 So many of you here tonight. We've got a good crowd. So I'll ask, as folks are coming in. I welcome you to use the chat function. I know we're all becoming zoom experts these days, but in case you don't know there's a little chat bubble should be at the bottom of your screen. And I'd encourage you all to say hello. Tell us where you're calling in from. And if you'd like to share what kind of beverage you're enjoying tonight can add that in there too. You'll notice that the there's an option to to talk with the panelists only, and then there's the option to talk to panelists and all attendees. So feel free. We've got a big crowd tonight already got questions coming in for our speakers which is great. So go ahead and introduce yourselves as all of us are coming in to our virtual party. And there's Christopher enjoying seltzer I'm having polar grapefruit seltzer myself. So glad to see so many folks coming in. So if you use that the chat function, we won't be monitoring just a little housekeeping as we get the party started, we won't be monitoring the hand raising function on the participants. So your best bet is to, to use that chat function and you can talk right to us by using just panelists, or you can choose I believe it says all panelists and attendees to say hello to everyone. We are another housekeeping piece. We are recording this this evening, just so you know, we think that's going to work right our intention is to record this this evening I should say, and we'll have that available for folks after the event. So, as you can maybe tell this is not my living room I'm broadcasting to you live from the fiction room. And I have to say this is an evening that I look forward to every year. It's the rare occasions for me anyway where I get to put on my party clothes and come and see the space that I love so much be transformed with beautiful decorations and amazing food. And most importantly it's a time that I cherish to get to visit with friends and neighbors and so many people who love the library so I'm sad that you all couldn't be in this room with me tonight. But I look forward to future celebrations, and I come to you tonight with my party decor of 2020. I brought my fanciest mask out this is the one from the drawing board that Liz makes at the drawing board these are my favorite masks, and the other important party accessory from 2020 is my hand sanitizer. So, it's a little bittersweet, but I just like to acknowledge how incredible it is that the staff of Kelly covered library pulled off this virtual fundraising event. This is our first ever virtual fundraising event, and more than 150 people bought tickets so it's just incredible. So thanks everybody for pivoting and joining us in this virtual fashion we've, there's been a lot of great preparation done by the staff in advance of this event. And I think we've got things in good shape but I'll just ask for your patience as we switch back and forth to lots of different music and different speakers, but we're excited to have everybody here. So again for folks who are just coming in, feel free to introduce yourselves in the chat. We've got, oh gosh, lots of friends I wish I could see you in person but yeah we'll use the chat or monitor the chat all night. If you want to say hi to friends. Well that's also the place where you can chime in with questions for Evan and Garrett. Our key speakers for the night. So, um, I would like to raise a glass to begin tonight. And I'd like for everyone grab your, your coffee mug yourself sir whatever you have. If we could kick off tonight with a toast of gratitude and appreciation for the Kelly covered library staff who have not only pivoted to make this event happen, but have spent a year adjusting in all kinds of creative ways to continue to serve their community during this difficult time so cheers to Kelly covered library staff. All right. Oh wow, I'm obsessed reading this chat so many people here. It's so great to have you all. So it is my great pleasure now to introduce our musical guests, the zeitner trio, and they're joining us tonight from their home in Northfield, Yazzie Oliver and Lully zeitner are three siblings who've grown up in the Northfield. They play traditional. They play traditional Irish and old time Appalachian music we've got Lully on four and five string banjos and Celtic harp, Oliver on the penny whistle and the illen pipes and Yazzie with fiddle. They're bringing age old melodies alive with creativity and voice and instrument. The group has gained a reputation in Vermont as standard bears of the tradition. The zeitners have played at the Vermont History Expo I think I saw you at the Vermont History Expo farmers night at the State House, the New World Festival and Randolph various venues in Boston. They represented Vermont at the big E and Springfield mass and performed for the Irish ambassadors 2018 visit in Vermont. So throughout their musical journey the siblings have been lucky to live in a state with a vibrant traditional music community, making their music an essential part of the fabric of their lives and they hope that sharing what they do brings inspiration to you. So with that, welcome, Yazzie Oliver and Lully. Thank you. I'm muted. Yes. Hello, everybody. Hope you can hear us. Amy said it all. She said everything about us. So we will just launch into some music. We're going to play a favorite old time song of ours called Chili Wins, which is kind of appropriate for this kind of year, I think. Three jigs that we put together. The first one is called Palm Sunday, the middle one called. Don't remember. Don't remember what the middle one's called. Maybe by the end of it I'll remember. And the last one is called the Humors of Kilarney. So I guess I should mention that Lully is playing harp. I'm playing the Irish bagpipes known as the illen pipes and Yazzie is playing the fiddle and we all have been honored to be part of a vibrant Irish traditional music community in central Vermont, largely to the good works of Hillary Farrington and Benedict Kohler. Hillary used to be the director of the Kellogg Hubbard Library, so maybe she's familiar to you and if she's watching, hello. Alrighty, you want to start on this, Lully? What do you want me to do? And I believe the last verse was actually not part of the original poem. Needed a fourth verse. Yeah, sometimes during close harmony songs we break down laughing and it's not great. And then we can't get out of laughing and so we have to just stop. Unfortunately, the song vision of the poem has fewer varieties of birds involved. Apparently the original poem by Joseph Campbell has different birds in each verse rather than the repeated ones. Right, we would have gotten so mixed up if we had to. So can we have a time check actually? Sure, we've got eight more minutes, so I think we've got time for another. Okay, so I need to go to the next room. Oh, right, yeah, so I need to go to the next room over and tune over to the basement so we can't hear you. Well, the banjo player is banished to the basement. Temporarily, Yazzie and I are going to play a few pieces on the pipes and fiddle. Yeah, we'll start with a slip jig that is called Shaheen Chahoe and it comes from a lullaby, an Irish lullaby. And then we'll follow it with one of our favorite jigs that we, the Irish session in Montpelier that used to happen on Main Street in Beguito's. This was a popular tune at that session. Could be just the insurance. A song that originated within... Sykner Trio, that was beautiful. Y'all sounded wonderful. Thank you so much. I know you can't hear it, but just know that there's more than 100 people applauding all through Central Vermont. That was really beautiful. Thank you. Well, I hope you all, I know you all enjoyed that. Such a great way to be together, even though we're all apart. I just wanted to, I'm enjoying, people are saying hi and chiming in on the chat, and I encourage you to keep doing that. And also, as you have questions for Garrett and Evan, please feel free to use the chat. But I did just want to note that you've got a choice to chat with all panelists, which is just a few of us. But if you want to say hi to everybody, please be sure to choose all panelists and attendees so you can say hi to all of your friends and neighbors. There's, we've got a great group of people here today. I won't point out everybody, but I'll just say that say hello to one of my favorite people in the world. Catherine Patterson is here with us tonight. Catherine, I can't wait to see you again in person one day. So I also wanted to mention that the online auction is live and rolling. There's some incredible artworks and incredible experiences. There's a fishing trip with Steve Gold to Lake Willoughby that I'm sure there's going to be a bidding war for so that stays open till nine. Please log in and bid often all those proceeds go to support our wonderful library. So many of you know, I think most of you probably know that we spent the last couple of years raising money through a campaign called gives a library a lift. And that campaign closed successfully at the end of the year, and Jesse Lynn and library staff have been so busy working on many projects. And I know that so many of you know that a primary very expensive critical project. In that work was the completion of a new elevator. And I'm pleased to tell you all that as just a week or so ago, the new elevator is finished. So I would like to have our second toast of the evening. I would like to lift your glass for the new lift. I'm pointing at it because it's right down the hall that way. And great thanks to all of the donors to Jesse for years of project management and funding coordination. We have a new elevator, and that's incredible so here here to the new live to the new elevator and to everyone who donated and made that possible. Okay, so on to the next part of our show. I am thrilled to present Garrett graph and Evan Osnos. Garrett Garrett, we've never met, but I've been following you on Twitter for at least five years. And, and I live down the street from your awesome parents so I'm so happy you're here tonight and that you brought Evan Osnos to join us tonight. So, Garrett probably needs no introduction to many of you but I'm going to tell you a little bit about his pretty incredible accomplishments. He's a distinguished magazine journalist best selling historian and regular TV commentator he spent more than a dozen years covering pop where we've been and where we're headed. Today Garrett serves as the director of the Aspen Institute cyber security and technology program. And he's a contributor to wired long reads and see a dead. His most recent book, National bestseller, the only playing the sky in oral history of 911, which we of course here have here at the library, and is also for sale at the wonderful bear pond books, right down the street. He's also the author of multiple other books, including the first campaign, globalization, the web and the race for the White House and the threat matrix inside Robert Mueller's FBI, and Raven Rock which I loved a national bestseller about the government's Cold War doomsday plans. So inside both journalism and politics he's got a long history as a new media pioneer, he was the founding editor of fish bowl. And during that time he was the very first blogger admitted to cover a White House press briefing way back in 2005. And that's been noted his reporters notebook is on display at the the museum in Washington in the collections of the museum at Washington DC. He's a native from Montpelier, of course, a graduate of Harvard, and he served as a deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign, and beginning in 1997 was then Governor Dean's very first webmaster. He's been a reporter for a while at Georgetown for many years. His writing and commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Politico. And as reporting has been cited on shows ranging from Stephen Colbert to john Oliver and Rachel Maddow. He's the chair of the board of the National Conference on Citizenship, and he serves here in Vermont he serves on the board of Vermont Public Radio and the Burlington Housing Authority. And as Garrett, I'm going to turn it over to you. Take it away. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much Amy that was a overly generous and long winded introduction but you somehow managed to forget the most important line on my resume, which is I, my first job was as a page for the Kellogg Hubbard library in middle and then reshelving books in the children's room when it was still downstairs. So, this is a real honor and a privilege to be back and tonight with the Kellogg Hubbard library. I'm not able to all be there in the building having the great food and drink that the gala normally has, but I'm pleased that you all are able to join me tonight for what I hope and what I think will be a great conversation with my friend Evan Osnos, who has a brand biography out about Joe Biden, the new President-elect of the United States. And so I'm interested in tonight to talk to Evan about politics and Joe Biden and a little bit about China as well. So, Evan is just a journalist who constantly humbles me both in the style of his writing and the depth and insight of his reporting. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2008 where he covers politics and foreign affairs. In his book, Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, which was based on his eight years of living in Beijing, where he was the Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune and part of a team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The book actually won the 2014 National Book Award and was itself a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. And he lives in Washington DC now where Evan and I also share a unique passion and interest in the world's doomsday plans. My book that Amy mentioned about the government side and Evan is the premier world expert on the billionaires bunkers in New Zealand and elsewhere. So, you should always pay very close attention to where Evan is speaking to you from at any given moment because if you ever see him popping up in New Zealand, you should know that you should head for your own basement. Evan, thanks so much for joining us tonight here at the College Hubbard Library. It's a great pleasure to be with you. Thanks, Garrett, for the invitation for a great cause. I hope you guys can hear me okay. We can hear you just fine so let me dive in tonight and let's start talking a little bit about Joe Biden and this election. Your, your book is called the life, the run and what matters now. And I thought we would actually talk a little bit about each portion of that. And Evan, as you say in the book has become sort of an area of accidental expertise for you. This is not anyone that you ever expected to go out and write a biography of but you have covered him pretty extensively for much of the last decade, and interviewed him on multiple occasions as Vice President, and even as recently as this summer. I wonder if you could sort of give us some sense of what Joe Biden is like that it that might surprise people I mean sort of part of what makes him so interesting. And as a public figure right now is he is in some ways, one of the best known politicians we have in America this is someone who's been in politics for 45 years on in a high profile way. And as you wrote about in in your biography of him this is someone who is actually profiled at length in Richard Ben Cramer's 1988 or book about the 1998 1988 presidential race what it takes. And a book that you know you and I both grew up sort of reading as one of the great campaign books of all time only to see this guy sort of pop back up almost 40 years later, and actually now finally achieve his lifelong dream of becoming president so we all think we know Joe Biden really well. What, from your experience, actually being with him would surprise us about him. Yeah, well it's, you know what's fun I have to say Garrett doing an event like this with you is a treat because in ordinary circumstances you and I would be having precisely this conversation, you know, over a cup of coffee in human form and instead we're having it anyway but it's also fun to be doing it with a group in this way so. Look, the fact is when I say I became a sort of accidental expert on Joe Biden it was for precisely the reason you describe which is that in many ways he was part of the political furniture. I mean he'd been around for so long that a lot of people didn't pay that much attention to him and then I came to Washington in 2013 and to be perfectly blunt about it. He was not the person that everybody was dying to see and I was sort of new to the politics game I'd seen him in China that's where I'd become interested in him. And the reason I became interested was because of his approach to diplomacy which was kind of unusual he was very candid when he talked to Chinese leaders. And then I came to Washington and the the sort of the kind of cool reporters the ones who really knew what was going on, really weren't spending a lot of time with Joe Biden he was not a hard interview to get. And I didn't know anything, and I thought this guy knows about foreign affairs. He's involved in national security in a really serious way, and I'm interested in those issues. I'm going to go start interviewing him. What I discovered was of course he was interested in foreign affairs he was involved as he said, you know, that he said President Obama sends me to the places he doesn't want to go. And that meant he spent a lot of time in in places like Iraq and Ukraine and elsewhere. And that by talking to him about foreign affairs, I began to understand a lot more about American politics because the thing about Joe Biden that is very rewarding as an interviewee, or I said, rewarding for the interviewer is that he can't help but tell you what he actually thinks. He doesn't care. He does some spinning everybody spins in Washington, but he doesn't put a whole lot of effort into it to be perfectly honest about it. And you and I both know there are some people in Washington, who are seamless in the way that they sort of lead you down the path to what it is that they want you to believe Biden either doesn't bother anymore, or he doesn't, frankly, sort of spend that much focus on it. And as a result you end up coming away with a tremendous amount of insight. One example, when I was talking to him once in about 2014 in his office at the West Wing. He started saying this is before Donald Trump was on the scene it was before Bernie Sanders was a phenomenon and helping us kind of reframe what was happening in politics, and Biden said look I think the Democratic Party is making a big mistake right now and losing a lot of people in the working class because it's not paying attention to issues of economic fairness. And he said this to me a couple of years before the election. And to be honest, I didn't think I didn't understand what he had figured out which was something was was changing in politics. I would directly answer your question the thing that I think would surprise people in spending time with him kind of one on one is that he is what I would describe as productively insecure, by which I mean he is constantly on the lookout for things he doesn't know. A lot of times when you interview somebody, a politician who has reached the highest ranks of their business in their eighth decade, they are generally kind of confident that they know what they need to know and he doesn't project and we can talk about why I think there's some interesting sort of biographical reasons. But he is constantly trying to figure out what's going on in my case he's asking about China wants to sort of think about what he doesn't hear when he's in his usual routines, and he's doing that to everybody. So he is kind of slurping up information in a way that I think is relatively unusual for somebody in his position. So you have this quote in your book that just sort of really stuck with me given the trajectory of where the country is right now, where you say quote from him, people say to me, what are you going to do if you get elected. And he says, it depends on what the hell I'm left with, not a joke, I'm not being a wise guy, things could get a lot worse. And that was from the summer when we thought things were rather bad in the country and we are now in far worse shape. On the pandemic front, the jobs report this week shows sort of a yawning gap on the economy. And this is all sort of leaving aside a series of actions that we are seeing President Trump take from, you know, Steve Mnuchin to the Pentagon to DHS. And sort of salting the earth that Joe Biden is going to inherit on January 20 at noon. And I'm curious, you know, how do you think Joe Biden is looking at this. And then, you know, the second half of the question is, in a weird way, this is the second time in 12 years that the country has asked Joe Biden to pull itself. out of a massive seemingly once a generation once a century economic collapse and what lessons do you think from taking office in 2008 2009 do you think Joe Biden is going to bring to trying to tackle this pandemic and this economic catastrophe. The first question, what's interesting is, you know, in that quote that he said to me he said it is going to get very, very ugly, and he was referring to both the nature of the campaign and of course we saw that unfold in those final months, but also his concern and he said that the president. Now the outgoing president was going to fundamentally mishandle the virus it was happening already but his sense was this thing is going to get worse and when it does the president's not up to the task and this gets to the sort of fundamental reason why he got into this race, which is to say, he looked at the state of play in 20 was truly to 2015. All right, I should say it was 2017 2018, and he said, this is a moral emergency, it's not just I mean initially he thought this is a matter of incompetence, but then he thought there's something deeper going on, which is that he thought it was actually a fundamental reason to undermine the functioning of the US government and of democracy. And so it became for him larger than a project of just trying to adequately run the government. And so you get to this current scenario, where you have, you know, the White House and Republican leadership in the Congress, essentially unable to come up with a deal that Democrats would agree to that would provide even basic relief for people in serious Right now, you have obviously an effort in a variety of ways whether it's by initiating further drilling contracts in the Arctic, or continuing to build the wall there's this effort to try to sort of govern from beyond the grave a bit and establish things in motion that the Biden administration will find it hard to undo, you know, one of the comments it was a quote recently from somebody in the Trump in the Trump administration who said basically the strategy is light so many small fires around the world here in the United States and elsewhere that there's too much for them to be able to put out right away so that's the state of play that a Biden administration confronts, and Biden brings to it a couple of instincts a couple of strategies. And one is his belief and it's worth reminding ourselves in 2009 when he came, and after all he was tasked as you kind of alluded to in your question, with implementing the stimulus bill was one of the things that President Obama asked him to do but even before that thing, and this gets to the question of how he'll handle this moment. He was asked to try to get some votes they needed votes in order to pass the bill in fact they, they didn't have it, and so he called six members of Congress and he got three yes votes, and the bill passed by three votes. So his view is that, you know, and this gets to his sort of broader philosophy is that he is somebody who fundamentally is a politician in the clutch, he likes in being in close. He likes those kinds of conversations he's constantly on the telephone at one point, people pulled his phone records during the vice presidency and he was making more phone calls than other people had been in that job. He liked his locker at the gym in the Senate, even when he was in the vice presidency because he liked to go down there and just kibitz, that's, that's in his nature. So, his approach to the moment is as, you know, look, his approach, legislatively, if it's possible depends on the composition of the Senate is to genuinely go big and go bold that's what Jake Sullivan said to me, not too long ago, meaning they're not going to do the usual, let's do a kind of sort of pace out what we can do over the first two years before the midterms. Their view is that's not this moment and that's not the politics, we have to go very fast do things almost immediately. If they don't have the Congress and it looks like they may not, then I think you're more likely to see what somebody in the transition said to me as plan B, which is scorched earth, and they don't want that to be the case we can talk about why Biden believes unity is possible or at least some negotiated compromises are possible. But if they need to they are a seasoned group and they know how to use the levers of the executive branch things for instance like setting priorities with individual departments about what do you prosecute what do you not prosecute what do you make an issue or for instance, how do you spend your money. So, you can decide that you're going to buy sustainable technologies electric vehicles things like that so you may not be able to get Congress to agree to a fundamental climate change program but you can use inside the departments to get power to get things done. All of this is to say that Joe Biden doesn't have a magic wand, and he goes into this with. I think the most important thing to know about his approach at this moment is that he is humbled by the awesome task ahead of him and it is not a celebratory mood. I mean, he was talking to his people right now these days and even when I was talking to him before the election. He was in a grave state of mind, and that's what's striking to me Garrett I mean you and I both have sort of followed Joe Biden's career over the course of his evolution. And in the years when Richard Ben Kramer in 1987 88 was spending time with Joe Biden, you wouldn't have described him as a grave person you wouldn't have described him as a deeply serious deeply serious man, and that's what he is right now he is I think he is appropriately grave about what they're facing. So after the election, a bunch of stories about his long, you know, warm working relationship with Mitch McConnell. That were followed about 24 hours after those stories ran by Mitch McConnell refusing to acknowledge that he was the president elect at all. And I'm curious, handicap, where you see that relationship going. If Mitch McConnell remains the majority leader in the Senate. How much do you think Joe Biden is actually going to be able to work with McConnell and make the deals that Joe Biden sort of thinks in his mind he is destined to make. Honestly, it depends more on Mitch McConnell than it does on Joe Biden and it's worth reminding people that they do have more of a relationship than certainly Mitch McConnell and Barack Obama had or even Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump. I mean interestingly, Mitch McConnell was the only Republican senator who attended bow Biden's funeral in 2015. There was this fateful moment we all remember in the Obama administration when we were facing this fiscal cliff crisis the possibility of the US defaulting on its debt and the president and McConnell's people have been unable to make a deal. And McConnell called over to the West Wing called over to Biden's office and Biden picks up and McConnell says is there anybody over there who knows how to make a deal so these two and they ended up then striking a deal, which it's worth reminding ourselves, Harry Reid was not a fan of that deal in fact it said that he crumpled it up and threw it in the fireplace I asked Harry read about it he said no that that didn't happen I used to throw other things in the fireplace but not that. But they, Biden is committed to the idea, he fundamentally believes that it is possible to reach some negotiated solutions right now with with Republicans on things that are things that are just so obviously urgently necessary, like his belief, but here's the thing. Biden does not pretend for a minute doesn't believe that Mitch McConnell is going to do something out of sheer kind of sentimental goodwill for Biden or for anybody else he believes and this gets to his core theory of political affairs is that people only do things because of their calculation and perception of their interests, and his belief is that part of the reason why the Obama administration struggled sometimes to get things to get things done with Republicans was that they were so involved, rightly in many cases, with the conduct of their opponents that they would go into the room and more or less say, here's why you're wrong and here's where you're coming at this from a fundamentally flawed perspective. Biden believes whether you're negotiating something in Wilmington Delaware or in Baghdad or in Beijing you can't do that. He talked to me about why, you know, if he sometimes frustrates diplomats because they say you're not, you're not saying what we want you to say, and he says because a lot of the things you tell me to say, communicate to the other guy that I think he's an idiot, and I'm not going to do that that's his language not mine. And so what he's likely to do is to go in and say to Mitch McConnell. I understand why you think it is in your interest to shut me down to make my administration is unproductive and as stymied as possible it's what you did to Obama. But here's why I think that's a mistake for you and your party, whether or not he's going to succeed in that argument is another story. It is it's important to identify that he and I think the key player here is also Mike Donilon, who is now one of his senior advisors in the White House, but Mike Donilon has been with. He was the strategy chief strategist of the campaign he's been with Joe Biden for as long as Biden's been in this game. And Mike Donilon and Biden both believe that that there has been some sort of failure of strict of the strategy of negotiation over the last few years, and they're determined to try to subvert that. We wrote a piece in the New Yorker, a month ago about pulling American democracy back from the brink and this last month as every month seems to be in 2020 was about six years long. And it feels in some ways that we are even closer to the brink in American democracy now than we were when your piece ran. I'm curious, you know, you talked about in the piece. You know the question, what would it take to pull American politics out of the fire to make democracy more functional and trustworthy and to make Americans feel in any real sense that we are all in this together. Having written the piece having looked at talk to all of the people that you talk to for that piece. And now having watched this last month unfold. What's your own answer to that question, you know, how, how well do you think America can pull back from the brink of democracy right now, and what's the path that the country needs to take to get there. Well, I think the way I would describe the moment that we're facing and this was sort of the motive of that, the motivation behind that piece was that it feels like we are choosing between two paths of the American political tradition. And the American political tradition is not sweet and simple. It is a combination of both moments of reason and moments of violence and when you go back and what I wanted to do was to remind ourselves that when you go back you have this conception that we were founded very much under the banner of the enlightenment we were after all a country conceived in, you know what Franklin called reasons I the idea that you could govern. You could be unburdened by the divine right of kings and by the sort of allegiance to the deities that that was how we were going to function as a country. The only moment that we were marching down that path, we were also beset constantly by this tradition of political violence I mean the example that I sort of refer to is that the Lincoln Douglas to dates right there on the eve of the Civil War was in many ways the political rhetoric of the 19th century you had Lincoln, who just by sort of sheer moral clarity was able to establish himself on the national stage at that point he was just running for the Illinois was running to be a senator from Illinois and in fact lost that race. But the years later when people would ask him what do you believe what do you stand for he would say just read the transcripts of the Lincoln Douglas debates. And what we know was that even though of course it was the high point of political dialogue and discourse it also didn't prevent the Civil War two years later and it also of course did not prevent. Lincoln's assassination and so you have these two halves of our kind of Janus phase character politically. And right now it feels to us like we are teetering very much so between these two the data is is is quite is is quite chilling when you look at the uptick in the number of people who describe their opponents as illegitimate. People who say that some portion of the people who disagree with them should just die this is not my language this is survey data coming out of very serious scholarship. And that worries us I mean when you look at the measures of political cohesion things like trust in law enforcement trust in the political system, all of those measures have dropped dramatically and not just by our own standards but by international standards. So then we're faced with this question, and I will say that when I was writing this piece it was just before the election, all of us you and I both I know, particularly we're thinking about the risks of political violence what would happen if these militia groups came out and said that they were going to prevent the counting of balance what if they said that they were going to, you know use force to try to reject a legitimate democratic result. It didn't happen. And instead what we saw was that at the top of the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell, obviously, and others followed Donald Trump's lead in this fantasy, this delusion that he won the election or at least not acknowledging Joe Biden's legitimate when, but what you also saw was that in these key small moments, it was I mean it's bizarre to really to think of it, that the slide into what could have been a real constitutional collapse. It was, it was arrested by individuals people like the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia and these individual state lawmakers in Michigan that is a, I would say a fragile foundation on which to for us to build our confidence in the democratic system right now, but it did hold for the moment and that gives us an indication of the fact that we are, we are tugged between these two. What I came away with and I think it's also directly relevant for tonight's event is that when I started talking to people for what we think of as kind of act three of a magazine piece like that you know your long piece of that kind in the New Yorker you typically you frame out the problem, you then talk about what the scholars are thinking about how we got here, and then we have to think about where do we go. Third part, I talked to some really interesting and thoughtful people people like Robert Putnam at Harvard who is, you know somebody who has thought for a very long time about things like social capital and what makes us citizens not just residents of a country like in a democracy how do we actually sort of relate to one another. And there was a really interesting project which didn't get enough attention at the time and I think people would find it interesting to read done by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in which they looked at this they said what are some of these steps that we could actually take to restore American reason and political decency. So things like, for instance, some of it is, you know, harder to do than others things like expand the House of Representatives, so that it would more accurately reflect the composition of the country that would then in fact also have an impact on the Electoral College. But I think one of the things that they also mentioned, and those are procedural steps, one of the things they also mentioned are things like libraries as they said to me. You know, one of the interesting details is that there are more libraries in America than there are Starbucks locations and libraries are the laboratory of democracy after all they are the building blocks of that civic culture it's where you go and learn how to disagree. It's where you go and learn how to absorb ideas that are contrary to your assumptions that might challenge you. They are also the places where we can put people into conversation with each other who might otherwise have very different lifestyles. Part of the subtext of that report was that, you know, one of the origins of our unreason is our seclusion, what Putnam called bowling alone our withdrawal from from our collective experiences and libraries and other pieces of what are so accurately described as the civic architecture. Those really are the kinds of places where you get people back into sort of nonviolent confrontation of ideas, and that's one of the ways that you can begin to rebuild this but let's have no illusions it is we are still very much in the grip of that of that dilemma that choice that Americans are making and I think we will be for quite some time I'm afraid. So for all of you watching at home tonight. Feel free to put questions into the chat a couple of you I've seen already do that will will work in some of those over the next 20 minutes or so as we continue this conversation. I'm curious when you look at the steps that Biden has taken in the month or so since it became clear he was going to be the president elect. Is there anything that you are seeing him do that is surprising to you. Well, one of the things is that he has over the course of the last year, continuing right up until this moment. He has resisted some of the temptation to freak out. And that is an interesting thing I mean, in his campaign, there were moments when they were so close to losing that actually one of his senior aides told me the story that she called him. He was on the train on his way from from Delaware to New York, and she said look we are so we're so low on money, because nobody wants to give us any right now because they think we're doomed, that we may have to shut down in a week. And if we do, you need to hold on to enough money so that you can pay people severance that's how close it was to the end. In the last year I said how did you respond to that. I mean there's a lot of ways that you know people can sort of rage at the heavens there are some who will then blame their staff, you know, there's there's a lot of ways you can handle that. And his answer to that was actually sort of quite calm. I mean as he said to me and he said to others, I've lost more than that in my life. And that's a different kind of calm and that you need when you're facing an outgoing president who is actively trying to subvert the legitimacy of the democratic process. But what you've heard from the very moment from the morning after the election was an effort to not allow themselves to be pulled in to the illusion of the controversy to the illusion the creation the invention of a dispute. There was no dispute the votes were clear the law was clear. This was something that was being manufactured by the President and in order for it to have any kind of life. Biden needed to engage and he didn't and what I was surprised by was that level of discipline. That saying, and some of this is not just him this is people around him I mean interestingly Ron claim of course who is now the incoming chief of staff. When Ron claim was the Ebola czar in the Obama administration he had a saying, which was ignore the noise and that was a time when people were getting scared the virus was coming to the United States where there's a lot of fear about whether Ebola was going to be handled well, and his message internally inside the office was ignore the noise focus on what we need to do. And you heard something very similar these days in the Biden camp because their belief has been that we need to keep marching forward convey a sense that we are in fact confident that we're going to be able to take office on January 20 we're not taking it lightly. They were taking beneath the surface of the water they were doing a lot in court, they were actively contesting every single one of these lawsuits, but they never allowed the public to believe that this was fundamentally in doubt. And what surprised me about it as I said was discipline because the Joe Biden of 30 years ago, the one that Richard Ben Kramer wrote so well about was not a disciplined candidate. He was a disciplined senator, he was making mistakes, and I think he is at this point in his life, finally ready, actually. And he would say as much you know he was asked once why he bombed out of the 8788 race and it took him a long time to acknowledge this but he said I was, I wasn't ready to be president. And these days and this gives me comfort I say this as a citizen as a dad, he is ready, and I am I am feeling quite, quite good about this person and this group that is going into office. I do think of that it's a fascinating insight. And then that jives with sort of all of my experiences, you know in and around politics as well, which is, you know, for as awful and weird and strange as presidential races usually are. I really do a really good job of sorting out sort of who is ready, you know, organizationally discipline wise, you know, sort of mature enough intellectually engaged enough to actually make it through that process. And one of the things that comes out in your book is, you know, just how hard it was when Biden took over with Obama in 2008 2009 the challenges that they face. And even really, you know, Joe Biden ran for president then also, you know, he was out there and 0607 running did terribly, and was sort of plucked by Obama from, you know what, what all of us in Washington at the at the moment sort of assumed was, you know, the light of Joe Biden's career to be vice president that summer. And he came in as vice president sort of assuming that he was going to be, you know, the smart wise one. And was as you lay out in the book sort of deeply humbled by Barack Obama's approach to the economic crisis the decisions that he made. And one of the lessons that he made which goes to sort of that wrong claim ignore the noise philosophy that that marked so much of the way that Obama led was, you know, you just got to make the hard decisions and make them for the right reasons, and, you know, move on and that's really what being a leader is about. When you look ahead over the next couple of months what do you think the hardest decision that Joe Biden is going to actually have to make is, and I sort of suspect it's, it's actually going to end up being less pandemic and more really how much do we relitigate the Trump years for the next four years I mean do you do you prosecute Donald Trump do you prosecute his family do you attempt to sort of relitigate all of these issues. And I'm curious if, if you agree with that or you think, you know there's something else out there like the pandemic that will actually prove to be the hardest part for Biden. That's a really interesting thing I mean he is. He's torn between these two impulses and I know for a fact that he is torn between on the one hand recognizing that there are a lot of people who believe that the Obama administration did not do enough to hold people accountable after the financial crisis or after the use of torture in the war on terror and you know there is a feeling that they in the interest of moving forward helping the country take hard steps that they created. There's a sort of unfinished chapter there through Biden knows that, and at the same time. He believes that he has to make a decisive break from what the Trump era represented in the Justice Department, which was the total politicization of prosecution and so he's determined personally to stay out of it, because he believes that one of the, it's a bitter Trump thing to use the powers of the government and the, and the threat of, of sending somebody to jail as an element of political and personal power, and he doesn't want to do that. So his approach is to do something sort of at the gentler end of the spectrum what he's saying now is, we are going to establish an inspector general to off the bat who is going to look into all of the spending around him. And if that person at office discovers examples of things that can be referred to the Justice Department they'll do it, in which case then they become, they become at matters for prosecution, but I don't think that actually this is the hardest call I think the hardest decision that Biden is going to face is the decision about when to essentially pull the record and decide that there is no way to make deals with the Republicans that there there is no possibility for negotiated compromise, and I have to do what I can to use his, you know, his advisor's term to me go scorched earth. That I think is going to be harder for him, you know, I had a interview, I interviewed President Obama for the book not too long ago and you know what he said to me was that he said look I think it's been painful that was his word for Joe to watch the dysfunction of the Senate because after all he came up at a time when the Senate was functional and it had much smaller degree of political polarization. And parting with that has been has been difficult. So I actually think that's that may be the thing because part of it is not just politics and rhetorical for Biden to run on the idea that he'll be able to make some make some kind of negotiated headway. He really believes it. And I think if he finds that it's not possible that taking that off ramp is going to be the hardest choice helmet. So I want to turn to a couple of the questions from the audience tonight. And pull together two of them, one that's asking about how Biden might deploy Kamala Harris, particularly, knowing as he does what it's like to be a vice president and what it's, and what it's like to be a vice president that actually has influence and is included in in conversations. And then similarly, you know, who knows where America will be in four years, but does not seem likely that Joe Biden will be running for reelection in 2024. So where do you sort of see Kamala fitting into this puzzle and how does she use the next four years in the Naval Observatory in Washington. Yeah, I find this a really interesting subject to because the thing is he after all comes to this, having formed his own theory of the case on vice presidencies. And what he said was, he determined, he figured out early on that actually, it was, it was a job, but only if the president native one like it's remind ourselves he didn't want the job initially he actually said no. And it was his wife, Dr. Jill Biden who said to him, more or less, look, what's wrong here what do you like why wouldn't you do this and he said look I don't, I don't think I can have a. I don't think I can. I don't think I want this job is a long history of people sort of maligning the vice presidency and she said you got into politics partly to try to advance civil rights and you also got into this. I've been saying you want to end this war in Iraq that you voted for. So why wouldn't you do it this is a chance to do it and he said but I don't know if I can. How am I going to work for somebody I haven't had a boss in 40 years and she said, grow up. So he then got into the job and discovered that the job is only as good as your president allows it to be and he thought it was important and he will make this vice presidency important, but it's a different job. He needs different things from what he did for Obama was partly foreign affairs as I mentioned before but also partly a link to Congress he after all loved being over on the hill Obama did not Obama did not enjoy his time in the Senate and didn't want to spend his time getting a drink with Mitch McConnell to borrow an old, an old joke of his and and Biden doesn't need that from Kamala Harris he has more experience on the hill and doesn't need her particularly on foreign affairs what he needs her. So what he does much emphatically clearly is as a bridge to a larger community of Americans, I mean she is able to obviously she is multiple series of bursts in her job, not only as a woman but also as an African American and as a child of Trump and he knows that he is not the person that a lot of Democrats wanted to be president much less 70 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump, and his belief it's quite deeply held is that he needs to both speak to this broader community and also absorb the ideas of people who may not look like him he is yeah he doesn't put it quite this way but he knows he's an old white guy, and he has to do a much better job of understanding what the experiences are people out in the country if he's going to succeed as president. Now the question of what happens in four years is, this is not being quite he does not know it is not a case that he is going into this determined to only serve one term I think actually, you know I pushed around on this a little bit in the reporting, because you'd heard these little indicators that maybe he was only going to serve one term and I, you know, the truth was, he doesn't politically it would be malpractice for him to acknowledge that at this point because he's going to be in the lane duck immediately, but I think more likely he's going to decide in the second or third year whether he's still got enough gas in the tank to do it. If I was Kamala Harris one of the key things that I would be thinking about is that he takes a lot of pride in the way that he did not run for president, kind of on the side while serving Barack Obama he takes pride in having been essentially a kind of faithful deputy, because the oldest psycho drama in Washington is a vice president kind of running a crypto currency, driving the president nuts while they're seeking the next office, and he likes the fact that he didn't do that. And so I think Kamala Harris is certainly wise enough to sense that her path to success as a vice president or eventually perhaps as president is to do the job as it is help him succeed as president, and when the time comes, get that slingshot effect being in the pole position that she wants it but but if she moves too fast. That's actually the way that that undermines that potential. Let me ask two more questions. Before we run out of time tonight. This has been wonderful and I'm really really appreciative of you sharing your wisdom and I, as you know we could go on all night as we have before when it has been just sitting in a bar together. So, speaking of people who didn't want Joe Biden to be president in the Democratic Party. We are pretending tonight that we're sitting on stage together in Montpelier Vermont, the home state of Bernie Sanders. Bernie seems like he is sort of continuing to play his role as a crotchety dissenter in the Democratic Party, announcing that he is not going to potentially not support the COVID relief bill that's coming together. Because it doesn't go far enough. We've talked a lot tonight about how Morocco, sorry, how Joe Biden is going to bridge to the Republicans, how do you see Joe Biden sort of bridging to the burning movement in the Democratic Party, which in many ways represents, you know, the next generation of the Democratic Party. You know when you look at, you know, the, the, that very historic, you know, 72 or 96 hours in earlier this year, where it looked like Bernie was actually going to run away with the Democratic Party in the same way that Donald Trump did the Republican one by just splitting the rest of the party's vote among Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden and the others before the rest of the party can yield very quickly around Joe Biden and delivered him the nomination. How much repair work does Joe Biden have to do there. And how do you see him, you know, just even bridging within his own party, let alone before he gets to the Republicans. It's worth in some ways, quoting Bernie Sanders on this subject I think you know what what Bernie was asked during the campaign you know why did you endorse Biden so much faster than you would endorse Hillary and what Bernie said was look to be frank about it. He said I have a much better relationship with Joe Biden and I had with Hillary Clinton, not personally meaning he is more open to listening to me and my ideas he doesn't agree with me on everything I don't expect that he will, but he takes them, he takes them on in a way that I sense. And that's one of the reasons why you then saw him become a more enthusiastic advocate, and then you saw the formation of these task forces which could have been, you know, baloney. But this was the real thing this was the essentially Bernie's camp and Biden's camp coming together and forming on issues like climate, the economy and so on. And, you know, I talked to, you know, people who are on those task forces one climate activist in particular who said to me. This is you know, somebody named Varshini Prakash was a young very kind of really impressive climate activist one of the co founders of the sunrise movement and she said I came into there very wary and what I discovered was that actually, John Kerry, who was the co chair of this thing, along with the presidency, that they were more open to hearing from people like me than I thought they were I did not get out of there I didn't get them to sign on to the Green New Deal I didn't expect them to. But she said, you know, my goal, my task before me in a Biden presidency. And I remember this expression always I think of it a lot these days is, I have to find a path between complacency, and not fighting, and being righteous, and, and closing off the possibility for progress, even if it's not all of the progress I want. So, in a way, it's this combination of things, Biden has to project to the left a sense that he is not regarding them as the enemy that he is not regarding them as irrelevant that he doesn't think that his mandate does not include them. It's, it has to be sincere, I think people will feel that it doesn't have meaning if he's not responding to it, some of that will come down to personnel, as it always does. And the reality is, look, if he's dealing with a Republican Senate, he's probably not going to be naming Bernie Sanders as Labor Secretary. He's not even doing it anyway, even if he had a Democratic Senate, he is at his core, a centrist, but there are a lot of other jobs besides the cabinet. And what we need to be looking for is to see who are getting those sub cabinet positions, and whether they do represent a diversity voices it's worth pointing out that some of his early appointments had been well received on the left. Janet Yellen, after all is is somebody who is known for her focus on unemployment on Labor. And whether even on climate somebody like John Kerry has been cheered by a progressive climate activist so they're making careful choices and they may not all of them satisfy what people really want at the most ambitious end of the party. But it will be this, it will be something closer to a center, a centrist, a centrist line that is open and respectful of views on the left. Last question tonight this this is one of the longest and mediest conversations I've had in a long time that doesn't focus primarily on Donald Trump. But I, we can't get out of the evening without a question about him. We've talked about the 2024 landscape on the Democratic side. It looks like Donald Trump is probably not going to attend Biden's inauguration. I've never suspected that he would and have been predicting that he will probably hold a, you know, 2024 reelection campaign kickoff rally at noon on January 20 and somewhere in Florida. Where do you see Donald Trump going over these next couple of years. How much of a hold do you think he's going to keep on the Republican Party. And how do you think the Republican Party moves forward to 2024. Look, he is clearly right now and will be on January 21 the day he's gone. He is the dominant figure in Republican politics full stop. And what he is also contending with is a future that will be very, very complicated he is under investigation in multiple jurisdictions, that is going to be a not insignificant issue for him. I mean that's not there a long way from the question of whether you know Donald Trump ever goes to jail that's not what we're talking about. But that will become a consuming fact of his life is contending with some of those, if in fact those become the kind of cases that they appear to be. And why do you hear him talking, as we're being told about the possibility of preemptively pardoning his kids and his lawyer, and perhaps himself. So I would put that in the column of things he's gonna have to be thinking about. The other thing is that it, there are a lot of up and coming Republican leaders who are not all that thrilled about the idea of Donald Trump squatting on the party for the next four years people who are not short of self confidence and ambition. People like Josh Holly and Tom Cotton, who had been envisioning a future that was that had more room to run. So I wouldn't assume that they are going to sit quietly and allow that to allow Donald Trump to make all the choices he wants to make. The third thing I would mention is power has a way of leaching out of a person faster than they sometimes assume when they lose the instruments of authority. And that signature becomes legally inoperative at noon on January 20. And that's going to change who he is we already feel it just in our own conversations around the dinner table I think you see just your own reaction when you see the tweets it feels different. It doesn't feel like quite as meaningful and as serious as it did even a few weeks ago. That's going to become more pronounced you know he has to deal with the risk of the Sarah Palin problem which is he ends up essentially as an entertainer. And in his case it'll be on a scale it's nothing like we've ever seen before. You know I only sort of half jokingly imagine that he will create a presidential library to return us to our venue for the evening. In which it will be more like a convention center it'll be a kind of Graceland style destination, and that's where he will hold court from somewhere in Florida. And I think the idea that he runs for president again in 24 2024 is a long way away by no means assume it will be the case. I don't think it means it's guaranteed to be another Trump family member I think you have a lot of pretty earnest Republican candidates who believe that it is their turn, particularly after a one term president, being driven from office with historic low levels of favorability. Evan, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Your book, Joe Biden, the life, the run and what matters now available at bear pond books in downtown Montpelier and of course from the Kellogg Hubbard library. It's been a pleasure talking with you tonight, Evan, and thank you to the Kellogg Hubbard library and don't forget, all of you watching to go online and bid on that online auction for the next 54 minutes. Back to you Amy. Evan, thank you so much. This is really fascinating and insightful. We, yeah, I could listen to y'all talk for a lot longer. Thank you. And Garrett, as you were mentioning, you are the start of your career here at the Kellogg Hubbard library I just kept thinking sitting here in the fiction room I feel like we should have a Kellogg Hubbard library page hall of fame, right on one of these walls here. Maybe that's a new project. So it really, it means a lot to us, Evan and Garrett, that you took the time to spend with us tonight. Really, thank you so much. So we're at the end of the party. And as Garrett mentioned, we've got 53 minutes left on that online option. There's some really great items there so I encourage you to bid. It's no surprise to anyone to hear that it's a challenging year to be raising funds for our library and, as Evan mentioned, public libraries are critical for the social fabric of our country so I know all of you tonight know that so thank you for all of your support of our wonderful library. I want to thank Garrett and Evan again, but I also want to thank the committee who put this first virtual fundraising party together. Carolyn Brennan and Jesse Lynn are awesome co directors, our board member, Judy Warner walk and staff members Steve Pocasio Michelle singer and Rachel Seneschal I want to give them a big round of applause. There's this is this is the sort of event that it's kind of like a duck. It may look smooth but there's lots of the feet are paddling underneath so I think them so much for their thought and attention on this event. I want to just take a special minute to acknowledge our friend Rachel Seneschal who after I think 14 years at this library is retiring at the end of the month. We are so grateful for all of your contributions to this place and we wish you a very happy retirement. And a final toast for the evening. May you raise your glass. May you all be safe and healthy this season. And may we all take care of each other. Thank you. Good night.