Makes a Difference Foundation that tests innovative learning programs to help struggling learn that they can learn she knows the importance of learning every day by helping him a homeless shelter for newborn babies and their families and a 5 million capital campaign, 5 million capital campaign. She has learned the value of giving toue others. She is passionate about improving the world and her two children will adhere it and to inspire others to learn, love and live their lives successfully. As a nationally syndicated columnist for creators syndicate, she writes with her heart and mind noted by the time for her considerable talent in writing, her outlook and opinions are entertaining, inspirational andfo thoughtprovoking. The five principles for a successful life from our family to yours. I should probably start assigning to my students and today why both sides need to stop ranting and start listening. On the today show usa today and the the washington times, shes appeared on abc good morning america, cnn campbell brown,he the 700 club wit and tn hannity show and lists keeps going on andnd on. Not the least of which doing numerous interviews where you might have caught her on tucker carlson. [cheering] the nonprofit activities include serving on the georgia Advisory Council for the public land and she serves on the board as a new life and is the founder and chairman of learning makes a Difference Foundation. She also works with american solution a company dedicated to the issues and politics. Jackie lives in orlando with her husband and her children. Lets give a warm gop welcome to jackie. [applause] thank you and im here to glad to be here today. Im going to step back a little bit and tell you why i wrote this book. I wrote this a little over a year ago and if you are like me, i am concerned about polarization in this country. Ed 6 of americans believe we are too polarized, but i am a Firm Believer that country is exceptional and we are structured differently. We believe god has given us rights as individuals an of indn we loaned them to the government if the government doesnt behave properly, we have to pull them back so im a believer in the government that informs what im talking about today so i want you to keep that in mind that where we are today not only a political response into what President Trump is doing but also quite frankly a cultural response, and thats what i want to talk to you about because that can only be done on the ground in communities with people like you and i know you can lead this effort. Talk about in the current district how its been in republican hands in 78. Hai just want you to know it isa sixth district, but the district in 70 eights within this district. For those of you that have been around as long as i have, you understand it is in the same district. In the 70s the district was from South Atlanta and over to alabama. I grew up in carrollton, georgia. My dad was a professor at west Georgia College and to be truthful he went there because it was the only place he could get a job. We moved there when i was very young so although i wasnt born here, i was born and where we and all i remember is georgia. Church and football thats all they did sunday morning, sunday night, wednesday night, then we had football friday night. That was our life, so my first memory was my dad running for congress. Now im going to back up even more because my father was an army brat and his father was a career officer that he moved around a lot and it was during that process when he learned about the history of the country and the sacrifices our soldiers have made not only for our country but to free other countries that he began to understand how important politics is and quite frankly what we engage in in the political world is a civil war when people get frustrated about how hard it is sometimes, this is so much better than the civil war that we have gone through but we have to learn what lmargaret thatcher said, first you win the argument and then the vote. And i think too many times we try to rush through getting the vote without actually winning the argument. So lets go back to 1974. My dad first ran 1974 and for those of you around, you will know it happened in the time of watergate t talking about impeachment right now. He was working very hard and his opponent was a democrat at that time if you can imagine in georgia it was a Democratic State so he wass running against the delegation. He worked very hard at watergate happened. I remember that night there wasnt any digital tv. We had people calling on the otndline phones from the precinct. My dad would sit there with a legal pad and put the numbers down and add them up to see where we were. At the end of the night we lost. 48. 6 of the vote and he lost. We worked very hard. We spent a lot of time in the car and little gas stations on a four way not even a traffic light. We went to the forward factory across from the original chickfila and shook hands. He said i need your support again and he ran again. He worked for two more years and he is now working very hard and we are all adults and a family event. We are exhausted and take breasts when we can. Works very hard and 76 he thinks he has the chance to do it. He begins to think this may be more difficult than i thought. Its hard enough when you are running in georgia but now we ahave a governor running as a president and what is that going ti mean that he sticks with it and works really hard and thinks that he only has a shot and draws up the vote in carrollton and pcs buses pulling up and people getting out and he realizes they are not there to vote for someone named Newt Gingrich and he was right. So, again we get the call from the different precinct and very late at the end of the night he doesnt win again but he got 48e he decides to retire and has a different opponent. This time she is all in it as well. Her mother comes and stays with us. We go to smalltown newspapers and quite frankly have a sign on top of the car that has Newt Gingrich for congress if you can imagine how embarrassing that was for a teenager coming you know how i felt. But i have to say the third times a charm. What i can tell you from that experience is that it matters. Out the vote and make sure people are registered to vote and get to vote and you have to make sure that you win the argument. I have raised both of my children in georgia. We do live in atlanta and when our kids were young i said cant we move somewhere a little smaller town and hes fortunately raised in atlanta and said no so we didnt. I also know that there is a middle in georgia but hasnt been around georgia very long but quite frankly believed all the horrible things they hear about republicans in the news media. I know you are wonderful people. I grew up in the republican party. Starting at sunrise i grew up in the republican party. I know we are loving people but im saddened by the fact he constantly gets maligned. I want to think about how we combat that. I want to transition from the 70s to hear. My father when he was finally elected in 70 eights the speaker of the Georgia House at that time was murphy and he lived in my dads district. That is the reason im telling you this. He wasnt very happy to have Newt Gingrich as the congressm congressman. As they are redistricting the democrats decided they were going to cut the old sixth district which was supplemented down to griffin, west of alabama and into little bitty pieces in an attempt to get rid of Newt Gingrich. The speaker wanted to do that because he hated to have Newt Gingrich as his representative. He cut it into the pieces and created a new fabulous sixth district and what happened . He walked around and met everybody here and ran for congress in the new sixth district that is what tom murphy gets for trying to cut it up. [applause] it does remind you of the power of redistricting which is going to happen again so lets keep that in mind. He actually had the primary and at this time hed gone to college, i was working in pobusiness evaluation and you ae going to laugh again, a wireless Cell Phone Company which at the time the phones were like these huge phones, unbelievable and they were installed in your car and its amazing. I remembered one day i was going to work and heard an ad on the radio talking about how he would abandon his wife and children, and i thought im used to having people say things that are not true. I read when ii was little my dad was in a limousine. We never had that. I had people tell me they were glad my father lost when i was in elementary school. All kinds of things. Just finally really got to me. So i got to work and i called him and said you havent asked me but i am the last to do the commercial for you if you ask this is just outrageous. He said i think it will help. I did a commercial and said the truth, its just not true. Sure enough, he won the primary not by many votes but he made it its been 25 years since that happened and i dont know if you saw a special on fox. Its interesting because it was valuable for us to think about. They were specific. Here are the things we are going to do. It was laid out. There was a list he actually had that was very specific. It was what can we do together. It was positive. And the third thing it drove all the legislative action and quite friendly with happened because it was a huge amount of work my dad had this great idea many of them are great. He wanted transparency so they decided to do a Daily Press Conference which theoretically was a great idea except it turned into a daily and he would be up there for an hour talking about everything and then get these little snippet and if you remember this is around the same time the government is getting shut down and he was aggressive. Hes done a lot of things. Hes never stolen christmas. Trust me, i would know. When you let someone else control the narrative they get to control which parts they want to say. Thats what i want us to think about again as republicans is how we can be more cheerful. Heres how the framework of questions are politically polarized i think the answer is yes is it dangerous for our country, i think it is and are we exceptional and worth saving. I agree with all those things but how do we say that. Is it true that there are Many Democrats on the left the answer is yes i think we all know that and its not a secret. If you are like me watching the 2,016th election headquartered in new york and i could tell the sound was off and i was watching the tv. I could tell by the body language and expression of their faces that donald trump was going to win. [applause] they got very upset. I know when georgia should be called and where the votes were. I dont know why they havent called. They wouldnt call and what wout call. Maybe an attempt to see if somebody could do Something Different but they just couldnt. Admit it. Then you have the whole weekend to do whatever and quite frankly i have to admit in retrospect i shouldnt have to i think we miss an opportunity to learn. I think we missed an opportunity to learn. Why were they so surprised and what have we not communicated properly . I believe in the Republican Values and our foundational structures as a country and that we can communicate better as a party. I also believe we have to if we want to win this next election and we have a lot at stake. One is the news has changed. When i was little, there was actually news. The information that was given not for very long and then everyone had the same framework that over the last few decades, im not going to say how old i am, so it is no longer news that it is now opinions. Al social media, prospective, not only that there are so many channels that you have to figure out which ones may or may not be right and which ones are slicing and dicing the facts. Quite frankly, it is confusing for the average person. And how easy it is for all of us and we actually care about politics. Imagine if you are a person that goes to work and has to worry about her kids interested coming out and pay the bills and doesnt even have time to think about it. The second thing that has happened is because of this, things travel so rapidly once they take flight in the social media its hard to get them back. I will give you a few examples. I know together we can figure this out so let me give you a few examples. In june of 2018 there was a coverr and the title said [inaudible] come to find out that girl wasnt separated from her mother in fact her mother had been deported from the u. S. And years later brought her child back with her. Whenwere not separated and asked, they didnt even know she left so that pro. The title could have been if you ask the average person not republican or democrat for the huge block in the middle of independence about that, they will have no idea. If you think about the picture of the child in the cage that was sent around on social media, the child was in the cage and i say that . Because it was a demonstration and he had it prepared for demonstration purposes. Nt their child got behind and cried. You and i know its not true, but what about that . How would they know. So, then there is. You and i know that. If you look at it before the midterms there are 33 hours dedicated to the Russian Investigation which we know was nothing for trump. And 14 minutes were about the economy. Less than 1 . Incredibly great number to the economy. The great news about low unemployment is means there are choices for jobs which means you can get a promotion or a raise and the ability to increase income. We have to think about how do we do this. Lets talk some more about how the next thing we have a social media. Is social media. It does two things that are not true. Also, allows you to comment from youryo betterment and three in e morning. [laughter] if you are one of those that does that, i suggest you dont. But it is a free country. You feel like you have a connection when you really don dont. This is a real connection for me, coming to breakfast. I had a public on bike and the video person in front of you on demand. The actual people you see and do thingsthin with a. We need to think about that because what that means is we have changes in our Society Today are no longer just these small. If they did anything wrong, she would find out about it very rapidly and the only time i got in big trouble is when i inadvertently left, and this is ridiculous, left one night to go to the movies with a youth group and forgot to tell her. But of course [inaudible] and people with kids not only cared about not only their kids but others and thats what we need to recreate. We cant do it alone we must do it in community. Sometimes when your you are ine community we have to remember we are not necessarily all the same but we still have to make sure that we respect one another. They are so preconditioned. We say we want to have you here involved. We need your input and i want you to be there. What else has happened in society, have we become less religious, there are few people that say they belong to a religion and 87 of us still believe in god and 55 believe that religion can fix almost all of thehe nations problems. Lower religion but i believe in god so this means we are actually due for a religious revival. [applause] i pray a lot for life is writins writing this book often have to were three in the morning. You will see that in the churches in new york and georgia, you will see people hungry for that connection to god and people but not necessarily to the religious institution they no longer necessarily believe in and thats hard because we are in a transitional time. Oh. I think it also means we have the opportunity to reach out to others who say you are welcomen. Here. Lets see what else has happened, we had a huge chain in immigration. 1965 on the 8 were first generation immigrant and this isnt good or bad. Now we are at 14 with an additional 26 of Second Generation so we are shifting. Part of this shift is its great. I didnt know it was bbq i cant wait to tell my husband hes going to be so happy. He loves bbq. But they bring so many Different Things and yes quite frankly a lot of the values of family and faith and belief are the same thing that founded the country and we need to make sure that we welcome immigrants into say it wasnt for our country i want you to come to our country. One of my daughters best friends moved here from ecuador and just became a u. S. Citizen and she was so excited to finally become a u. S. Citizen and she had worked very har hard passed the test and we have to remember we have to make sure that we reach out and wrap them in our arms so thats happening at the same time. So tribalism whether it is my tribeca telephone and yours some where else. It is how it is all different and i would say the problem with that is we begin to see ourselves not as individuals which is individualism but members of a tribe even before members of a country and that is where it gets dangerous. Think about the friends you have and how you interact with has happened as slowly as a country we are in Political Parties not just geographically which has happened, we know thats also in the same geographic areas. As a fact that 64 of democrats and 55 of republicans had a few or no friends in the opposite party. Just think about that. That is frightening because what that means is you have no contact with anyone else in another party you dont understand how they think or what they care about or quite importantly they think you dont care about them and thats where i think we are as the country. I know we care about all of america and all americans. And i know we want the best for the country. We must learn how to communicate effectively. And i think that is our next challenge. [applause] im a huge believer in divine scheduling which means i had nothing to do with it. Isc was going through my email and have someone that sends me all kindsne of articles and one that i received this morning was about getting information out of people and communicating. Those of you that have a spouse or children i dont know if you ever haver problems communicatig with them, but i find especially if they come in and they are upset and ranting and raving and the screaming it doesnt help a lot for me to scream back. Having tried that, i was not very successful. Please let me know afterwards and im glad to run some tests. What i learned is people actually shut down and become more defensive and that is what the article is about is to really communicate with someone and understand where they are coming from. Do not judge them and make them feel safe and welcome. I never said rollover and abandon your principles and believe whatever you want. Im talking about a little l intellectual curiosity, just a little whats happening with them. Even if you dont learn anything about their position or dont agree with them, you will learn a lot about them as a person and then you can communicate with them because if you dont know where they think you dont care about them it doesnt matter, the facts dont matter you will not be able to communicate. Its so important we make sure people understand we care about them and we want to listen to their problems and quite frankly we can help them solve them. If we talk a little bit about party tribalism weve pulled apart and ideology but hes hadd some great legislation in the last two years. We had the patriotic communities act, agricultural improvement act, for incredible bipartisan bills but no one talks about them. One of the challenges is the need to proactively tell people about this and i know we think we do it in im just as guilty as you are. If that works for you, let me know. We cant just tell people ones that we did these acts. We have to tell them so many times that says you cant just toss them at one time you have to tell them a thousand times in different ways for them to understand and you cant yell it at them. When they were young i could otpick them up especially in the Grocery Store we could pick them doup and leave them in a card tt that we are not children, we are adults. How do we understand how to deal with people and get them to understand where we are coming from and what we want from our country. So i dont know if you remember in 96 it was red for the democrats and blue for the republicans in mississippi turned red when carter won the state. Little known fact there was a light behind it and i think it was a plastic type of map and it melted and went up in flames if you can imagine that. So the 1976 the colors changed and what the red or blue depending on who you are looking at. It wasnt until 2000 that the colors became the same. And you also remember now it isp no longer about who won but its about what color and wife team and i call this the sport of politics. Its no longer just about politics but its now like a sport. You are into these issues and know whats happening but for a lot of people, they are not engaged in these issues. What they arbut they are engages identity and who they belonged to. They said do you agree with that and they say yes if they think it is their parties stands even though it is not. What this tells us is that it isnt about ideology. Its about who people think they are and we had a lot of work to do communicating whoor we are to the vast majority in the middle. Weve got to think about that because if they dont think he belonged to us, we know they belong with us so what are we communicating wrong. Weve got to fix them. Im going to challenge you and then open up for questions. Politics isnt a civil war and yes its important and we need to make sure we support and understand and back of our foundational values and talk about but its not like so we also have to talk about what we can do together. I think in the long term we have to c be optimistic not only for the party but for the nation so i would liker to think of a little framework im going to give you of how i think about things. I challenge you to think about gratitude over grievance because theres a lot othere is a lot on grievance, let them have it. Let me tell you why we should be grateful. [applause] people want to come here because we are such a great country. Lets be grateful for that. Thats amazing. Be grateful for that. We had a place where we have free speech. Quite frankly we need to use it and articulate more clearly why we are the better party. [applause] w i think we win the best when we went with a w clarification of explaining to people why we are the better choice in understanding what we can bring to them. So no more grievances, just gratitude and we should be grateful that we have a party that makes us more clearly communicate because we need to do the t work. I love to have some competition because it makes me work and it makes me think and we have to communicatenk better. Second, think about the National Narrative. Is it optimistic versus negative, optimistic and pessimistic. I am not saying we are a perfect nation that we are at the t destination. If we constantly tear ourselves down we will never be able to move forward. Try to go home and tell your spouse how terrible they are. Does that work . Till your child how horrible they are and they will believe it and its terrible. We have an entire generation of people we have told cannot be successful and unfortunately they believe it. Its a travesty and we have to change it. We must confront the National Narrative and express to people and communicate how great we are as a nation and how great we can be together. Anything else quite frankly is unacceptable and we must continue to be positive about the country not saying were perfect but be positive and move forward. Ive spent the last 20 years in Corporate America for a long time i ran a division with 3 billion under me and after our second child i was traveling so much i didnt want to do that. I wanted to be home with our kids. So parttime, i consulted and am heavily involved in the community. What i found is that when you work with people and find a problem that you care about and i dont care what it is, for me it is the environment, financial literacy, early education, whatever you care about, it can be a garden club,on health care, you spend time with whoever cares about the same thing and she worked together and make progress and you dont know if they are democrat or republicans you will change their mind about what a republican is because they will see you working next to them and caring about people coming youll see them caring and leave their life changed. We cant sit back and pretend that 65 of us that dont have friends of another party is okay. We have to be in th a community with people even people we dont like because quite frankly if we did and we would sit alone by ourselves at home which really isnt a very good choice. So, i think a little intellectual humility to know we may have a lot of things right but not everything right, to know that we need to be part of a big system that doesnt always work well tha but works better n anywhere else in the world and to understand every time they are out in public we reflect ourselves and our brand reach out to people and if they yell at you let me tell you ive been yelled at so many times even when i try to check out at the store they will start yelling at me because of my father. I would get very upset about it and finally i just started to smile. If it makes them feel better to yell at me maybe that is my job for the day. I dont know but what i do know is if i yell back they are going to go tell somebody shes really nasty and what does that do, that doesnt do anything so my challenge to you is to get involved and be pleasant especially when yelled at and remember that together our country has a great future. Thank you for having me here. [applause] do we have time for questions . Who do have time and we had a microphone so im just going to ask that you wait. You can do lightl like me if yot but im just going to smile. Smile. Im going to applaud you. My big question is a here and see so much vitriol that we could have a disparate viewpoint but what i see is the number one issue day today that we are calling each other names instead of calling out the issue, and its on both sides. Can you speak to that because i know we will not be able to get people to be victorious unless we become virtuous with our mouth. Well said. The question talks about both sides ranting and raving. I visits per if the process, this is what they do. I found it rarely helpful to scream back at anyone screaming at me, and ive actually done this i can pull up the video, i have had people scream at me about whatever and i find it to smile at them and clean and because it sort of takes them back and i will ask them explain that to me and this happened last week not on tv but somebody i just met that was emotional about what she thought and was happy to tell me about it. I asked her questions every time he would say to explain more about that to me. And by the fourth time she just quit and had no more to say so we were able to have a discussion but it took a while. When we get yelled at there is a basic desire to defend ourselves so i find it helpful for me personally and if that doesnt work i just saying in my head while not responding back. Its not agreeing with what they said because that isnt the point that the plaintiffs to respect them as a human and i think unfortunately so many people especially have been told for so long that we are so terrible that they dont understand that we care. We have to stop along the t way sometime. Thank you. First and foremost, i want to say i love my president , i love his tweets and everything about him. I like what you shared about speaking positive to your children so you can get positive results. Its almost like a terrible. I think also along the line that helps me i was at almost 0 when people knew i was with trump but i know the lord told me to get on his train and it was a winning train and i knew nothing about politics four years ago until the lord told me to get on Donald Trumps train. In that, i find that actually giving true history because google has changed and i think god that i have two sets of encyclopedias to know that it was the republic of the democrats, the only party in the United States at the time so when you share knowledge and open peoples eyes, when i teach the word i like to go, i dont just quote scripture and when people are able to see this then they can believe and walked in but youve got to walk in truth, too. I just wanted to share that part and here what you have to say about that. When you are dealing with people that dont believe what you believe politically, how do you communicate and its making sure they understand the history and whats happening and the truths and facts. We are in a great economy nobody talks about it, lets talk about the bipartisan things we did together that are great for the country. Theres a lot of facts we can share that you are referring to as well but i think the really interesting thing about what you said is we are clearly in the community, talking to and interacting with people that have different political perspectivesh. To be in the community with them and talk to them about what you know to be true and have an introduction and i can tell by your demeanor was done with love and not anger because of the way you talk this up again we have republicans in the Democratic Party and we need to change that because if we all talk to ourselves and nobody else it is hard to expand the base. We have to do exactly what you did which is talk to people about whats happening and then hear the information. So, thank you for that this is the last one in the back. Two quick things. Few people in the room have heard the story many years ago people were looking for how we get more people involved and my perspective is how many walked out to take the Public Transit you talk to somebody on the streets there and i had a couple of people respond why would we want to do that. To get more people involved, Something Else ive been doing h to get across the party line discussion is finding which of the major candidates had 20 and now its down to a dozen or so people running. Which one do you like best from the opposite party and why. Just because they are on the opposite party doesnt mean, you might be against certain of them, but others they never have a chance. I like steve c. Evans better than Stacey Abrams or better than anybody else currently democrat ticket and explain why you might like them at least on the opposite side and that is the discussion point im starting to have with some people. Again you are talking about how you expand into you will interact with or you will not have that experience and intellectual curiosity. I think it is hard because we have a very firm belief in what we stand for but im not saying that its changing those beliefs. Being curious is why people mighas to why peoplemight belieg different because along the way you will learn something about them and be able to communicate better. Nt i think we have one last question. [inaudible] [applause] they wont understand me and the people you are talking today wont understand until you understand that we need to show an understanding of the difficult positions the political opponents of people see and show that recognition of their concerns and then lead them back to a position that we know is based on the first principles. Can you speak to that of being able to engage people in where they are and shoving a recognition of, and an understanding of why they are where they are is a first step is getting people where they need to be to understand things where they are. That is a great question. Im going to say it again because it is so important, it is the working definition of grace to meet people where they are. I know im mixing the cultural and political but quite frankly they are all intertwined and unless people know how much you care for them they will not care or understand how much you know. What you are right we need to understand and communicate that we know where they are and if not, we need to ask them and explain to them this is what i hear. Is that true . And then we need to help them go somewhere else. Theres a homeless shelter and we work on the health of the mother and baby and Education Training and then follow up for a long time but that is exactly the work that we do. We need people wherever they a are. We need to help them understand the way forward for than so thar that purpose perfect. Both sides need to stop renting and start listening as well as the 25 documents so thank you again. May god bless you and our great country. [applause] here is a portion of that program. There is no agreement across the subculture of preventing tho the enemy is and what the nature of the enemy is. Theres the authoritarian police state and complete anarchists and those who are internationalists in the sense of im going to be a citizen and i dont own allegiance to a particular nation and there are those that are America First we are going to get the country back. So thats whats interesting because they would like them to be painted the same. Some types are in favor of returning monarchy and not just any. How many different factions there are and people have put hillary types and Bernie Sanders types and they genuinely loathed each other. 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