The circus. So many jobs for so many talented people. I am pleased to have them back at my table. Most important table in america. Charlie give me a snapshot, how do we say there is a National Poll in which trump among likely voters and the small Party Candidates included is leading 45 to 42 . Fareed we can say it that the race is close and we have given and given all the things that happened in august, there was so much damage that it was unrecoverable and clinton was on her way to a landslide victory. This poll and others suggest that the race is tight. And Hillary Clinton has substantial structural advantage in the battleground states that she is going to be the favorite to win the next election at that donald trump will make a race out of it. Given that month he had it is margin of error, suggesting there should be no breathing easy in brooklyn. Charlie is it a dead heat or is that erroneous . John those are in the margin of error. Statistically they are ties. Guest any democrat would come in with structural advantages because of their dominance in the vote. She is an experienced, cautious, careful, hardworking candidate. It is kind of extraordinary given how horrible trumps august was trumps august was that he is in but this is an electric that is looking for change. An electorate that is looking for change. It has been a comment on how much he has been emphasizing jobs in the economy. Something republicans wanted him to talk about for months rather than lawsuits and trump university, rather than attacking goldstar families. The danger is if he does well in the first debate and the expectations will be lower than for her. The pressure will be on democrats. I do not think trump and his team will feel very much pressure as compared to what she will feel as the noose tightens if this race is close come the fall. Lets face it, while trump has been an uneven candidate he is a great performer. She is not. President ial politics, it frustrates the clinton people to no end, performance matters. Charlie is he that best campaigner since bill clinton . Guest he has since bill clinton. If you look at the achievement of winning the nomination with ritually no staff, spending virtually no money, a guy who would never run for anything before that visit an extraordinary achievement by a guy who show best political skills before bill clinton just in achieving that. Since then i am open to seeing the new data. He has been a horrendous candidate. Many things, i thought he would think instantly switch to talk about the economy and jobs and switches demeanor. And switch his demeanor. I thought he would execute it because we have seen flashes of it. And so no, i would no longer say he is that great because i have looked at the totality of his career in politics, a yearandahalf and the first part was stunning, a stunning achievement and he is lucky that she has got so many problems with so Many American to. Who do not trust her that he is in this, he is behind but he is in it. Because there are some structural things on the other side that work to his advantage. Charlie when we look at the answers to the questions it leads to the question of absence of transparency, caution, and perhaps bordering on full disclosure. Mark if there was a most valuable player it would be james comey for putting that report out on a friday afternoon before a Holiday Weekend. There are so many things in that report that are damming on their face and so many questions raised, but the nature of a Holiday Weekend and we are in the midst of other things. Charlie isnt that our responsibility mark we should be digging in but there are questions in there that will never get the attention they should have gotten and i find it stunning that the fbi director whod bragged about his fidelity to the two transparency would choose to put it out. Charlie you have three political programs. Mark it is difficult when you have 72 hours of sunshine to bury it under. Charlie when you look at her and you look at the emerging constituencies the obama constituencies they are all coming her way. John not all. Not all of them not with the level of enthusiasm she might like. I want to say a few things about what mark said. I take some exception to the view that trump was an amazing performer. He was a very charismatic guy. He also was helped enormously in the republican nomination by the weakness of the field. We do not disagree with that. He had enormous luck in terms of not being faced by one single opponent who was willing to take him on in a sustained way. He made a lot of mistakes, no one was able to make him pay a price for those mistakes. He has we agree, he has been horrible as a general election candidate in a lot of ways not only doing think things we think are objectionable, saying things that are on their face racist, attacking a gold star family, he has made a huge number of mistakes in the one place where i think that the Clinton Campaign and i think we agree about this, where the Clinton Campaign has a point which is that donald trump has been judged by a much too loose and certainly much looser standard on a lot of the stories than Hillary Clinton has. He right now is involved in a scandal at least were questions are being raised about pay for play accusations related to the attorney general where he gave a Campaign Contribution to her when she was diverting on whether to go after him on a lawsuit. She says that but my point is that that story which the prima facie evidence points to more than anything that has happened with the Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation is a subject worthy of a lot of her knee and she is worthy of a lot of criticism but they are right when they say trump on a variety of fronts there are so many things he has done that are potential areas of scandal controversy that the press skated over all of them. Part of what is keeping him aloft right now is that although people often on television criticize trump for various indiscretions and various things he said that are controversial or inappropriate, it is the case that no one has really been, really focused with the degree of intensity and the degree of intensity or pervasiveness on many of the things that are problematic in his career. His connections with russia, his tax returns, etc. Than they have on the if you issues about her. He has benefited from that. Charlie do you notice any discernible difference in his campaign because of the change when matt forte left when men afford left and steve came in. Mark if you look at his outreach, the outreach he has done to minority voters, two weeks of talking to africanamericans, not necessarily always in their presence but talking about wanting African American votes, trying to assuage their concerns the concerns of collegeage white women, that is a Kellyanne Conway production. She is focused on understanding that trump needs to do better with a certain set of normally certain subset of normally republican voters. John i do not think that they are things that paul may object to. I think theyre all consistent with the Campaign Strategy and tactics he wanted. Charlie the message was essentially economic and change. Mark and to find ways to appeal to the base of the Republican Party and the center of the electorate and selectively and to his advantage. They have more of an ability to get trump to execute, implementation she is a pollster, she is someone who understands the use of language. I think that the election, i have wrong about a lot but this is one thing i think i am still write about right about. Ive always said trump will win if americans see him as an acceptable president. The whole contest has been you are you an acceptable president . So much of the clinton effort in advertising and out of Hillary Clintons own mouth is to say here are the 50 reasons this guy is not an acceptable president. Charlie he would win if he is seen as acceptable because you believe people are looking for an option to her. Mark also change in a new direction in washington and the economy. It is hard to see given what Hillary Clinton is proposing as compared to the last 50 years of democratic orthodoxy and the current president that she is someone who would fundamentally change how we are trying to help americans create jobs. He has created so many new problems for himself and be in being acceptable, he brings with him decades of history that the clintons and the democrats have effectively put out there to say this is why he is unacceptable. The main reason the first debate is so important, if he can come across as acceptable, not best president ever, not our far and away my first choice of anyone in america, but he is acceptable, we want change. Charlie we can trust him in the office. John in fact, that sort of suggests that the trajectory of the race is more in trumps hands than in her hand. In the end if using about the structural advantages she has, the battleground state advantages, the financial advantages, the operational advantages, all those advantages and all the ammunition that trump has given her. All the things he said that would be disqualifying for almost anybody else who was the nominee. If she executes and runs a good campaign, is a good candidate, she should win this race. Charlie if she executes it will it trump his ability to transform itself himself into an etc. Candidate . John he made john kerry acceptable. John kerry did not clear the bar for enough of americans. He did that in part by energizing people to say we cannot let john kerry in the white house. Barack obama did the same thing against mitt romney. You look at the economic conditions, he made mitt romney unacceptable. We are seeing the same thing. Hillary clinton will lose if she does not make donald trump unacceptable but she had her team with trumps eight and with trumps aid and assistance have done a fantastic job of until now making the discussion more days than not in all reasons why you cannot trust donald trump to be president. He has got time to make himself acceptable. What gives the people and the clinton camp the most comfort i would say second to none is the number of americans who are who have already decided he is unacceptable and are so unlikely to change their mind. Charlie great to see you. Back in a moment. Charlie Bryan Stevenson is here. He is a Public Interest lawyer who has dedicated his life to fighting Racial Discrimination in the criminal Justice System. His efforts have focused on putting a spotlight on the legacy of slavery in america. His nonprofit equal Justice Initiative has saved 125 death row prisoners from execution. He has won a Landmark Supreme Court ruling that held mandatory life without parole sentences for minors is unconstitutional. The organization plans to open the first and largest memorial honoring the thousands of victims of lynching in the united states. That will happen next year. The project includes a museum that will explore the road from slavery to the current era of mass incarceration. Both will be located in summary, in Montgomery Alabama montgomery, alabama. I am pleased to have Brian Stephenson back at this table. Welcome. When you went to montgomery, did you see unfurling this career that you have had . Did you burn with the fire to do what you have done . Bryan i did not see everything that would come. I grew up in a poor Rural Community where i saw the anguish of racial exclusion. We lived in a black settlement and we could not go to the Public Schools and i know the way people internalize that hurt. I saw people you million needed i saw people humiliated by segregation and jim crow. That desire to see things change was very real but i had no idea that things would develop as they did. I went there at a time when you could still have a conversation with rosa parks who moved to detroit that would come back and there were these icons of the Civil Rights Movement in my ear. I have been hopeful that we could get to the point where we could talk about these issues in a broader context. We have had success in the criminal justice area. We still have an a numerous amount of work to do. We have had some setbacks but i have now realized that we have to talk about these issues more broadly if we want to see the change. Charlie did you want to have a big life . Brian no. I just wanted to make a difference. I would be very happy charlie that is one big one definition of a big life. Brian i am happiest when i could go to the prison and spend time with clients, standing up for people in the courtroom, making the kind of arguments i think need to be made to point to the humanity of every human being. But i did not expect to be in a situation where we had talked more nationally and internationally in these issues. Charlie are we approaching a time in which there is developing a consensus on criminal justice . Brian there is a consensus that we have too many people in prisons. People on the right and left recognize it is going to far. Charlie it is coming on both sides of the political divide. Brian everyone realizes that putting people in prison for life for simple possession of marijuana or writing a bad check is an inefficient use of government resources, it is punitive, it is harsh, it is unnecessary. We are not advancing Public Safety when we have hundreds of thousands of people in jails who are not a threat to Public Safety. We went from 6 billion for jails in 1980 to 80 billion last year. Not only are we not helping in the Public Safety space we are undermining funding for education and for health and Human Services and for a lot of the things that the rest of society needs. Charlie in so many areas of endeavor, we are a shining light. But not in criminal justice. Brian not in criminal justice and that is in part because we have allowed ourselves to be a little distracted by the politics of fear and anger. We have allowed ourselves to buy into narratives rooted in fear and rooted in anger. When you are afraid and when youre angry you will actually tolerate abuse and unfairness and inequality. In the 1970s, political candidates started saying lets be tough on crime. Nobody said no, we should not be tough on crime. They all competed with one another over who could be the toughest on crime and it created the political culture where democrats and republicans were looking for ways to show their toughness. Charlie it was also law and order. Brian law and order and tough on crime. We exhausted our ability to guess we went to other spaces and said drug addiction and dependency, that is not a health problem, that is a crime problem and we did not do that for alcoholism. We said alcoholism was a disease. It would not cross her mind if we saw someone who was in a college to who was an alcoholic who went into a bar to call the police. We have sent hundreds of thousands of people to jails and prisons but that phenomenon i think is related to this history of racial inequality. I think if we had done better in recognizing the problems of the genocide when native people were slaughtered by the millions, if we developed a consciousness that said wait a minute, we made a mistake, we need we have created this horrific consequence for native people in this country, we would have thought differently but we did not. We went past that genocide and then we enslaved people for centuries and while we ultimately recognized that slavery was wrong, we did not account for all the damage that was done, we never talked about the ideology of White Supremacy that emerged. We did not appear the damage that was done by insulating by enslaving human beings. We fought the civil war charlie and making them property. Brian that led them to this era of terrorism and lynching and the trauma that was created. We have not been very good at owning up to these mistakes and as a result they keep manifesting. Charlie are you suggesting that what happened in south africa, that never happened in slavery and therefore we now have we have never come to grips with it . Brian we committed ourselves to truth telling about slavery. We did the opposite. We did not hold the people responsible for slavery accountable. We did not insist on recovery and repair for emancipated people. We abandoned those who were enslaved and we allowed them to sink back in this condition of second slavery. We tolerated convict leasing. Charlie in a locker room way, what about Thomas Jefferson . Is Thomas Jefferson, should he be taken out of American History or he should be what . Brian i do not think we should ignore Thomas Jefferson. Charlie this was a what . Brian there were people who were respectable and that we should honor. There is a cloud over the founding of this country that we could not see, the inhumanity, the inequality inherent in slavery. It does not mean we are condemned, it does not mean we have something destined not have just something to be proud of. Something to be proud of. We have to own up to it. At some point we have to say slavery was horrific and we think about how we free ourselves and what you cannot do which is what we have done is ignore it. Pretend it did not exist, pretend it was not that bad because you add to the victimization. Charlie what is the definition of pretending it does not exist . Brian pretending is evident when Michelle Obama gets up at the Democratic Convention and talks about enslaved people ling the white house enslaved people building the white house and everyone says that is wrong, that is outrageou