the American political spectrum and I think the tea party for a moment threatened to kind of pull the Republicans too far to the right I don't think that's what's gonna happen in the next Republican primary for president you're gonna have a really really great debate and you're gonna have a lot of mainstream conservatives maybe Jeb Bush Chris Christie you know Bobby Jindal you're gonna have the Ted Cruz's and the Rand Paul's I mean the Republican Party in a lot of ways is up for grabs and how it's gonna resolve the social issues I think one of the most interesting things that happened recently is when the Supreme Court came out with that ruling that basically paved the way for gay gay marriage you know nationwide what was the Republican reaction silence mostly except for the you know Ted Cruz and and Mike Huckabee of course you know the social issue conservatives were angry but the Republican leadership in Washington didn't make a peep so I think that you know things are changing we talked about millennials you know gay marriage is kind of a threshold issue issue for young voters they don't really want to listen to you if you they think you're an intolerant party and I think that there is a future for fiscally conservative socially moderate politicians and I think that might be might be where we end up go over there hi my name is Michael lock I'm a first-year student studying industrial management at the school of Cranart and I wanted to ask you about immigration it's been kind of in limo for a while do you think it poses a threat to the rule of law and do you think an enforcement only policy is a viable solution for immigration does immigration a threat to the rule of law yes with 11-5 I mean with all the people coming illegally over the border right and the the things that Obama is doing to grant them amnesty right well first of all when Obama does issue as executive orders we'll see what the reaction to that will be that's going to be a really interesting moment for everyone we don't know exactly what he's going to do and we don't know how the Republicans are going to react I think that the immigration system is broken both parties agree with that needs to be reformed the legal immigration system needs to be reformed I according to economists by 2016 we are going to have a shortage of legal skilled labor in this country so something has to be done about that I mean I think it was George Schultz used to say we should staple a green card to every PhD you know that's issued in this country and but the big sticking point is what to do with the 11 million people who are here illegally you wanted to port them all leave them in the shadows that's a form of amnesty and that certainly is against the rule of law or do you want to find some way to legalize them or put them on a path to citizenship that's the debate that they that we had in the United States Senate and they passed a bill that resolved this problem the president would have signed it I think he would have signed something even more to the right of that if the house had passed something to but they didn't so I think we'll see what happens next year what the president does by executive order and whether the House of Representatives and the new Senate want to tackle this issue before the next presidential election thank you only one of you can ask questions well take the little guy my name is Stacy Studeville I came up from Indianapolis to hear you tonight and you touched a little bit on campaign finance reform and I was just wondering what your thoughts are on the future of that where that's going to go because it seems like the amount of money is just staggering that is spent in elections and then also I would love your thoughts on the Democratic primary for 2016 oh and thank you the Democratic primary that's pretty easy because there's not much of one but anyway the question about the question about the campaign finance I think I called a Michael Steyer I meant Tom Steyer but in any event there's I don't think much can be done if you're talking about getting money out of politics at this point I don't see how we put the genie back in the bottle I do think though that it's a pretty even arms race from what I've read about the actual measurement of how many dollars are in there I mean conservative versus liberal dollars it's pretty even but it is a tremendous amount of money and it gives these billionaires a tremendous amount of clout and they can almost create these independent political parties with their own data operations and ground games and advertising budgets and that's I think you know something that the two parties really have to wrestle with in terms of the Democratic primary there's really only one candidate on the Democratic side for 2016 Hillary and I think I don't know if we've ever before had such a prohibitive front-runner I mean something like 65% of the Democratic party you know are backing her I think that she is the prohibitive favorite for the for the nomination I think that getting the White House will be a much harder task it's very hard to become the to succeed a two-term president of your own party and only George H. W. Bush has done that in the modern era so I think that will be very difficult but I do think one of the things she's going to have to it's a high-class problem but one of the things she's gonna have to confront is if she doesn't really have any opposition how is she gonna keep the excitement going throughout the primary process when you're gonna have this unbelievably robust debate on the Republican side with a tremendous amount of excitement long primaries we have learned we used to think that they were debilitating they bankrupted anybody it turns out that long primaries can be really good for parties because they generate excitement you can build what they called capacity you know volunteer networks you know grassroots infrastructure in all these states that help you in the in the general election hi my name is Akhil Ranka and I'm doing master's in industrial engineering my caution is what you do to handle with the immense work pressure which you might have at this point in time wait can you repeat that how to handle what pressure what you do to handle the immense work pressure which is work pressure yeah oh well I come out here and talk to Mitch Daniels and you know then I just all the pressure right yeah I don't know you know when you've done something that you really like and you've done it over time and you also have a family you just kind of learn to be efficient and balance things and my NPR is a pretty good employer I I don't know why I just managed to work it out I don't feel unoverwhelmed or anything so we got let's take the last two that are here and start over here hi my my name is Katie Bean and I'm a high school social studies teacher but I recently just a couple weeks ago I heard on the Diane Reem show on NPR Senator Kristen Gillibrand speak and she's the female senator who took Hillary's seat right and recently wrote a book called off the sidelines really encouraging women to engage more in the political process I mean actually run for elections and it got me wondering how what is the percentage of women currently in members of Congress and how important do you think it is to diversity and just having you know the other gender more engaged in the political process well first of all I'm really sorry to say I don't have the number on my fingertips of what percentage of Congress are female but I can tell you it's a lot lower than than the number of the percentage of women in the population so women definitely lag behind although there are more women in the pipeline and that's the most important thing you got to start somewhere running for school board you know or a local office is a good way to start you know women are 53% of the electorate and the women's vote is really important I think that more female senators from both parties you know our inspirations to women who want to enter politics and it is tough now Kristen Gillibrand has little kids that's the other thing there used to be a different model women got into politics after their kids were grown but now you have more and more young mothers in Congress and I think that's an important thing for people to understand that it is possible to do that last question all right my name is Fiona Thompson and I study a computer information technology here at Purdue grew up listening to you on NPR with my father so it's a pleasure to have you here tonight I was just you mentioned this evening about the need for leadership in Congress and how it's for that divide to be kind of gapped that that some there needs to be a new leadership skills do you think that this is something that can be taught to people or is this is role of Congress man or woman dominated by a specific personality type that causes these types of disparity in leadership no I don't think it's the personality types I really think that left to their own devices I think that most members of Congress would like to get things done and and more of them would like to work across the aisle then do now but you know there is a system where there are punishments for that and you know you can see the number of Republicans for instance who got tea partied you know got a primary from it from a tea party opponent now the good thing is this year the Republican Party kind of came to the aid of a lot of those people and proved that they were willing to push back but I think people in Congress have the leadership skills they just have to exercise them and be brave enough to take a risk sure thank you so I gave what our guests the protested was was too effusive a an introduction but I think you'll agree after the answers that we've all just enjoyed that I should have gone on longer and been more extravagant in my praise can't we all be grateful that America still has journalists the call of the caliber and of the character of Mar-a-Lyce and thanks for coming to produce