to be prepared to be giving back some stuff. and that s going to be the hard, hard test of not just the next two debates but the next term of whoever gets to be president is how we begin to dial down the sense of entitlement across the board in this country and how we rearrange that. and i think both sides have gone to kind of their extreme positions. and it s in the middle somewhere. yeah. absolutely. reporter: downsizing democracy. that s what dick lamb calls it. that was a great line from the former governor of colorado, how do you have this debate about downsizing democracy? it s a tough conversation. that wasn t had last night, on the democratic side, joe biden wouldn t even talk about raising the retirement age. i ll agree with that. and on the republican side, you ve got a republican ticket that still can t explain their $5 trillion tax cut. people giving things away remains sort of the ploy right now. yeah. chuck todd, thank you so much. we ll see you on the daily
and my third governor today from the state of colorado, dick lamb, former democratic governor here. now, the colorado director at denver s institute of public policy. i just love this campus. my third and final governor. i ll ask you the same question. what makes colorado such a swing state? it s always an evolution, i guess. there s always new people coming to. and there s these new elements, the hispanic community, this has always been a young people s state. young people change. i came up during the time of john f. kennedy. the young people that came up during the time of reagan were much more conservative. you have all these young people and they re always in transition. lynn, you re covering the campaign on the ground. of the two campaigns, who do you feel understands the ins and outs of how colorado ticks?
level of education. you could tell they were swing states. i covered john kerry. we went to colorado and virginia early on. somewhere in september, you backed out. there s a sign there, moving in this direction and now, you can see obama, virginia, very close here. these states are changing and that s driving some of the changes in the politics as well. you know, two issue themes that i feel like i see out of here and one is near and dear to your heart, governor lamm, which has to do with fiscal issues and retirement reform. about you know, at some point, we re going to have, the people have a due di to die, when you were talking about how expensive it is. fiscal issues here. if obama doesn t win this state, do you think it s the fiscal issues are the reason? if he doesn t win the state, you know, i don t think either of them have shown particularly courage on fiscal issues.
invidious basis. and i think you ve got a track record of thousands of television appearances, hundreds of congressional testimony, a virtual wall of public record as long as your arm of this organization that would bear out those issues. let s talk about you know we re extremely fair minded organization. we certainly never had anything to do with virginia abernathy. i don t know where you got the idea we worked closely with her. we never have. on that point, sir, did you not give her organization hundreds of thousands of dollars for the prop 200 race? first of all we never gave that organization a dime and secondly, even if we were going to give them a dime we wouldn t have given them a dime with virginia abernathy associated with it. the problem is southern poverty law center has made about 75 factual allegations all of which are wrong about f.a.i.r. let s talk about the factual allegations you re not being interviewed by southern poverty law center, you re being interv
population policy, dick lamb, sharon barns, people working with planned parenthood, others, sydney swinsroot, all got together said we need a responsible organization to ensure that immigration doesn t fuel too rapid population growth. there was a time when it was believed that population stabilization was in the national interest and there were democrats and republicans together on this, after the commission, people like father he hessber, the naacp to bring together a compromise. what s happening in this debate is there s a polarization taking place where somehow this idea that democrats don t favor any immigration enforcement and want the borders out of control and republicans or anybody who wants to see the laws enforced in this country is somehow a bad guy or a bigot. this is a very sensitive, very difficult policy issue. it s obviously very emotional, but if we re going to take this country down a bipartisan a partisan road on the immigration