>> at staples center. sen. bennet: how are you? so good to see you. it's like an out-of-body experience. >> you good? sen. bennet: i'm good, yeah. do you want to make it out to stephen, or for stephen? >> i saw your interview on book tv back in october or something. that's how i -- sen. bennet: thank you. >> i decided you were the man. sen. bennet: thank you. thank you very much. i really appreciate it. i hope you get a chance to read it. you will enjoy. hi, everybody. nice to see you. they asked the librarians here asked if we could start a little bit early because they have to close a little early because of the snow, so i'm going to, being the son of a librarian, i'm going to accede to their wishes and get started if that's ok. we're about five minutes early, and i think we have until about quarter past. >> [inaudible] sen. bennet: ok. thank you very much. those of you who are from laconia and from new hampshire, thank you for coming out. those of you from other places, thank you for coming from those other places. come on in, please. grab a seat. maybe we could keep our eye out just in case more people want to -- i'll tell you a little bit about myself and why i'm running, and i'd like to spend time in a conversation with all of you about whatever it is you want to talk about. that's what i want to talk about. i followed my wife, susan, out to colorado 25 years ago. she's a public interest environmental lawyer, and she wanted to go work for a group called the sierra club legal defense fund, now called earth justice, and she wanted to work on saving western public lands, which is what she's done the last quarter of a century. i wanted to get out of the practice of law because i thought if i stayed in the law, i'd become the world's worst lawyer, and i went into business for a while, buying companies that were well run but had -- come on in, please. we started a few minutes early because the library is closing a few minutes early. there are chairs -- there are plenty of chairs. here. i got three right here. rep. gabbard: -- sen. bennet: here. i was just getting started. i said that i followed my wife out to colorado 25 years ago. she's a public interest environmental lawyer. i went to work in business and restructuring companies that were well run but really poorly capitalized, so the last deal i did out there was regal cinemas, united artists, and edwards theatres, movie theater companies going bankrupt at the same time, and we created regal entertainment group. and then naturally after i was finished doing that, i went to become superintendent of the denver public schools, which is a school district of 95,000 kids that's got a budget about -- a billion-dollar budget, which is, just for ease of comparison, is roughly three times the size of south bend, indiana's budget. that village in indiana that mayor pete comes from. [laughter] and i was doing that -- that's where i was when i was appointed to the senate to begin with, because my predecessor had gone into president obama's cabinet. that's who i am. i have been in the senate for about 11 years. i come from a state that's exactly a third republican, a third democratic, and a third independent. it's sort of like new hampshire in that respect. it is a swing state. it is a purple state. i'm actually the only candidate in this race who's won an election in a swing state, and i've done it twice, and i think that's going to be really important as we go forward to have somebody who we nominate who can win purple states, not just blue states on the coast, not just win in the commonwealth of massachusetts or in vermont or california, but in places like colorado, if we're actually going to not just win the presidency, but win a majority in the senate and displace mitch mcconnell from being the majority leader in the senate, which i believe is vitally important for us to do. if i had to summarize my town halls for the last 10 years in that state, it is really easy to do it and new hampshire is no different. it's people coming, saying, michael, we're working really hard, but we can't afford some combination of housing, healthcare, higher education, or early childhood education. in other words, we can't afford a middle class life, we can't save, we feel like our kids are going to live a more diminished life than the life that we lived and maybe even a more diminished life than the life their grandparents lived. i think about the families i worked for in the denver public schools who are not coming to my town halls because they're working two and three jobs to keep their heads above water. they would say we're killing ourselves, and no matter what we do, we can't get our kids out of poverty. those are the reflections in the town halls of an economy that, for the last 50 years, hasn't worked well for most american people, hasn't worked well for 90% of the american people. it's worked well for the people at the very top but not for everybody else. we have the lowest economic mobility of any country in the industrialized world, and we have the largest inequality we've had since 1928. it brings me no pleasure to say this as someone who ran denver public schools, but across the country, our education system is reinforcing the inequality we have rather than liberating people from their circumstances, because the best predictor of the quality of education is a parent's income. that's not the way it has been, but it's the way it is today. is of that taken together one of the reasons donald trump got elected, because people looked at economic quagmire and anxiety in their own lives and said nobody in washington seems to care much about it, nothing ever changes, we send democrats and republicans there and nothing changes, we might as well send a reality tv star to reality tv star to washington, we couldn't make matters worse. of course, now we know we actually can make matters worse. when i talk to people at home all the time who voted for donald trump, why did you vote for donald trump, very often the answer is, we wanted to blow the place up. and i say, congratulations. you have achieved your objective. but now what are we going to do for our kids and our grandkids? what are we going to do for america's place in the world? and i think those are a couple of questions we need to ask right now as we think about the next steps after donald trump. i'd say something else. i don't know where you were when barack obama was elected president, but i know where i was. i was sitting in not our house but a rental house in colorado. i was a civilian. i was the superintendent of the schools. and all i could think about is he was standing in grant park with michelle and the two daughters in chicago that night was how far this country had come and what this would mean for the kids that went to school in the denver public schools, what it would mean to them when they thought about what a president was or read about a president in the history books that barack obama was who would come to mind. i thought about what that would mean for my own children, what it would mean for their future in this country and to me it just felt glorious, and what i was not thinking about at that time was the reaction that would set in, in part, a reaction to president obama's election. and what i really wasn't thinking about was three weeks later i was a united states senator in washington, d.c. getting sworn in at the same time president obama was getting sworn in. i was quite aware of the fact that president obama was getting sworn in. i doubt very much that he was aware that i was getting sworn in, but my arrival did coincide with his arrival, and i have been there ever since. and in my first election, which was 2010, a terrible year for democrats, we voted for the affordable care act. i barely hung on, barely survived and because i did and harry reid did and patty murray from washington state did, we held on to the majority another four years, which was good, but this was the beginning of the rise of the tea party and the beginning of the rise of what then became known as the freedom caucus, people who rode into washington, reacting to the election of barack obama, not with conventional republican ideas, not with traditional conservative ideas, but with sort of sarah palin's cartoon version of what the founding fathers were engaged in when they were founding our country, pulsing from the veins in their foreheads, and they showed up in washington and have basically been dismantling our exercise in self government ever since, in the name of that ideology. and for the last six years barack obama was president, he couldn't get anything through the congress as a result of that. we can't pass a simple infrastructure bill in the senate. this is all before trump got elected, and it's one of the reasons he did get elected, because he rolled in as kind of king of the freedom caucus to smash the institutions up, because it didn't look like we were getting anything done, and we weren't getting anything done. i can tell you exactly who was responsible for it and it wasn't barack obama. it was this cast of characters. when i hear the vice president sometimes say, look, if we just got rid of donald trump, it will all go back to normal, i can tell you that there was no normal before donald trump got there. one of the reasons he got there was it wasn't normal, and we have got to find a way to close over this freedom caucus, not just beat donald trump, but be able to govern the country again . i think the only way to do that is by winning more states in this country. many of those are purple states. i think that's the only way. today was reading an article in the "new york times" about how mcconnell thinks he outsmarted everybody on this impeachment stuff and for years. and in the book you've got over there, steven, called "the land of flickering lights," i said to mcconnell once -- thank you very much. advertising. i'll use this as an opportunity, thank you, thank you. i will use this as an opportunity to say if you ever write a book and you decide to run for president, please have the publisher put your photograph on the front cover, which i did not have the sense to do. but i told mcconnell, i said, man, i've written this book and i've said mean things about you in the book and he said, well, i don't really have much of a relationship with him but he said, well, that's ok, you're running for president, naturally you'd say mean things about me. i said, come to think of it, mitch, you're probably the only person in the senate that will like this book, because i say things like mitch mcconnell is impervious to give-and-take unless he is taking everything which he almost always is, and he got this big smile on his face when i said that. but that is, in that article today in the "new york times," what mcconnell says is, look, we had process. i disagree with that. we didn't deny witnesses, i disagree with that. we had process, we had witnesses. he says, but what they didn't have was the votes, and he said the reason why they didn't have the votes, the democrats, is that we're not winning enough races, and that's my point. we're not winning enough races. and sometimes people ask, in fact, in every meeting i have, people ask what will change the dysfunction down there and there's not an easy answer but one of the answers is we've got to win races and in order to change anybody's mind down there. i think that's really important when we think about who we're going to dominate because it's got to be somebody who can win in these purple states and that we can all rally behind. this is a difficult time in our political system. it's not -- we're not going to change it, it's not going to be easier to change -- sorry, i'm getting a little tired. it's not going to be easier to change than the last gilded age was easy to change, but in the last gilded age, the american people rose up and said we're going to make some changes, we'll amend the constitution so that women have the right to vote in this country. we're going to amend the constitution so we are directly electing senators, instead of having senators bribe their way through state legislatures, which is the way it worked from the founding until then to get into office to give themselves railroad rights of way. we're going to do things like invent high school because we realize a middle school education isn't going to do what's required in the 21st century. education won't do what's required in the 20th century and i think that's what we need to do, too. and i don't think we should feel we're burdened by this. we should feel privileged to live in a country where what we do makes a difference and all of you have the opportunity in this moment, at this time, when we've got a president as disgraceful as the one that we have, to make sure that it's only one term that he's there, and that on the back end of there, we create a new politics that could actually leave the democracy in better shape for our kids and grandkids. i really believe that the task in front of us is the task of creating a constituency for change out in the country to close over a broken washington. washington will not fix itself, no matter which person we elect president. we need somebody who can mobilize americans with a set of ideas that can galvanize not just the democratic base but also win back some of the nine million people that voted twice for barack obama and donald trump. that's the perspective i bring to the race as someone who has won in tough places a couple of times. thank you for being here. i'm happy to take any questions or any criticism. i tell people to ask me stuff you wouldn't ask any other politician because you're worried about hurting feelings. i was an urban school superintendent for a number of years, so you cannot hurt my feelings. they've been beaten out of me a long time ago. >> as president, you have to deal with war and peace. do we have enough nuclear weapons? too many? not enough? when would you use them? or not use them? senator bennet: i certainly believe we have enough, and i believe the way they should be used is only to be threatened to be used in a balance of power. that's what i believe. i certainly wouldn't want to be a president who used a nuclear weapon. >> for a strike -- senator bennet: i can't imagine a world where that's a view i would endorse, but i also want to remind you that we have a president right now who's trying to miniaturize nuclear weapons to make them more helpful on the battlefield, which is a direction we don't need to go in. >> i'd like to give you a thank you if you'll take that. sen. bennet: i will, thank you. >> as a bird dogger for the self-employed, i want to tell you the tax fairness for the self-employed from delgado's office are excited about working with your office. that enables me to ask you a question on my mind all the time that you may not have heard before. but i respect and appreciate the fact, how committed you are to addressing climate change. so, here's my question about climate change. according to the gallup poll, for the last 20 years, 40% of americans believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. how do you convince people that climate change is a problem, if those people don't believe in time? sen. bennet: i've not ever been asked that question, but i have an answer. i have an answer. >> you think well on your feet. sen. bennet: i do. by the way, i appreciate your bringing -- i want to use this opportunity it talk about two things, healthcare and climate. you mentioned delgado. delgado is a guy in upstate new york who won a very, very tough congressional race last cycle. do you remember that? do you remember a time before 2018 when we were in the minority in the house of representatives? do you remember that? and the republicans were in the majority so they were doing things like defeating the immigration bill i wrote with john mccain and others in 2013 that if we had passed it, i think actually this president probably wouldn't be president. you remember that time? and then we won the majority, and delgado was one of 40 people that flipped house seats to get that majority for us. 39 of those 40 ran on a public option for healthcare. one person ran on medicare for all. one. and i just think it is such a reflection of where the politics actually is in the country. those folks were able to run an offense against a president who is the first president in american history to take healthcare away from millions of americans. that's donald trump. and we should running on offense in this election, as well. if we're running on medicare for all instead, donald trump will say he's the guy protecting americans' insurance, he's the guy protecting medicare. and i can tell you that will be a huge mistake and if i were wrong about that, then 39 of the 40 would have been running on medicare for all the last time and they weren't. and by the way, if i would say this to my friend, bernard, if he were here. he's not here today. if he were here, he'd say, i wrote the damn bill on medicare for all, and i would say, you're right, bernie, you did, and i wrote the bill on public options called the medicare acts. so a thought on the good of the work. come on in. we started early because they're closing early. i'm michael bennet. you missed some boring stuff. [laughter] >> i came all the way from florida! sen. bennet: who wants to go back to florida? [laughter] sen. bennet: i hope you have a big automobile. but let's talk about climate for a second, because actually the majority of americans believe climate change is real and -- we got plenty of chairs here. the question was, how do we get people to believe that climate change is real when -- >> the gallup poll says 40% of americans believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, so if you don't believe in time, how do you believe in climate change? sen. bennet: right, and i said i had never been asked that question before. i can't explain the time part of it, but i can tell you that gallup and other pollsters say that the majority of people believe climate change is real, humans have contributed to it, and we've got to do something about it. my deep disappointment is we have a climate denier in the white house, and i think it should be disqualifying to be elected president if you are a climate denier. i mean that in moral terms, but i also mean it in political terms. i ask myself all the time, how is it possible that he won and stayed there? he didn't make a secret about his views on climate. the answer is, we lost an economic argument to donald trump. donald trump argued that if you ignore climate change, the economy is going to do great. if you try to do something about climate change, you will destroy the american economy. that is a preposterous argument. it is a ridiculous argument. but we lost it, all over america, to donald trump because not enough of the american people thought the democratic party was worried about their jobs and worried about their income. in the context i described earlier, where people feel like they can't get in the middle class or if they are in the middle class, it can't stay there, the anxiety people had. first of all, i will never lose that economic argument to donald trump, and it is one of the reasons why my climate plans looks different than other climate plans in this race, because i believe we should get to a place where we are paying farmers and ranchers to sequester carbon in their soil and foresters to sequester carbon in our forests. let me come to a second point on this, because it is vital for people to understand this. i was asked a question the other day that was like this but slightly different, when somebody said, can western democracy solve climate change? that was the question. and i said to them, you just asked the most existential question of anybody in this campaign. and it isn't obvious the answer is yes. if we persist in the politics we have today in washington, the answer is no. because today in washington, either we can't get anything done, or best-case scenario, we get something done for two years and the other side rips it out. done for twoing years, the other side rips it up. that is the story of health care the last 10 years. you can't solve climate change two years in a row. it is impossible to solve it two years in a row. and i don't think you can solve this other stuff two years in a row. we can't transform the educational system in america two years in a row, regulate our banking system two years, but we can't deal with climate to years at a time. that means we can't accept the politics as it is. some people say we are called upon to be a version of trump, a version of mcconnell. and what that ignores is, they are not trying to do what we are trying to do. mcconnell can get done -- the current political state in d.c. is the ideological end state of the freedom caucus. they have gotten what they wanted. they are dismantling our ability to make decisions. we can't even pass an infrastructure bill, when china is building 3500 miles of fiber-optic cable to connect ,atin america with africa connect to china and export their surveillance state. we can't even take care of the roads and bridges our parents and grandparents had the decency to build for us, much less build the infrastructure our kids are going to need in the 21st century, much less actually deal with climate change, as long as those guys are getting what they want. and just like it is the end state of the freedom caucus ideological point of view, it is the end state of trump's ideological point of view, because if he can crater our institutions, there is no rule of law for him anymore, even if he were inclined to subscribe to the rule of law, which he is not. and mcconnell is getting absolutely everything he wants. all he wants to do is put right wing judges on the courts and every now and then cut taxes for rich people, and he is good. he has done what he wanted to do. we can't solve climate change that way. that's why my view is that we have to act not just urgently, but in a way that is durable, that will last for a generation, until you can pick it up and say, this is what we are going to do. there isn't a way to do that unless we can figure out that we are fighting for something we think of as american climate policy, like we used to have something called american foreign policy, where when a president was elected, whether they were republican or democrat, they knew what their job was with respect to the soviet union and the cold war and the transatlantic alliance. we did not fight that war two years at a time. it would be preposterous to think we could fight climate change two years at a time. that means we have a lot of hard work ahead of us. first of all, you have to not lose to climate deniers who make ridiculous economic arguments, by reassuring the american people we understand how tough this economy has been on them, and we realize they are worried about the transition to a clean-energy economy. i believe the transition to a clean-energy economy is the answer to flat incomes in this country, and it is the answer to how we create more jobs in depressed areas, especially rural areas. i believe it. i think american innovation is going to produce all kinds of incredibly interesting jobs that we can't even conceive of today, but just because i believe it doesn't mean everybody else does, and we have to make that case. and if we make that case, we will win. and if we don't make that case, we will lose. and if we wake up in november and have lost to a climate denier again, that is not his fault. >> that's definitely our fault. sen. bennet: so that's what we've got to work on. >> one follow-up -- sen. bennet: by the way, 1490, the first one, that's good. and i didn't put that out there -- 1491. as long as congress is dysfunctional and you are going to get this presidential power, you would be giving executive orders to reverse everything trump did, just like obama did. sen. bennet: i said that when i put my climate plan out, i was first after maybe jay inslee. the first plan i put out was the climate plan, and it looks like the other people's plan except for this issue of paying farmers and ranchers to sequester carbon in their soil, which is a reflection of a worldwide movement to set aside 30% of the planet for the sequestration of carbon. and i said in that plan that if congress didn't act in nine months, that i would act through every executive authority there was under the clean air act, to deal with climate, and then i would protect those gains. but you have to realize something, everything we have done in the last administration on climate, with one exception, has been ripped out by this administration, by a bunch of climate deniers and the fossil fuel industry. these guys are so manic about this that they are now trying to bring back incandescent light bulbs. that is what it has gotten to. it was one thing when it was fuel efficiency standards and they were just trying to make our cars as uncompetitive as possible. now they are trying to bring back the lightbulb. the last person we heard about lightbulbs from was none other than sarah palin. in the intervening years, if you walk into home depot, it is very difficult to find an incandescent light bulb because people have moved on, because they want to save energy and do it at a cheaper price. who else? yes, sir. >> a lot of the ideas you are talking about have to do with how good you are for down ballot races, but as we are moving forward, how do you get to the top of that ballot? what is your plan to secure the nomination and not get beat out by people who may not be as good down ballot for the party? sen. bennet: i have to do well in new hampshire. i have been here more than any candidate. i had 33 town hall meetings and said i would do another 50. by announced i would do 50 more town halls. laconia is the 49th town hall, so here we are. tomorrow in manchester, i'm going to do the 50th with james carville, who is coming up. he has endorsed me, which i appreciate, and we are hoping something really good happens over the next several days as a result of all of those meetings. in all honesty, i've got to do well here. i think we've got some momentum, and we've gotten great endorsements and we are making progress. if it goes the other way, we will have to have a conversation after tuesday, and i will take your advice then. [laughter] >> if you are elected president, given your expertise in education, what is the first thing you would do as president in the education sphere? what would your first act be on that subject? sen. bennet: if she has not left already, cleaning out secretary devos's desk would be the first thing i would do. that would be a good thing to do. it shows what contempt donald trump has for our children, that this is who we would nominate to be secretary of education. i would say, first of all, this. i think we are doing our kids an enormous disservice. it is nobody's fault. that is not about whose fault it is. but we are running a system of education that belongs to the colonial era. that is when we set it up. colonial erain a when kids were needed to be working on the farm during the summer. we are running our schools today imagining that we are still in a labor market that discriminates against women and says to women, you can only have two professional jobs, one is a teacher and one is a nurse, so if you don't want to be a nurse, come and teach "julius caesar" in the laconia public school system for 30 years of your life and we are going to pay you this ridiculously low salary that no one else in your college class whatever accept because we are discriminating against you. but if you make it for 30 years, we are going to give you a pension that you can retire on, which sounded pretty good because your spouse would die before you. that is our plan. and that plan isn't working well. we are losing 50% of the teachers from the profession in the first five years, because that is our plan. that is not something i can solve as president, but it is a conversation i can lead as president, with the governors of all 50 states and with the mayors and school superintendents saying, look, you guys know we are trapped in a system that is not going to work well for our kids. we are not keeping the people we need. what are we going to do to get going, and how can i help you do it? i have laid out some things where the federal government can put incentives on teacher pay and things. but here are two big policy things. if you took a focus group today in america and asked america, what does the democratic party stand for on education, the answer you would get back is free college. that is what you would hear. as the only school superintendent who has ever run for president, and as the father of three daughters, i am far more interested in free preschool than free college. and i am much more interested in the following question, what do with the 70% of kids who graduate from high school who don't go to college, who today are consigned to earning minimum wage for the foreseeable future? we are not teaching them what they need to know how to do to earn a living wage. i propose we spend $50 billion a year for 10 years, not a small amount of money, to re-orient our high schools and community colleges so that you will not graduate from high school without the skills to earn a living wage, and without a year of community college under your belt. that would transform the lives of millions of americans and would transform the american economy. sometimes i wish preschool kids voted because we would be pandering to the right people in our political system if they did. i can tell you how parents in denver feel about this, and across the country, and i am deeply worried about the college debt issues. i've got ideas about what we should do there, but having our answer on education be the regressive policy of free college doesn't seem to be the place where the democratic party ought to be going into this election. can i come to the person behind you to get some gender balance, and then i will come back to you? >> since 2016, i have had a hard time even speaking to people who want to blow our government up. maybe you can let us know how you speak to those people, and one step further, how would you get their votes, how do you get people to move away from operating out of a position of fear, to have them come to a where it is to their benefit to live in community with others? sen. bennet: this is a great question. i am a huge believer, and this word is going to be irritating to my staff, i am a huge believer in pluralism. i believe this country is strongest not just when we are diverse, although i believe we are strong when we are diverse, but we are strongest when a diverse country has made possible the participation of every individual in the democracy and the economy. we are stronger when we do that. that is one of the reasons i went to be superintendent of denver public schools. it seemed to me that if we had an educational system that is reinforcing income inequality, that was denying people's ability to participate meaningfully in the democracy and the economy. and when people that have been marginalized by the country are given the opportunity to participate, the decisions we make are better, our democracy is stronger. and i believe it to my core. that is exactly the opposite of how donald trump sees this situation. donald trump sees this situation as a matter of dividing and conquering, of exploiting divisions in our society and then trying to hold onto power by exploiting divisions in our society. that is an unusual thing for modern american presidents, but it is not unusual to see people in democracies do that, to try to perpetuate divisions to create fear, create concern, and that is what we have to overcome in this election. when i meet people, sometimes they say, i love trump, and they often are people that are quite wealthy, they say, i love trump because of the tax cut, because of the deregulation, i love him because even though i don't like exactly how he took on china, i'm glad he took on china. and i say, yeah, but look at what he has done to kids in denver public schools, who are terrified their parents are going to be deported. he says, i haven't thought about that. that ought to be a barrier to somebody holding high office in this country. i think we have to continue to assert that as a reality in the united states, that this is a strength, not a weakness, that the country is going to change over time, and that as long as everybody has the opportunity to participate as an individual, as long as everybody has the opportunity as a citizen to play a role in the country, that is all we can ask for. mitt romney said it so well the other night, every single one of us is going to be a footnote in history at best, but if you live in a democratic republic, that should be good enough. and that is my feeling, not just about senators, about citizens as well, and i think that is what our party should stand for and what the country should stand for. with respect to trump, we have to take on his lies and remind people who voted for him that just because he says it is true, doesn't mean it is true. the other night in the -- [applause] sen. bennet: thank you. the other night in the state of the union, he was going on and on and on about how great the economy is. first of all, we have all the issues i talked about, if i had to summarize the last 10 years, people say we are working hard but can't afford housing, health care, can't afford a middle-class life. that is how people feel, notwithstanding what trump says. but even with what trump says -- i mean, this guy is very, very practiced at the art of being born on third base and thinking he hit a triple. that is what his personal life has been all about, and that is what his governing life has been all about. these are facts. we are in the 11th year of an economic recovery. if we were producing jobs as a country at the same rate we were producing jobs when barack obama was president in the second term, we would have one million more jobs in this country today than we do, because of trump. whenever i go on fox tv, i call that the trump jobs gap, and it is true. we were creating 218,000 jobs a month, the country was, when president obama was there. we are now creating on average 189,000 jobs a month. among farmers -- i would love to campaign among farmers for this -- under trump, bankruptcies are up 23 percent among farmers in the u.s. farm income is down 16%. our exports are down $4.6 billion as a result of his trade war with china. 30% of farm income in america is money from the federal government to try to make up for the damage he did with the trade war. >> that is socialism. sen. bennet: socialism. the irony here, $28 billion is what his socialist experiment has been in collectivist agriculture under this presidency. every one of those $28 billion, ironically, borrowed from china. [laughter] sen. bennet: so this is where we find ourselves. and that is more than twice what we lost on the auto bailout, which turned out to be a big success for american jobs in this country. so we have to make this case that what he says isn't true, here is what the facts really are, and i think if we can get their attention and focus everybody's attention on the interests of the next generation, that is what binds us in this society. everybody essentially wants the same thing for their kids and grandkids, everybody wants the same opportunity for their kids and their grandkids, and having a pitched battle among americans divided on these lines is never going to get us where we need to be for our kids and our grandkids. that is what i think. it clarifies the mind. at least i found that was true when i was superintendent of schools and we had to make terrible decisions in our community about closing schools and consolidating schools, the most painful decisions anybody could make. the best school closure meetings i ever had are 10,000 times worse than the worst tea party town hall meeting i've ever had. but in the end, if people can focus on the interest of the kids, i think we can break through. yes. >> [inaudible] sen. bennet: we have 10 minutes. >> we just saw the number of countries subject to the muslim ban double. what is your perspective on immigration? sen. bennet: i will give you a perspective that is sort of personal. when i was in the second grade, and i am dyslexic, so i was in second grade two years in a row, and in one of those two years, we were asked to line up in my classroom by whose family had been here the shortest time and whose families had in here the longest time, and i was the answer to both of those questions. on my dad side, my family went back to the mayflower. on my mom's side, her parents were polish jews are survived the holocaust. my grandfather had a big, extended family in warsaw who wouldn't leave, and the whole family was killed except for them, and then they lived in warsaw, stockholm, they went to mexico city, of all places, because mexico was taking european jews, and then they went to new york, and they came to the only country in the world where they thought they could rebuild their shattered lives. my mom was the only one of the family who could speak any english at all. she registered herself in new york city public schools and graduated from hunter college high school and went on to graduate from wellesley college in massachusetts, in one generation. on immigration, i have traveled our country very broadly, our state very broadly, i've met lots of immigrants, and i never met an immigrant in america with a stronger accent than my grandparents had, and i never met anybody in america who were greater patriots than my grandparents were, because they had been through some of the worst that humans had to offer against each other and had come out the other end to find a country that would not just take them in, but make them part of the country, and they always felt they were part of the country, notwithstanding their accent. and their love of being american citizens was a totally unadulterated love. and what i also learned from them was how important the idea of america is to the rest of the world, not because we are perfect -- people are too sophisticated for that -- but it is the opposite of that, we live in any imperfect country but we have been trying to make it more democratic, more fair, more free since its founding. that has been the job of americans. that is what we have done. and we have never done any of it perfectly, but they knew it was a society that was at least trying, and what we have seen in the absence of having a president who doesn't have any appreciation for that is that the world becomes much more dangerous very quickly. he has turned our border into a symbol of nativist hostility to the rest of the world, because of the refugee crisis that he has not solved, and done nothing to solve. when that happened, my mom called me and she said, i see myself in these kids at the border, because she was separated from her parents, she knows what that does to an individual, for their life. i know what it does for the people coming after the individuals. so for me it is very personal, which is why i wanted to be part of the gang of eight in 2013 that wrote legislation in the senate that got 68 votes and had a pathway to citizenship for 11 his had the most progressive dream act we had ever conceive or pass. it had something else we had forgotten in the midst of time but it had border security in the bill, not 6 billion for the mexico supposed to pay for trump's friend people wall, but 46 billion dollars of border security that would let us see every inch of border. we should do something along those lines on immigration and the refugee part. we have more refugees at any time since world war ii in the world, and we can start by taking responsibility in our own hemisphere, by saying we are not a weak, desperate country, which is what donald trump would have us believe, we are a rich and powerful and humane country and we can take refugees on our southern border and we can lead all the countries in our hemisphere in a discussion about how to settle refugees throughout the hemisphere. because there are a bunch of people on our southern border who don't necessarily want to come here, but they want to go somewhere where spanish is the language that is spoken in -- spoken. they would like to go someplace with a lower cost of living. but they have run for their lives for the southern border of the united states and it is politically very important for us not to allow the president to conflate or combine the refugee issue on the border with our broader immigration issues. he is trying to do that so he can sew the divisions you were talking about a minute ago, and we should not allow him to do that. i've got to go. [applause] thank you. those of you that our voters in new hampshire, i would love your help on tuesday. i would be very, very grateful. those of you who are not, thank you very much for caring about our democracy. i am glad you were here. thank you, i appreciate it. >> we are the majority. >> thank you a lot. >> i like your t-shirt. >> i was down in d.c. i saw you on the senate floor. you were the most functional -- punctual person in the room. just like you are at your events. >> i was lucky, i got to go longer. did you see my speech? >> i was there for two hours. what have you learned doing this, being on the campaign? >> what i have learned is, number one, we have got to come together, we need to unify the democratic party, we need to unify the american people. i believe donald trump should be a one-term president. we need to be donald trump. >> you are a great guy. why have you not caught on? >> i'm not as well-known as a lot of the other candidates. the dnc debate rules. really unhelpful. cut a lot of people off. end?d to serve what to serve the reality tv ends of the networks? we need to learn from our mistakes. -- you know this, because you are out here doing this. new hampshire is less decided today than they were six weeks ago, six months ago, and so now what we should be doing is giving the opportunity for the candidates that are left in the field to make the case. let's stay in touch. >> i'll give you my card right now. if you don't do it this time, will you do it again? >> you probably haven't heard the last of me. thank you. thank you, very much. great to see you. >> we talk about you every time. >> i will, i will. that sounds like a plan. thank you, very much. do you want me to sign it? thank you. >> i work with [indiscernible] >> you do? wow. please tell them i said hello. >> [indiscernible] and our mom is an auschwitz survivor. >> is she still around? >> she died four years ago. [indiscernible] >> thank you for reminding me of that. thanks. thank you. good to see you, and thanks so much for being here. he can do it, he is of the right generation to figure it out. we are getting out of here just in time. thanks, man. i appreciate it. i would be honored to sign it. do you want me just to sign it, or make it out to you? what is your name? luke. l-u-k-e? >> that's right. >> i'm curious about supporting students with disabilities, and more inclusive opportunities. >> i don't think we were perfect in denver public schools, but we did a lot to support inclusion, integrate students more better -- much better into our schools and classrooms, and it is vitally important. it is what we need to do at the federal level. what i will continue to fight for his to make sure we fully fund the individuals with disabilities education funding act. it, we have to be at $40 billion roughly, so i appreciate your advocacy. thanks. good seeing you, luke. wow. thank you. i do have a copy. i will buy your book. [indiscernible conversations] >> our live campaign coverage from new hampshire continues tomorrow. pete buttigieg attends a get out nashua atvent in 11:00 a.m. eastern. senator bernie sanders holds a town hall in hanover at 1:30. joe biden makes a stop in hudson starting at 3:45 p.m. eastern. watch them all live sunday on c-span. during this election season, the candidates beyond the talking points are only revealed over time, but since you can't be everywhere, there is c-span. our campaign 2020 programming differs from all other political coverage for one simple reason. it is c-span. we've brought you your unfiltered view of government everyday since 1979 and this year, we are bringing you an unfiltered view of the people that will steer the government this november. in other words, your future, so this election season, go deep, direct, and unfiltered. see the biggest picture for yourself and make up your own mind with c-span campaign 2020, brought you as a public service by your television provider. >> professor dante scala from the university of new hampshire. let me begin by asking about the polil
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