Welcome to the New America Foundation. Thank you for braving the weather and for being here today. For those of you who are here in the audience and for those of you who are joining us watching over the Internet, welcome to New America. We appreciate your interest in this discussion of the future of the Republican Party. Certainly an interesting time in day 10 of the government shutdown, and people continually, as the polls tend to indicate, blame the Republicans more than anyone. I think the Hill, as I saw this morning, quotes a Gallup poll that 28 percent is the approval rating of the party, and the shutdown does not help. As you know, an inner-party battle seems to have risen given the extraordinary interesting changes in the last few election cycles with the rise of the Tea Party and the re-examination of party policies as a result of two presidential election losses. That transformation obviously brings opportunities for new ideas to emerge, as well as new coalitions to be formed. But obviously the disagreements make for a very fervent time for the discussion of the party. And obviously there are many who are putting forth vigorous social and economic and foreign policies that are getting perhaps less attention than the drives to repeal Obamacare and oppose immigration. It is my belief that to be successful in 2014 and 2016 and beyond, the party needs to be known as a party of yes with an affirmative agenda that people see as improving the lives of all Americans in solving problems, not to copy another party or to minimize disagreement or standing up for things which should be stopped and people feel strongly about it. But an affirmative agenda or the perception of one is important, and that in part is what we're here to talk about today. The state of the party and where it's heading and what policies are perhaps being lost in the shuffle of the shutdown and other things that would make a difference for Americans and as a result lead to some success for the party and what underlying ideas need to be surfaced. And to help us sort that and to share perspectives on where the party should be headed, we're grateful for a phenomenal panel of individuals today. And I'm so grateful that you've each taken time out of your busy schedule and brave the weather to be with us. Governor Christine Todd Whitman is the president of the Whitman Strategy Group, a former board member here at New America, served in the cabinet of President George W. Bush as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency as the governor of the state of New Jersey, serving as the first woman governor from 94 to 2001. And the author of a New York Times bestseller, It's My Party 2, which focuses on many of the ideas the Republican Party perhaps was not talking about at the time and may still not be talking about today. Mark Rogers, a principal at the Clapham Group, a company which seeks to influence culture. He served as the third ranking Republican Party leadership staffer in the Senate for six years and served as a high ranking staffer as chief of staff to Senator Rick Santorum and working on Capitol Hill for 16 years. Ron Haskins, a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program and co-director of the Center of Children and Families of the Brookings Institution, has been a leader in this town on a variety of domestic policy issues serving in the White House and in senior leadership positions on Capitol Hill, most prominently for the House Wains and Means staff, and has been a leader and a thought leader and influence on my thinking for many years. As director of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, Jennifer Marshall oversees research in many of the areas that define our culture. She heads the ThinkTanks Center for Religion and Civil Society. She oversees thefamilyfacts.org website. The National Journal has named her as one of 20 power players in Washington for her work on education and other reforms. And Tevi Troy, who is a senior fellow at the Huston Institute, who served as deputy secretary of Department of Health and Human Services, as well as many senior positions on the Hill in the administration where I had the pleasure to work with him and also at the White House. And Tevi is the author of a new book which has just come out. His latest book is What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted, 20 Years of Popular Culture in the White House, which I... That's 200 years. Oh, 200 years. That's right. That's right. Not just... Yes, thank you. Back to the beginning. Math was not my strong suit. And in any case, I recommend it. And so with this group, we're going to have an opportunity to hear from each of them on their perspectives on some of those ideas and where the parties headed and most importantly should be headed. And then an opportunity for some discussion and a chance to open up and hear from some of your views and particularly your questions as we move towards the conclusion of our program. So again, thank you all for being here. We'll begin with Governor Whitman. Would you share your perspective? Well, certainly. I think of what I... My first bit of advice, which actually a lot of it was in the book, and there's no satisfaction in saying I told you so, especially not when it's so serious for the future of the country. But I would wish the party would adopt Pope Francis's attitude, which is we don't need to get hung up on issues like abortion and the social issues. They can be important. You can have deeply held beliefs on them, but they're not the ones that should be driving public policy at this point because they are so deeply held and so personal. And so we need to move beyond that. For me, the Republican Party has always been the party of the people and respect for the individual by getting back to those things we show respect for the individual by less government interference in our everyday lives.  But recognizing you have to have a balanced budget to do that. And we need to get back to looking at the spending. We lost that somewhere. And suddenly became the party of we want to... We'll spend on everything. And I love it when I watch these members on the Hill who voted happily for continuing this shutdown that we have now, pushing aside the barricades to take their constituents through the monuments. They don't seem to think that there's any disconnect there, which I think there is. And with the American people, they feel a disconnect. And that's part of the problem. Actually, I saw one survey, I think, out of California. It was an Internet survey, but that said Congress's approval rating was at five. And I don't know that you can get much lower than that. But we also were a party that believed in a strong national defense, security at home, but not getting into trying to define every single issue on which we had to agree in order to be a good Republican, because what we've created now is a two-tier system where, because of redistricting, we'll do very well, because the district did. Fortunately, people have gotten frustrated with the system as you look at the split now between the parties and the growth in the changes in registration. It's the independence that are growing, the non-aligned that are growing. Both Republicans and Democrats are losing registered voters. It's the registered independent that's seeing a growth. Well, that's all well and good, except that in 35 states, registered independents can't vote in primaries. And there are another seven where they make it very difficult, my state being one where you have to declare your party a month ahead of time, month ahead of the election in order to be able to participate. Well, when you're not participating in the primary level, you're leaving it to those who are the most partisan. And they tend to be coalesce around one or two issues that get them going on both sides of the aisle. I do want to say that I think this is happening on the Democrat side, starting to happen as much to the Democrats as it's happened to the Republicans. We've just been at it longer and talk about it in more sort of robust terms. But we are a family, there's a whole area, for instance, in welfare reform. When we did this back, when I was governor and Bill Clinton was present, we went back at him and back at him to give the states the kind of flexibility they needed in welfare reform that would actually support mothers, help them get off welfare and stay off welfare. And they gave us the flexibility to do that. And to me, that was very consistent with Republican values. It was saying we want to have people work, but we understand that moms care about their families and they care about their children. And if they need to get an education, they can't just go off to school. They've got to know that their children are positive we could talk about.  You can argue over who causes it. But, you know, we're the party of environment. The Republicans are the first land that was set aside as public land was Abraham Lincoln. And then you have Teddy Roosevelt who vastly expanded the national park system of the national park system. And some say he actually founded it. And of course, it was Richard Nixon who signed the, created the Environmental Protection Agency. So why we've suddenly become this party that will not and does not want to talk about any environmental issue and can see no good, it seems, anymore in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. They're disconnecting with the American people. But you have this group because of the way we've redistricted. Because of the low voter turnout in primaries, its average is about 10%. The people in the districts, the representatives in the districts, are very solid. And they don't have to worry. They're anywhere from, I've heard the low of 36 to a high of 91 competitive seats throughout this country, which is pretty pathetic when you think of the numbers we're dealing with, which means that the only thing that those members have to worry about is an attack from the right if they're Republican and an attack from the left if they're a Democrat. So they move further and further to the right and the left which meets it harder and harder to come back with the American people as a whole. So basically back up. It allows us to be very strong in Congress and I don't think even with the fact that Republicans have such low numbers right now that the Democrats will win the house. I think that's a real stretch to think that they will win the house. I mean, anything's possible, but I don't think that's going to occur. But we can't win national elections because we're not appealing the vast majority of Americans and I think Democrats are somewhere in the middle. It doesn't mean they don't have strongly held beliefs on certain of the social issues they do, but they understand that a party is bigger than that and they care about the core principles that make them a Republican or a Democrat and they're willing to work with people who may not be exactly the same as they think the same way they do on every issue in order to get things done for the American people. And the idea that compromise is a bad idea, I wonder how many of them have actually read their history books because if we don't understand that what got us our constitution didn't involve people who are independence, didn't involve people who had vastly different ideas of how government should be formed. I mean, Adams and Jefferson almost didn't agree on anything and yet they understood they were about something bigger than themselves and came together and created the documents under which we enjoy such an incredible environment. But to me, I started to say one of the consummate issues was on the attack on Obamacare.  They're all confused. They think it's well they just don't know and I'm talking about before it actually October 1st when they had to start signing up and figuring it out. But many people said that you know there's something wrong with our healthcare system. It's costing a lot. There's a lot of people who do know that now pre-existing conditions, for instance, are being covered and they like that. So for the Republicans to say in this latest go-around that it was all about doing away with Obamacare, to the average person, I was just talking to a cab driver the other day, he said, you know, I'm a pragmatist. It's not going to go away. It was signed into law and then went to the Supreme Court and, you know, it's law. I think could have made huge inroads is to say, but this is what's missing. This is what's wrong with it. This is what we need to deal with. Whether it is tort reform or allowing insurance companies to write policies across state lines, there are a number of things that can be done to improve it to change it and for them to take advantage of this. And unfortunately, we've gotten so caught up in everything's history. So on the hill is debated, and frankly by both sides, not on the policy merits of the issue, but on the political merits of the issue. What's going to get me another vote in caucus or another percentage on my re-elect? And again, the American people are looking at this and they're shaking their heads and they're saying, epochs on both your houses, I don't want anything to do with either one, and it's not going to change. It's going to change in public policy and people becoming disengaged, because we're the only ones that can change it. We don't like what we're seeing and I've said this to many groups with whom I've spoken is if they're upset about what's going on, I say look in the mirror, because that's where the problem starts. It starts with us. If you only get a 35 to 37% voter turnout in Congress, the problem right there is you're giving up your right to be heard and to determine, much less of course the primaries, which are abysmally low. And that is where the issue starts. I think Republicans should start taking control of exactly what you said they should become a party of yes, here's how we're going to do it better, or here's how this is a lousy idea and here's how we're always looking for ways to exclude someone. You have to be 100% pure or you can't be in this party. And that's just not where the American people are and unless we change that, I believe we're going to see continuous defeat at the national level and it's going to be more difficult at the Senate level when you're having to appeal to a voter group. Now there's some things you can do about that. You have to appeal to everybody. If it's an open primary and then you have to appeal to everybody, not just your narrow base, you have to appeal to a broader group. That kind of approach could help. But right now I'm not seeing any appetite for that. They have to get through of course what's happening right now and it looks like they will. I've always thought we're not going to go into default. I don't think we're going to go in the road a bit on the default and put that off probably for a month or so and then really fight overspending and I have no problem with fighting over spending. We do need to control spending but I do think any time you have these kind of across the board things they're fairly mindless and you need to be more precise and where you want your cuts. Having said that, of course we don't have government and I think we all benefit from things like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act and I don't think we should say we want to do away with all those. So it's there are a lot of challenges out there but there are a lot of opportunities and I think and I hope that the Republican party will move itself into a position where it is talking about what they want to do positively and not leave the Democrat we won't have anything to do with and the Democrats need to rein it in a little bit so they're not saying anything the Republicans put forward to something we won't touch and we won't discuss because that's not where the American people are they understand that you have to come together you have to start to talk to one another and find that consensus in the middle that will get us to moving policy forward and not leave the Republican Party. Mark you've had a chance to travel the country as well as work in senior positions in a variety of the branches of government would you share your perspective. Well first let me say there's I think there are two questions on the table one is you know what is what what is the future of the Republican Party currently likely to be and what is it that we would like to see it and I think for me that it has become somewhat I think for all of us kind of markers in terms of the current situation here in Washington 50% of House Republicans have been in Congress only three sessions of Congress so their sophomores are freshmen so 50% one of every two House members have been in Congress less than two full terms the second marker interesting just to note only seven of 232 of the 232 House Republicans are from districts that President Obama won. So now you can see this is and this is a similar situation on the Democrat side by the way so what you see is you've got right now a dynamic where basically the entire Republican House is elected in primaries and that dynamic is going to drive I think for the near current definition if you would of the party and drive people towards more kind of rhetorical purity if you would for foreseeable future at least the next cycle so there are members that I used to know their staff was with one a few days ago that are from states that are pretty rib rock conservative and members that are who are being primaried and are honestly very concerned about their viability in the primary election. Remember you're dealing with a small percentage of the overall electorate turns out in primaries and then a small percentage of that can actually affect the outcome. So this dynamic is driving our political landscape or rhetorical landscape and I think contributes primarily to the situation that we're in right now. What does that mean in terms of the long term? There's always a challenge for a minority party and I'd say in some ways right now even with the House majority we are in a minority position from a messaging perspective. It's difficult to message but you can normally organize as the minority as the opposition are unified with an against framework or an against rhetoric. You don't have to come to consensus what you're for you can come to consensus that you all agree you're against something and agree on that rhetoric. Some of the first times I've seen us be in this position as a party and not be able to agree what we're against and I think that's another dynamic that's been interesting to kind of watch and see how difficult it's been for the party to have a concerted messaging even in the minority. So if you look back in previous elections the Democrats in particular were very good at organizing a unified voice and creating a single national message and we're unable to do that. We also have a dynamic in the short term where you don't really have any strong messengers. I think the general Senate default is not to kind of be proactive with the agenda setting, vision casting there's a general approach I think in the leadership there that you don't put things on a target because they just get shot at so you just define and define as need be but don't go out with broad vision statements. So the question is where is that vision going to come from in a way that can actually produce some consensus within the party that's very fractured and dealing with this dynamic in the kind of primary situation and I'm not sure I know what the answer I'm curious what all my colleagues will have to say about that where will this vision come from about the future of the party that might be a vision. Obviously the likelihood is 2016 and that is until the summer so we may be in the situation now without any kind of clarity of vision casting for the next two and a half years which is devastating. So if you look now long term what's the impact I've got a couple minutes here I'd say for me the marker is a demographic one and that is the look at the electoral landscape and who is becoming the dominant voters the surprise of course in the last two cycles was the relevance of both the Hispanic and the Millennial votes and the last election in particular was the role of the single woman and both those two last elections you can view that the proportional impact of the swing vote that went from Bush to McCain and then recently to Romney. Two thirds Ed Gauss says of the swing vote in essence of the last two cycles was made of Hispanics and Millennials. These are electors that were not these are not locked votes historically but they're becoming in a pattern locked votes and now if you look at our demographic trends what demographics are growing and more influential it will be those two in particular. So the question for the party is how do we have an agenda that can resonate with Hispanics, Millennials and to some extent I would argue single women. The marker on that is was a statistic that came out of the last election what I call the empathy gap. When you looked at the different issues or attributes which define the two candidates Romney won on most of the traditional attributes of an executive the ability to administer decision making even shares my values the biggest differential though on the other way in terms of where President Obama politically kind of was more resonant with the electorate than Romney was what's called cares for people like me was an 81-19 gap now that was amongst a 20% of the electorate that said that's the most important value but it was a huge gap and not always as broad as that there's a period in fact there's been a slow decline for Republicans since Gerald Ford who was the last Republican nationally to have an advantage on that gap who actually was viewed to be more in line with caring for people like me than the Democrat nominee so we've seen a gradual decline but this was the worst any Republicans done in terms of that marker. So how does the party appeal to Hispanics appeal to Millennials and show that it actually does care for people like me. People that ultimately are not I think issue voters or party voters but they are late voters because they're voting based on an emotive vote not an intellectual one or kind of a principled or party decision. The party has to vision cast an agenda that shows that we do have solutions that care for the people that are struggling right now in this country and that is I think a huge deficiency we don't again have a messaging mechanism we don't have an infrastructure for message casting and frankly we don't have a message. So I think that's what you're asking us to do so the last two minutes I would say that the agenda needs to cover four areas. One I would argue that you can fuse economic policy and social policy they are related they interact they are one in the same in many cases. So when you look at the dramatic decline of marriage the increase of out of wedlock birth rates in some communities that are absolutely unsustainable in any society when you're at three out of four African American babies born out of wedlock almost I think now two out of three Hispanics as well if that number is right. I think among whites we're at 40% Jennifer. So those numbers have deep deep social consequence and economic consequence. So I'd say first of all the party has to have a vision cast for strengthening families I know some people say that there's no role for the government in doing that. I'd say whether there are marriage penalties and EITC or in Obamacare those penalties that deter marriage or affect marriage they have to be cleaned up and I would say there are other policies like child tax credits that can be promoted by our party that are consistent with our principles and affirm the role of marriage and family. Second we have to have policies that understand the shifting dynamics as they relate to the marketplace and job preparedness. The idea that a four year college is the not just preferable but frankly the only track towards success towards achieving the American dream I think we're realizing is not aligned to the current economy and we have to as a party affirm the policies such as the Perkins Act and others which look at career college in all terms of four year education as viable and important ways to equip this generation to the workforce of the 21st century and be competitive internationally. School choice options of course and I am actually a supporter of national standards I think we have to be much more unified at a non-federal control level at a state level at understanding where our deficiencies are state by state and that we can become more competitive nationally. And finally two last things I think we have to understand that there are communities that are deeply struggling. I think Charles Murray's book is one of the best kind of analysis of that at a kind of sociological level and we have to address in those communities where these breakdowns are taking place one of which is in particular the plague in some communities of juvenile detention or detention incarceration rates and the difficulty that individuals and families have of people coming out of incarceration and not being able to find employable work. And then finally tax reform I tend to be a supporter of the use of the tax code to promote certain incentivize kind of social if you would areas of concern but I do think there's an opportunity for a broad reform that treats economic and other capital equally with human capital and do something so structural and systematic that we mitigate some of the inequities that are in the current tax system. So I do think that for me would be I think a broad agenda and one that if the party does not vision cast with its next nominee frankly will be that is for a long time coming. Thanks. Fascinating Mark thank you. You mentioned Jennifer why don't we turn to you next to follow up on anything you've heard and provide your perspective. Yeah this is good sequencing actually I'm a single female so I can respond on that count and I appreciate the integrative approach that Mark took and I wanted to actually begin with the empathy gap. We heard a lot about that in the 2012 cycle and I think it was used mostly for the lack of connection on economic issues but empathy as and we could certainly have heard better economic messages than I think we heard better connecting ways of approaching those issues but empathy as a connecting quality I think attaches to a larger leadership characteristic of what I would call authenticity and that would be authenticity and integrity in one's own being and outlook and also authenticity or maybe coherence and accuracy that one sizes up the world. Leaders need to be able to deal not just with the conditions that are caused by this month's particular trajectory of the business cycle. Leaders need to be able to deal with the human condition that is what it means to be human to form community and to aspire to things that transcend our particular political economy here and now and Americans need to be able to evaluate how the way in which leaders approach these things whether it rings true to human nature and the reality around us including the reality of the the moral realities of the world around us so my comments are going to focus on three areas and approaches that I think would particularly bring out this kind of authenticity I'm talking about here. The first is poverty and its relationship to human dignity. The second is marriage and how it serves the welfare of children and the third is the relationship between the populations and particularly freedom from coercion. I think when candidates or campaigns try to steer clear of certain issues like these they do themselves a disservice because they veil that authenticity of the type I'm talking about. So to begin with poverty we're now a half century into the war on poverty and liberals can hardly declare victory about it but they can claim to have dominance about the debate in public politics. So I think Americans are looking to conservatives for answers about this and that's not to say that we don't have answers. We have some pretty good successes actually. The 1996 welfare reform has already been referred to here. Welfare roles dropped in half after the AFDC program was transformed into the temporary assistance to needy families or TANF program and we could name other successes Mark brought up school choice but there were no notes sounding out individually. We have failed to draw them together into a melody that people could catch on to that could bump aside the prevailing tune about how we serve the needs of our neighbors here in America and that prevailing tune of course is the welfare state diddy to spend more to start another program. And today we're spending to the tune of one trillion dollars annually on 80 different federal means programs that provide aid to poor and low income Americans. Only one of those was reformed in 1996. We have spent 20 trillion dollars to date on the war on poverty. In other words, if we were going to win this war through spending, we should have done it a long time ago. So I argue it is time for us to change this tune. We need to recognize that the problem is more than a mere lack of material resources. The reality of poverty strikes much more deeply at human dignity, at the roots of human dignity. And that's because it typically involves relational breakdown, especially fatherlessness and the collapse of marriage. Roughly 80 percent of all long-term poverty occurs in single parent households. And a child born and raised outside of marriage today is five times more likely to be in poverty than a child raised in an intact family. I'll link that with the facts that Mark was bringing out. We have 40 percent unwed child bearing overall, half of Hispanics, more than half of Hispanics born outside of marriage and more than 70 percent in the black community. These are heart-stopping statistics and we ought to take time to deal with them very seriously. Misdiagnosing poverty as a merely material problem is a terrible disservice to those in need. And it often encourages the kinds of long-term dependence that we see as a chronic problem. So conservative leaders need to be convinced that poverty is our problem. We need leaders to explain that the welfare state has not done justice to the poor and to point the way towards upward mobility. We need to change the incentive structure of the welfare state to make it an actual safety net, not an ensnaring mess like it has become. Welfare should promote work, should encourage marriage and self-sufficiency in the context of community. And our ideas need to be more than abstractions. Which means that we need to as conservative leaders get out go to neighborhoods, listen learn, show up learn from those who have overcome poverty and social breakdown. We need to be learning from guys like Bob Cote. Bob passed away last year, last week after decades of helping addicts in Denver through his step 13 program. It was a tough love program that built on what he knew as a former addict. And he knew that accountable relationships were the formula that would bring them to successful escape of the demons that had once haunted him. That's the kind of approach that makes churches and family and civil society groups like step 13 so effective because they're facing these challenges in the context of accountable relationships. One of the major factors that led to the welfare reform breakthrough in the 90s was the broad agreement on the importance of marriage for curbing child poverty. The evidence was clear that children tended to fare best economically, educationally in a variety of other ways when they were raised by their married biological parents. But what we affirmed in the 1990s, many people are now trying to ignore. Marriage policy has always reflected the biological reality that it takes a mom and a dad to bring a child into the world and that they should give kids a chance to be raised by their mother and father. Marriage redefinition on the other hand would deny as a matter of policy the ideal that a child should be, should have a mother and a father and be raised by that mother and a father. Now the question we're facing is will we have the freedom to make marriage policy that tells the truth about children needing a mother and a father. That was the truth that was central to the reform in the 90s. Or will our marriage policy instead put adults' desires before children's needs. Now don't get me wrong, as Americans we are legally free to live and to love as we choose. And we have learned to make do in a variety of circumstances in which for one reason or another a mother or father is not able to be permanently with the children that they've brought into the world. We've learned to make do. We've continued even so to maintain in law a unique status for the union of a man and a woman. The only union that can produce children as a permanent, monogamous and exclusive relationship. We uphold this ideal in the interest of children of limited government and America's future. Now for anyone who says that's a losing proposition, take a closer look at the results thus far. Until last November 32 out of 32 states that put the issue to a vote had defined marriage, affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now last November main Maryland, Minnesota and Washington state went the opposite direction. But in each of those deep blue states marriage out pulled the Republican presidential ticket. In Maryland for example Romney received 36% of the vote, well marriage received 48%. It's not that the argument for marriage has been heard and rejected. Too often it simply hasn't been heard. The Supreme Court didn't help things in the end of June when it handed down decisions that further erode the meaning of marriage. And over the summer the challenge has quickly escalated so that now we're not just debating the definition of marriage. Now we're having to defend even the freedom to be able to speak and to live in accordance with the reality of the belief that marriage is the union between a man and a woman in our professional lives. And to say that there is a difference between a mom and a dad and that children need both.  Here are just a few examples of what I mean from late this summer. On August 12th California Governor Jerry Brown signed a transgender rights bill mandating in effect that boys be allowed to use girls restrooms in state public schools for gender identity regardless of their biological sex. On August 22nd the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled against an evangelical photographer, Elaine Huguenin because she declined to photograph a lesbian commitment ceremony. Never mind that another photographer was readily available at a lower price to the couple, the price of citizenship, one justice said required Huguenin to ignore her religious convictions. California's legislature was poised to strip tax exempt status from groups such as the Boy Scouts because of policies on sexual orientation. It had passed the Senate 27-9 before it was tabled for now. Now I'm leaving out half the list of what happened in that month actually, but my point is this is an extremist social agenda and Americans need to know that this is many liberals direction for America. This parade of outrageous news is also an overreach it's a pattern of overreach. This is not tolerance of diversity it's remarkable intolerance actually. Conservatives need to make this pattern known and to be clear about where we stand on life, marriage and religious liberty and to stand up for freedom from coercion. Coercion and clashes with religious freedom are more and more likely as we have more centralization of policymaking in Washington. Obamacare is the most glaring example right now. The law prescribes what patients must buy, what insurers must offer, and what kind of health coverage employers must provide. It offers no way out. Now one of the first Obamacare coverage mandates was of course as well known now the mandate that nearly all insurance plans cover abortion inducing drugs, contraception and sterilization. Many Americans have religious quibbles and objections to facilitating these things. Yet under the Obama policy only houses of worship are exempted. Even a Bible publisher and the Catholic group Little Sisters of the Poor are not religious enough to qualify for an exemption under this. They'll face in fact crushing fines that would shut them down if they don't comply. Not surprisingly more than 200 plaintiffs have joined 60 lawsuits that are now in federal court, two of which are now appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Well we need leaders who can take a strong stand on these religious liberty issues. Employers and individuals need to be able to choose health care plans that align with their needs and beliefs. Our vision of America is one that allows citizens to make decisions about health care, education, and how to run their businesses in ways that meet their needs and respect their values. When government is limited, friction with religious institutions and individuals will be rare. But when the government and religion clash regularly it's a pretty good sign that the problem is the rise of the over-reaching state and that's a problem that endangers the whole foundation of American society.  We need leaders who approach economic and social issues as indivisible. The strength and stability of families contributes to our economic vitality and our character as a culture will shape our capacity to lead on the world stage. So my offer would be that leaders who convey a compelling vision on the full range of these questions in a way that rings true to Americans experience of reality are the ones who will provide the most promising way future forward. Not just for a movement and a particular party, but for America's future in general. Thank you. Jennifer, thank you very much. I appreciated the thoughts about when you mentioned welfare reform as it leads into where Ron might be able to take us next. I know Ron knows a bit about welfare reform having been central to it and would you pick up then and share some of your perspective on some of the ideas that you think would make a difference going forward. Yes, but welfare reform will be somewhere down the list. The first thing to do is accuse you of conspiracy. The left-leaning foundation with the audience that's certain to be left-leaning and you plan it for a day after it's revealed the Republican party who didn't give the whole story is revealed to be the least popular it has ever been. It's dropped 10 points, not 10%, 10 points since last month. The idea of closing governments comes to mind as a possible explanation for this sort of thing. So I'm anticipating that we will not get a warm and fuzzy reception here but we'll bear up under under. Let me start with some values. I want to mention four things that I think ought to be ought to drive a Republican agenda and these were true not last year or last decade but in the last century in a century before that. These are the things that Republicans should stand for. The first one is prudence. Prudence it plays a huge role in the literature on conservatism that conservatives above all maybe not above all but a central feature should be prudence. So when you negotiate when you participate in government at the local or the state or the federal level that you're prudent you don't want to take unnecessary chances and now I'm thinking of the debt ceiling I don't think anybody really knows what's going to happen to debt ceiling. I'm at Brookings I'm surrounded by economists they all have their predictions but I don't think anybody knows that a prudent would not take a chance. The possible consequences are so grave that rational people would not even consider America not paying back its debts and I love this argument well we'll pay back the interest and everything will be fine we'll pay our debtors and so we won't pay American citizens the benefits that the laws say that they should get. I mean this whole course is just nuts. It is and unwise and Republicans should have never started down this path and it could turn out to be a huge problem not just for us but for the country. Second thing is compromise. Compromise is the fundamental characteristic of Democratic government. There's a brilliant article just written by Jonathan Raul should appear in national affairs which is a right-leaning journal and it's about why you have to have compromise and very critical of Republicans for the some Republicans for their stance on compromise. And a lot of detail in there about Madison and Madison's conception of a Democratic government and how it's absolutely essential to have compromise so that's the second value that we should hold. The third is good government. Somehow Republicans I can give you a lot of examples of why but have gotten in a position of being anti-government that we don't favor government and yet you know I think a Romney's famous 47% statement that actual if you do a poll and ask people have they ever been helped by government you know what percent say yes over 95% say yes at some point in their life they were helped by government and I study low-income families I'll talk about that more in just a moment and Republicans have created it wasn't just a welfare reform it was what I call the work support system that provides benefits to low-income families because they cannot earn enough to support a family so do you want them on welfare facing hunger and health problems and so forth are you want them working and earning say ten or twelve thousand dollars a year which is pretty much the capacity of these mothers and then subsidize their earnings contingent on work that is what we did and that lowered poverty more than has ever been lowered I'm going to return to this and the final thing is personal responsibility and I think Republicans continue to stand for personal responsibility and this I think sharply divides Republicans and Democrats not that Democrats don't believe in personal responsibility but I've written about this often I had an op-ed in the post a year and a half ago or so and I got tons of mail all from Democrats some very prominent I won't call their names but criticizing me for you know for saying blaming the victim this is blaming the victim so you expect people to graduate from high school to get a job and to get married and have babies in that order this is a radical idea that is subject to criticism I got all kinds of emails about what a you know you blaming the victim and there are all kinds of reasons the context of why people make these decisions over baloney Republicans should stand straight up for personal responsibility never back down for it featured in their speeches our presidential candidates featured as well so now let me make four brief comments about areas that I think Republicans should focus on the first one is a deficit it's a natural for Republicans but we've handicapped ourselves from the very beginning because our stance on taxes there is no way ever that you're going to get a deal on this without at least some increased revenue and several Republicans gave gave us an opportunity to cover it up a little bit by saying tax reform and we'll do tax reform in a way that results in more revenue without raising rates it seemed like a wonderful compromise but no no that won't do either the CBO baseline has to show that there's no new revenue we're not going to get a deal on the budget we are not going to be able to contain entitlement spending especially on Medicare and on Social Security unless we have additional revenues that's what it's going to take to do a deal that's called compromise this town works on compromise and if Reagan were still alive and he were the president and Danny Austin Kausgurt had ways and means they would work this out in one afternoon and they'd bring their parties along with them and here we've been fighting this for years and we've we've reduced the deficit by over maybe two and a half trillion dollars that sounds really good but we haven't focused on the policies that we have to focus on which is taking stuff away from the elderly we have to do that and probably the only way to do that is in a bipartisan deal where Republicans and Democrats walk arm in arm and say okay old people especially wealthy old people we're going to trim your benefits a little bit it won't start for a decade or so but eventually that's the way to do it we did that in 83 and it didn't dominate the subsequent election and so forth Republicans have been very bold on Medicare and it didn't cost them elections so there are possibilities for compromise here so the deficit is the first thing but we can't do it unless we're going to be willing to sit down and taxes would be on the table or additional revenue would be on the table second thing is the middle class both parties fight over the middle class and no wonder because you know if you talk to the voters about 70% some polls 80% say they're middle class people making 15,000 years say they're middle class Americans love the middle class so let's focus on them and what are their concerns they're two big concerns that I think Republicans are not sufficiently focused on one is jobs the president talks a lot about jobs but I mean a good candidate could really ram the president on jobs because we have the worst job situation we've had since the Great Depression and if you look at the data on job openings compared to job seekers that number has never been so high and here we are you know five years beyond a recession four years beyond a recession so there's plenty of territory here for Republicans to make progress on their other party of jobs and I feel in wages too although it's a little bit difficult to think about how we can increase wages tax reform another natural for Republicans again Republicans will be prevented from doing tax reform as long as there's no revenues on the table and I think we could especially do something with social security tax that we could figure out ways to lower the burden of social security taxes on low income workers especially since they'll earn more later and then they can pay more social security taxes so there are a lot of things in this agenda of the middle class that we could help people the third part of the agenda is personal responsibility I've already said what it is and I think Republicans should talk about it incessantly and that is we need more of our people to finish high school get at least some training beyond high school then get a job and then get married and have babies not until they're married should they have babies so that would be very popular in American and public in general a lot of debate Republicans will be accused as I've been of blaming the victim but so be it this is a debate that I think we would win and in addition we have one favorable part of the argument on our side which is we will not reduce poverty in the United States significantly until we've done something about the out-of-the-wedlock birth rate 40% Americans that's still growing are born outside marriage are five times as likely to be poor even more important we now have mountains of data the scholars in the United States agree on virtually nothing now they agree that the best marine environment for children is a married couple family and if kids are raised by single females they have all kinds of disadvantage New America just published something about this by David Autor called wayward sons blaming the predicament of young black males primarily on the fact that they don't have fathers in their marriage what did you hold up two minutes okay good finally low income I wish Republicans would focus more on the low income agenda it is a fact that welfare reform did more to reduce poverty than any other single strategy we've had if we gave money away just to the poor we could solve poverty but Americans would hate that and it's a bad idea anyway by the way if we gave money only to the poor we could give a mom and two kids $60,000 without spending any additional money that's this trillion dollars that you mentioned between the federal government and the state so we have sufficient money now we need to figure out how to do it better so the strategy we need I think is a two-part strategy we already are doing it to some extent and we could expand it greatly first is people should work couples with a personal responsibility agenda we ought to have work requirements in housing programs that are more realistic than the ones that have been approved by the house and we ought to have work requirements in housing programs we now have them in a TANF program in part a condom for the reduction in roles but in addition after welfare pass work by never married mothers the most disadvantaged group in our society increased 40% in four years 40% increase in actually having a job so that's a revolution there's nothing like that in bureau labor standards and we could do it again I'll come back to that in just a moment and the second part of the agenda then is we have to support them and work and Republicans are really very leery about this I hope they could get over they hate food stamps I don't think we should hate food stamps we use food stamps in part to subsidize the incomes of these single mothers because they earn about $10,000 a year and in fact in the Bush administration we made 7 or 8 changes in the law in the farm bill of 2002 to make it easier for states to give food stamps to low income working families Republicans should feel that if benefits are going to low income working families especially if they're rearing children that that is not welfare so food stamps to give it to someone doesn't work and it's not disabled so forth then that's welfare but if you're supporting low income working families it's not we also should do a lot more about child care pre-school programs which I think also is a natural and there are all kinds of things we could do about the public schools to help the next generation I think we could match our agenda with a democratic agenda any day and look at least as good and I think in many cases better if our Republicans knew the arguments so if we would return to fundamental conservative values and build an agenda on those conservative values we would do much better than we've been doing in the last 5-6 presidential elections thank you very much the details is fantastic they're going to put you in charge of writing the platform 16 I'm sure many of our speakers have mentioned Adams and Madison and Jefferson our final panelist knows what Jefferson read from his latest book and research Tevi thank you David and thanks to New America for putting this together I had a feeling that listening to my distinguished colleagues was some inspiration for some additional things I wanted to start off with before I get into the meat of my agenda and I was proven correct first of all I appreciated that Ron looked pointedly at Jennifer and me when he mentioned Madison I'm not sure why he did it but I'll take it as a compliment second of all I was looking for a good way to mention my book about presidents and pop culture and when Ron mentioned Prudence I remembered how important Prudence was to President Bush and the infamous live imitation of him by Dana Carvey when he came to the White House dressed up like President Bush and said wouldn't be prudent and that was kind of that encapsulated his George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush's approach to things so I applaud Prudence the other thing is a couple of people mentioned the Republican Party is divided and that's always I'm sure what you're going to hear in the media about this panel but just about the Republicans general how divided they are about a five-point agenda that I'm going to talk about in a moment and I was glad to see that every one of the panelists mentioned at least one thing that is on my agenda so I think there may be more unity among Republicans than people think and at the same time I think you have some really smart thinkers here who are innovative and really serious about policy and so I think this group in front of us is an encouraging sign about some of the ideas that the Republicans have to offer so I'm encouraged by this panel that said there are obviously some reasons for discouragement especially on the electoral front over the last few years and even in decades Rod mentioned that the Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections and in looking at the reasons for that one of the things I identified was that Republicans have lost the votes of certain voters that one would think would be in their wheelhouse easy for them to get and I'm not a big fan of breaking up the electorate into groups based on race and ethnicity I don't think that's the American way I don't think Ronald Reagan went around saying well I need 10% of the black vote and Y% of the Hispanic vote and Z% of the Asian vote he said how can I unite all Americans but he did and I think politicians should look at economic and educational characteristics of voters regardless of their race or ethnicity to look at where you can find votes and where your agenda can appeal and with that in mind I noticed that the Republicans have been losing what I call the high tech voters people who work in let's say Silicon Valley or the high tech corridors in Boston even in Minnesota where the device industry is active Southern California there's a lot of biotech and the Boston corridor even in Virginia there's a lot of high tech workers and those are places where Republicans have been losing voters they've also been losing a lot of voters on Wall Street and a lot of money on Wall Street which was traditionally a Republican enclave they got some of it back in this last election because there was a bit of a Wall Street backlash against President Obama but overall the trends among Wall Street have been trending and even among professors you think that professors are a strong Democratic enclave and they certainly are in the social sciences and in the humanities but for a long time business professors and professors and the hard scientists were much more evenly split much more likely to vote Republican than their humanities and social science counterparts but those numbers have been decreasing in recent years as well and so with that in mind I decided the Republicans really need an agenda to try and win back those voters but to do so in a way that speaks to all Americans and so I've come up with what I call a high tech compassionate agenda an agenda that looks at why Americans don't have what I call the pro-go, why Republicans don't have what I call the pro-growth voters but also looks at some of these issues from a compassionate standpoint not necessarily because Republicans are going to win low-income voters in this election or the next but because it's the right thing to do and so with that in mind I'm going to lay out my five planks and again some of them have been mentioned by my colleagues and friends on this panel but I think I put them together in a different way. Number one is I think Republicans need to be out there promoting innovation. Innovation is one of the engines that drives our economy it's what makes American workers different and it is a comparative advantage for our nation and innovation takes place in many fields I mentioned high tech in computers in biotech even in entertainment and these sort of high leverage fields where education and training are paramount and can lead to very high wages and to what Bill Clinton used to call good jobs at good wages and I'm not going to talk about all the aspects of this agenda but in my particular area of healthcare you can just look at the pharmaceutical sector and the life science sector and it takes ten years and a billion dollars to bring a product to market the litigation costs or the tort costs from not having tort reform or something like 367 billion dollars on that industry and I think Republicans should look at a way to help promote and encourage the development of new products rather than to allow government to stifle or reduce the ability for new products to come forward. Second in line with this is to encourage talent bring talent to America, make America the talent magnet that it used to be and is no longer to the same degree. I know much of the immigration fight we have these days is about what to do about the 12 million or so illegals who are in the country or improperly visa people in the country if we want to put a nicer spin on it but the debate really should be about and what Republicans should be about promoting is a legal pathway into the country for the kinds of talented people we want to encourage and that would include a skills test, Canada already does it Australia already does it and these programs are successful they bring in people with science and technology and engineering and math backgrounds people who can help the economy grow and help develop an innovative economy. Also when students come to America to study especially in these fields we should encourage them to stay in this country I like the idea of a couple of mention Bill Gates has talked about this of stapling a green card to a science or technology diploma.  The third thing is we need to improve our education system and there's some talk a little bit about school choice. I know that school choice is very controversial and some people argue that perhaps it helps wealthier kids but there's one type of choice that I think we can all get behind which is allow title one dollars to follow the child. Title one is about 14 billion dollars to help 10 million poor kids it only goes to poor kids but if those poor kids are stuck in failing schools they should have the opportunity to take those federal dollars with them make them portable and bring them to another school that better suits their needs. Parents of whatever political stripe want to get their children the best possible education they can get them and American CEOs are clamoring for a better educated American workforce and we deserve to give it to them and I think the Republican Party is best suited to promote and pursue that policy. Fourth and we've talked about at least Governor Whitman and Ron both mentioned this and I think Mark did as well mention the issue of the debt which is a huge issue. I'm a fan of tax cuts I like to see lower taxes but I think Republicans need to recognize that the issue of cutting tax rates does not have the political resonance that it did in the Reagan era. There is a reason for that. Part of it is because we've successfully taken a lot of people on the tax rolls. I know when I was in the Bush administration and the tax cuts passed in 0203 I signed off on press releases that bragged about 5 million people going off the tax rolls because we raised the exemptions to the bottom which is I think a good policy but at the same time those are 5 million people who don't really care if you lower personal tax rates because they don't pay them. Mitt Romney was right when he said 47% of Americans don't pay federal income taxes. He was wrong about what it meant I think but I think Republicans need to recognize that you no longer have the federal income tax being as much of a burden on as many people it's still a burden on the people 53% who do pay it but the fact that only a little more than half pay it is a problem from a political perspective so I think that the focus needs to be more on alleviating the debt so that we don't have to raise taxes in the future and that perhaps we can lower taxes again once we get our debt situation resolved. With that in mind I think that leads to the next issue which I think has an important overlap and a couple of my fellow panelists have addressed this is the issue of poverty. We really need to look at poverty in a serious way and the reason I mention it in conjunction with debt is that if the U.S. defaults or if we have a major debt crisis or something happens that forces us to completely change our policies if we have a debt crisis in this country basically that will hurt the poor the worst and for a number of reasons. Number one the poor don't have the savings that the upper classes have it's by definition they are poor. Number two if there is some kind of economic collapse that's generated by debt we will lose the economic dynamism that allows people to rise from the lower rungs of society on the socioeconomic ladder and move upward. And number three if we have a debt crisis there will be indiscriminate cuts in social service programs that will not help anybody we will go after things with a meat axe rather than a scalpel and that will not be beneficial to the poor or to anybody else. But that said I think that Republicans are well poised to address the issue of poverty. My friend Ron Haskins has written groundbreaking has come up with groundbreaking research that talks about the three things you need to do to get out of poverty. You've got to graduate high school. You have to work full time and you have to wait until you're married to have a child. If you do those three things that reduces your chance of being in poverty from 12% to 2%. And I think Republicans are poised to engage in pro-family, pro-work and pro-education policies to help get people out of poverty on their own. I agree with the points that Jennifer was making. In fact I had some of those numbers written down in front of me although I have a couple more that I want to add. We've spent about 20 trillion dollars in the war on poverty. We spent about a trillion dollars annual. There are over 122 means tested programs. There's no way that all of those programs are being effective and we would need some kind of consolidation and an approach to poor people that really addresses their needs rather than just throws money at the problem. And so I think if we can do all of those things we can solve many of the agenda problems that the Republican Party faces. I think that just saying no to Obamacare is not a positive agenda or an agenda that will be successful in the future and I think that what we need to do is come up with this kind of pro-growth pro-growth series of policies that will solve our problem. Now that said Republican Party faces another issue which is on the communications front and that's something I talk about a great deal in my book and I'm not going to talk about it now but I look forward to getting into it in the Q&A. Thank you. Thanks very much. Fantastic. I appreciate very much the compassionate high-tech agenda and your love for Bush 41. Someone developed a kinder, gentler iPhone than the one I have. I would be grateful. So let's think of our questions if we could. We're going to have an opportunity to, Mike's going to come around and if you raise your hand I'll call on you in a second but before we do that I'm going to do a lightning round for our panelists if we could. Just keep your answer just to a minute. I'm just curious just to throw out a question for each of our panelists just as you're to give you a moment to formulate your questions. Tevye if I could, I'll just start with Tevye and then come down the line. You mentioned Obamacare at the end. I know you know quite a bit about healthcare. I'm just curious real quick if there's a single policy that the Republican Party should be putting as an alternative to repealing Obamacare that they should add to the mix that would make a difference. What would it be? I think that Ron was right when he talked about prudence. I think that the Obamacare policy was the opposite of prudence. It tried to do absolutely everything to address a problem that needed to be broken into discrete parts. And the Republicans have actually put forward an agenda that CBO has scored and instead would reduce the cost of premiums on individuals and includes buying insurance across state lines, expanding the use of HSAs, tort reform and so those kinds of policies I think can help reduce the cost of insurance. The problem with the Republican policy as scored by CBO is that it would only cover an additional 3.5 million Americans, which is a start but not enough. And what I have proposed in the past is to take those policies that CBO has scored and said would reduce premiums and at the same time graft it to some type of tax goodie. It could be an exclusion. It could be a tax credit. The reason I am vague about that is because there is a lot of disagreement within the party about how to configure that goodie but take some kind of tax incentivized payment to allow individuals to purchase health insurance and you put those two together and you have a workable health policy system that is done in a prudent way. Thank you, Terry. Jennifer, I appreciate what I heard is really reclaiming some of the social issues such as poverty, that the Republicans have had some success that are underreported in reducing poverty. So if there was a single policy recommendation in the low income family area, what would be the most important thing, whether it is marriage or EITC, or is there something else that if a national level politician would focus on, either rhetorically or substantively, that would be the area to focus on first in terms of poverty reduction? So I think one of the most important and immediate steps that needs to be taken and it needs to be a long-term agenda that has many ways to advance it is transferring the discussion from thinking that cash benefits and in-kind benefits are going to be the way to solve this. In other words, defining the problem is merely material that we can win by spending, the war on poverty by spending and deep in public understanding once again and you can't just do it once, one time, two decades ago and hope that we've learned our lesson for all. We have to keep teaching this and one of the ways to do that is to draw attention to the entire price tag of the welfare state, the means-tested welfare state. Almost a trillion dollars a year by all levels of government are spent on means-tested aid to poor and low-income Americans. Get a handle on that, get a handle on that growth and then start dealing with the incentive structure of the welfare state you have and that incentive structure is going to get you to solutions that are going to transcend the material problems, get to the work and to the marriage and to the cultural issues that we've got to tackle if we want to turn the tide on a half-century of a failed war in poverty. Thank you, Jennifer. Ron, everyone's going to come out of this meeting, buying Tevee's book and reading your Washington Post article, I think. The references to it. Hey, man. The economic mobility piece. You've got the order wrong. I should start with the post piece. To me, the economic mobility side, this is one I want to ask you about more, the 47 percent, the income, the social disfranchise, the middle class, the party of social mobility and economic mobility whoever captures that view has a real opportunity. Would you say more about how a party, but in this case, the Republican party has perhaps some work to do, but also some opportunities as you've laid out, might focus on recapturing the social and economic mobility mantra? Well, I think I laid out the agenda that I would follow. I should have used the term mobility because it is a mobility agenda, and it's something that, you know, I wrote a book about it, and it's everything that we wrote about almost is compatible with what Republicans would do. Let me talk just about the marriage issue, because I think the marriage issue is so crucial. I just got through analyzing the last five decennial censuses.  Marriage rates go down without exception. They just keep going down. The one exception is college educated women. In the last 20 years, their marriage rates have actually increased slightly. It's the only good news in the whole thing. So as a result of that, here's a shocking thing. 20-somethings are not going to stop having sex. So if they're not married and they don't stop having sex, they're going to have more kids, and that's exactly what they're doing. And the non-marital birth rate is increasing for whites, for blacks, for Hispanics, for everybody. Blacks are probably reaching some kind of a symptom because they're up at 22% and it's been stable for about three years, but the other two groups are continuing to increase. So the first thing I think we should do that we could do that would work and what? What was that? Oh, okay. That was me. I feared this was another strategy. Is non-marital birth. We know a lot about reducing non-marital births. We've had tremendous success with teens. We still have the highest teen birth rate in the world, but we've reduced teen births every year since 1991 except for two years. And it's in part because of our policies and because I think there is agreement among ministers and parents and local politicians and so forth that teenagers should not, you want me to stop? 20-somethings is the real issue. Until recently, if you look at the numbers, it's amazing. Teen births are going like this and births among 20-somethings are going like this. So it's like young ladies could contain themselves and have to be 22 or 24 or 26 and then they have babies. And by the way, I think if we discuss this, that would be a worthwhile thing to discuss because I don't think they're accidental. They want to have a baby but they don't want to be married. They have guys that they're willing to have a baby but they would not marry the guy and I don't think many of us would want them to marry some of these guys that they have babies with either. But we have very good policies and very nice studies that show, for example, if we talk about this, if we make birth control measures, especially LARC, long ass acting reversible, we will save money because a huge percentage of births just on Medicaid are Medicaid births, but it will save a lot of money after that as well. So we could really do something about non-marital births. That would be a first step in a marriage agenda. Unfortunately on the marriage front, there's not much we can do. We've done a fair amount. We've changed the tax incentives. I don't know what it is about why marriages decline so much in America but there's at least a hint that women with more education, their weights are actually increasing. So if we can educate more women, the marriage rate would probably go up. That would be the first thing I would focus on. Thank you, Ron. Thank you, Ron. Governor Whitman, I wanted to ask you about identifying and harvesting state and local ideas. So a lot of concern about gridlock in Washington, you have a lot of experience at the state level and looking at the local level. I'm curious if you see any promising ideas at the state and local level or promising leaders of the state and local either one, just quickly, that if there's one thing that you have noticed outside of Washington that could be taken nationally, is there anything promising that you have seen? Well, there are a number. I mean, there are a lot of things going on the states. They are the laboratories of democracy and I think that comes from the fact that for a governor, you've got to deliver. You've got to think and talk and pontificate and then maybe pass something under which you don't have to live or you don't live up to. You have actually got to get things done and the people know who to blame if you don't. And so that's why we're actually going through the welfare reform. The governors came down and the Republican governors came down and we butted heads with the administration over and over again and got through a bill that was reflective actually of what many of the states had already done to the degree that they could. And we got support through the federal government. Finally, it took three times before the president signed the bill. It was a third time. We got a bill that he would sign that gave us the flexibility to do what we wanted to do. So I would definitely as we look to the future, I look at the governors to see where we have people who have some executive experience. I think we've seen frankly in my opinion over the last five years that without executive experience it's pretty tough to manage a huge executive branch to manage government. I think you've got to have some of that so that you understand the consequences of some of the policies. As to specific initiatives being undertaken, I see a lot. We did it back when I was governor but there's much more happening now when you talk about schools, charter schools, the Republican agenda to try to move forward on charter schools and getting that done. Work being done on education in a variety of ways, vouchers, those sorts of things. Again, experiments that are going on, experiments and work that is being done with tax structures to try to encourage economic growth and looking at the regulatory system to see where it makes sense, what you can do to protect the public in the way that you need to because there is a role for government here but not to get in the way of good business and to be able to encourage business growth. That's something that you see happening across the country. The other thing that I would hope that might be encouraging that you see happening in the states is looking at different ways to redistrict and to try to open up the process so that you get more competitive districts and that's going to be something that I think has a great deal of potential for the future if we're going to open up and break open the partisan system a little bit so that we get a government that's more reflective of people in general and not just small constituencies within each of the congressional districts. I wouldn't pick out a particular governor at this point that I think is going to be the next leader but a lot of people look at my state, I will say and he's done a lot of good things but I'm not going to be that partisan or parochial as it were. Thank you governor. Mark, I think about the closing, the gap on empathy and the cares for people like me point which was I think very important. I'd be curious your thought about what is more important the idea, you laid out a four point agenda which I thought was very important. I also have some concern about policies or ideas that get promoted or introduced legislation that would be introduced or passed in the House for instance for the base that ends up having no chance of becoming law but hurts in the empathy gap area because it seems to be narrowly tailored and so I'd just be curious your reaction to stop doing things which hurt the empathy issue as it relates to, even as we develop a positive agenda. Give me an example of what policy that hurts the empathy. So in April comp time passing the House for instance no chance of becoming law, nothing new in the work family space, doesn't do anything to the FML so stuff in the labor area but it has, you're coming up with an older idea which hurts on the empathy you know the message becomes mixed on the empathy. I think you're there's a some of you all know I've for a few years occasionally meandered back up to the Hill to some former colleagues and really encouraged them to try to formalize a bicameral mechanism with not outside of leadership candidate, I'm not sure this can be done through leadership at this point to try to forge some sort of a consensus agenda that can be articulated by some promising, I mean there's some members that I think are remarkably kind of in a position to shape a vision along these lines and do it bicamerally I'm impressed with Mike Lee's presentation recently at AEI and Heritage as well both Rubio of course and Ryan both gave great talks at a camp speech recently, a lot of synergies and overlaps and their ideas and policies they're stalwart members like Joe Pitts and others so I think there's a potential for a group of members in a bicameral way to outline some policies that I think that could in a sense shape that agenda and avoid some of what you've described as unnecessary not unnecessary, but policies which produce I think some dissonance in terms of messaging and ultimately are short-sighted in terms of their politics and also frankly often short-sighted in their policy as well you said it better than I sometimes I think we have underlying policies that are good, the example I use would be underlying good policy but the messaging becomes so problematic and there's no chance of becoming a law so therefore it mixes it has a mixed benefit this is excellent, let's open up if we could let's see where our questions lie raise your hand if you've got a question I want to see how many we have so if we think about pairing we're going to take two questions at a time let's start with the person to her maybe the gentleman and the lady on your left if we could and if I could a single question if you could and identify yourself if you wouldn't mind and keep it short so we can have it all Anne Stonehead of Republicans for Choice and I'm glad to see the social issues did not center we're not a centerpiece here but one of the things that we have to do as a party and I would love to hear what the panelists say is find a way to turn down the volume and so that people Christie is attacked as a rhino Republican name only for disagreeing on a couple of issues even Pete Sessions now is attacked as a rhino the level of vitriol that's coming out the screaming and the yelling and all that keeps anybody from working together and I've often recommended that maybe they bring in the search for common ground into the Congress and have them within the party, not between the parties first within our own party to get people to sit down and really hear each other on policy solutions putting aside the most divisive issues but you know to have people who have given such great services Christie just hammered and attacked and savaged is ridiculous and when you have that going on other things don't happen so any other ideas that people on the panel have to turn down the vitriol we'll take two more questions then we'll go down the line and have a chance for anyone to answer what they find most interesting let's take a second question just following up on the marriage question my name is Anthony Odea I'm a consultant on economic development and I thought both Mr Huskins and Ms Marshall made very strong empirical arguments as to why it is better to encourage and certainly not discourage people who are going to be parents to marry yes the empirical data shows kids are much better off in that stable situation than with single parents I was more concerned that Ms Marshall then I don't mean to be offensive but slipped into the argument I thought the same sex marriage question where I'm not sure we're looking at the same kind of empirical evidence my understanding is kids in stable same sex unions do comparably to those in traditional marriages certainly a great deal better than those with single parents are we mixing empirical with traditional values or are we open to going with the empirical evidence where it leads we'll take up the lady in the front and we'll come back to left time for her hi I'm Adele Stan with RHrealitycheck.org and I guess my question is primarily for Governor Whitman it's kind of the flip side of Ann Stone's question where there is a lot of discussion now about the role of Republican moderates since you have the big role of the tea party discussion and do have Republican moderates enabled the growth of the right wing I remember in 1996 when a lot of this began with Pat Buchanan's bid with the nomination and that convention there was an attempt by some pro-choice Republican women to do a floor fight and I was it was my understanding that you decided that that wasn't going to be productive and asked your delegation not to engage so I'm wondering what comment you might have on where moderates who now are being said to be in a very tight spot in the Congress might be in changing the party very good so let's start with those three questions focusing on the inner dialogue turning down the rhetoric internally the marriage question Jennifer you may want to focus on the empirical data in terms of families and children but we'll start with Governor Whitman and the question that the lady just raised in terms of the roles of moderates well have the moderates contributed yes and part of the problem is they're moderate it's not the same passion it's part of the definition and when you see consensus you don't draw those lines in the sand that say we will not talk with you if you don't believe with us on this issue or that issue and how you overcome that I've tried I've had an organization that tried we've got other organizations that are out there they're trying to just reach that gap to say to Republicans look my father described it the best when I asked him what made the difference and he said parties are like umbrellas you have a central handle of an umbrella that is those are the core shared values that you have those are things like respect for the individual low taxes balanced budgets those things that I talked about at the beginning and then you have all the ribs that hold up the canopy and the ribs are different ways of interpreting that which means you could have people who don't agree with you on everything under that same all comprehensive umbrella and that's where I think we need to go back we need to go back to what our basic principles are and focus on those and say it's all right we understand that when you do that you're not going to have people that agree with you 100% on everything I've been married 40 years not agree with my husband on everything but you know we're a nice stable marriage and I just wanted to do one little bit on that on the marriage I'm a heathen here because I think government ought to be out of the business of marriage I don't know why we use that word and have government in marriage we ought to have frankly this is where the Europeans do do it well when you go down to the county clerk or the municipal clerk and get your marriage license that's the state's total involvement period the end and then if there's a church a mosque a synagogue who wants to marry a homosexual couple or a heterosexual go ahead do it it's not going to bother my marriage I don't I do agree there's a statistics that I've seen and of course obviously proved wrong all the time on things and it was something that I I allowed as a governor that a child in the welfare system was so much better when they were adopted by a loving couple and if that loving couple happened to be gay I don't care if you've ever spent any time visiting shelters where you have children that have been put into the system at age two and three because they come from abusive households they are in a terrible situation and they just do you got to believe they do much better when they're with loving engaged parents and if they happened to be gay okay but I do think that the government the bottom line is we'd all have a much easier discussion if government limited itself to providing the license and beyond that there was no more involvement so that intelligent consulting adults could decide who got there who got their insurance and who could make their final decisions for them when at end of life those sorts of things and we are our broader discussions and I don't think we should be as the party should be talking about further but I feel like we should have one more and let Jennifer address respond to this because I think the question was to her as well so Jennifer. So you asked if the empirical evidence is the same or we are not dealing with the same kind of empirical evidence on same sex households that's because in the case of the intact family and other household forms we've got data from decades and scads and everything that a child does best when raised with married biological parents. What we have now emerging are the beginnings of scholarship that look at new family structures and so what we've had to date in this area has been mostly what we might call convenience samples where there's advertising in the community to try to get people to recommend people to be a part of a study. Now convenient samples like that are very helpful for qualitative data being able to tell the kinds of questions you should ask in larger samples but they are not population based data they're not large enough samples to be able to generalize from those conclusions to form policy at large for the population as a whole. So we're just beginning now to see the kinds of studies that could from which you could extrapolate the kinds of things that we have extrapolated for years about the intact married family biological family. Are we willing to follow where the data leads us? I think that's an exceptionally good question to put to the those who are supporting redefinition of marriage because thus far it has proven to be the case that they are not willing to look at the data they are not willing to look at the conclusions of a study called new family structures from the University of Texas at Austin that it's peer reviewers of Palomato. You remember Palomato who's so seriously well known in discussions of divorce and other things. He said this is the best we've had to date. This is the best we're probably going to be able to hope for in a while and yet this study got condemned by proponents of same sex marriage. They're not willing to go where the data says. What the study showed was that those who had experienced being raised had experienced with same sex relationships of their parents did not fare as well on a variety of outcomes. Just this week, and I would point you to thepublicdiscourse.com if you want to read more about this, we have a study based on census data from Canada that is looking at educational outcomes and what it's seeing because they have a longer history of recognizing same sex relationships in Canada is that children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65% as likely to have graduated from high school as children of married opposite sex couples. There was specificity with regard to the gender for girls living in gay households. They are only 15% as likely to graduate from high school as those girls from opposite sex married households. So yes, we should be looking more at the data. We should have a more robust debate about it. So far, that's not been possible. Thank you, Jennifer. I want to ask, and we're going to have see how many more hands we have for questions here for a second. All right, so we have a few. So let's take some more questions here. Tevi, I know you have an interview coming. I'm going to let you have the next word about communications because we mentioned that earlier. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought in part Governor Whitman's, please do. Yeah, thanks, Ann. I'm sorry. Fair enough. You're right. No, but I met you since you referred to it. I forgot. So Tevi, opportunity to talk for a moment about the inner party rhetoric. Rhino and then I'll go into the inner party. The number one characteristic of a rhino is having a thick hide.  I think famously of the disaffected Democrats in the 60s and 70s who were dismissively called the neoconservatives by Michael Harrington and the neoconservatives led by Irving Kristol said that's a great name and they took it on. And so I am a conservative. I have a long history as conservative. Jennifer will attest to my decades of working in the conservative movement both at think tanks and in government. And if I come out with a position that says let's be prudent about this and somebody calls me a rhino, I'll say, okay, fine, I'm a rhino. I don't think you should worry too much about other people calling you that name. The second point about communication is that I think Republicans just need to be smarter about the way they've reached out to the American people. I think President Obama, a critic of President Obama, I did not support him in either election and I worked pretty hard for his opponent, Governor Romney, in the last election. But I think he was very effectively using pop culture in his 2012 and 28 election efforts. He went out on shows where the voters he needed to reach were and he went out and he reached out to them. And if that meant circumventing the White House press course, then that's what he did. And he recognized something very important. That 30, 40 years ago when there was a show like the MASH finale or Who Shot JR, those shows got 100 million viewers. Last week Breaking Bad went off the air. It was talked about all over the place. It was in all the newspapers and it was all over Twitter. And the finale which had 50% more viewers than that show had ever gotten had 10 million viewers. Record breaking 10 million viewers. So there's no one place where you can get the audience anymore. No one place where you can reach out to everybody. President Obama recognized this segmented approach to our population. And he went out and reached out to the voters where they are. I think Republicans would find their electorate in different places, but they still need to go out and do the hard work and find those voters. Can I add one thing to this? Real quick. I agree with what you said about rhinos, okay, but that's not really the issue. The issue is how much influence they have in the Republican Party. If moderates had more influence from the Republican Party, the government would not be closed. And we would not be having a discussion about the debt ceiling. That's the real issue. And the Republican Party, especially in the house now, is controlled by people who are willing to do things that I think prudent, wise people would not do. And I don't think Boehner himself would have done these things without being put. Boehner did what he did because he had to to maintain agreement within the Republican Party. There was no way to do it without bringing conservatives along, and they wanted to close the government over Obamacare, and they did. Let me just quickly respond to that because you and I are coming from different places. I side more with the conservatives on this, but if some conservative has a position that, let's say let's be more prudent and let's not do the default or let's agree to raise the debt ceiling, which Boehner just came out for this morning, and somebody calls him a rhino, he should say, fine, I'm a rhino, but I think this is what we should do. And I don't think you should cry, let's say, if you're hit with that appellation. That's my whole point. But I don't agree with you that I want the moderates to be more ascendant. We'll continue the discussion in the green room this morning afterwards. I'm going to take five last questions, and we'll have a chance for each of our panelists to respond. So the gentleman, the lady has a question here, and the gentleman here, because he had his hand up for the longest year, and then that gentleman here and we'll go to the back, okay, please go ahead. Thank you, yes. I'm one of your single independent voters here, and I have a question for Ron, I think Governor Todd Whitman, and anyone else, you're all making very good points. They sound very nice. But who's listening to you? When I lived in Seattle, we had our term limits passed for the King County Council. The elected officials didn't like that, so they brought their top attorneys to Seattle to overturn the voters' choice of term limits for council. So who's listening to all of you with your five strategic points of wanting to make changes besides the people here, and then you have the talking heads all over radio and TV and whatever. Who's listening to get your message that sounds pretty moderate? Yes, Ron, I do agree with you that the moderates on the House are not being heard, and they're afraid of the tea party. So who's listening to you with this stuff? Thank you. That's a very good question. The gentleman in front of her. I just had a question, though, and I agree with you, Ms. Marshall, that the fact is that there is significant empirical data that chose that we have a long history of the positive impacts of traditional marriage, and a little bit less of a substantive and kind of authoritative research standing for measuring these six, if there are any some effects for same-sex couples. But at the end of the day, and this is a wonderful discussion in the think tank and policy arena, at the end of the day, Republicans need to win elections. And so Mr. Rogers makes the point that we have a lot of voters in these key demographics that are motive voters, that they are coming not from an intellectual and academic or policy analysis standpoint, they're making very emotional decisions in the voting booth. So, respectfully, can't you see that a lot of this analysis comes across as not empathetic or the fact that it is to say that even though if your analysis shows that there is only one specific choice towards a traditional relationship, there's an obvious negative correlation to this key demographic that's making very emotional, non-empirical, non-policy analysis decisions. Great, thank you. I'll take the gentleman here, his hand was up for a while, and then the lady in the back and then we'll go to him. I'm Basil Scarlas, I've lived and worked abroad most of my life, and my question relates both to the open primary or the closed primary problem and the influence of business groups. My question is, do you think the recent loss, apparently recent loss of influence of business groups on the Republican Party is something that can be corrected and would if there was greater business organization activity in the Republican Party it might have a moderating influence. Thank you, Shelley's question. So, lady in the back. Hi, I just want to circle back to one topic that Ron, you mentioned briefly, but I'd love to hear everybody reflect a little on it, which is child care and early childhood, because that used to be an issue that Republicans had a pretty good track record on, and frankly, a lot of governors in our two states that have universal pre-K are Oklahoma and Georgia. But I'm wondering why we haven't heard much about it since the President's proposal, and are they going to run away from it now that Obama has put something out there? Yes or no, and should they or should they not be running away from it? Very good, excellent. And a final question here, we'll have the gentleman right here, and I apologize for not getting to every hand. Thank you, my name is Rourke McCorsen, I work at the Heinrich-Bowl Foundation on Climate and Energy Issues, and those are two topics that I didn't hear very much about from this panel, and I'd like to hear, especially from Governor Whitman, about maybe what national Republicans can learn from state and local level Republicans on climate and energy issues, because my observation is the more local you get in the U.S., the more bipartisan those issues become. You can look to, like, red states in the wind corridor that have very progressive energy policies, or in Georgia where you hear recently about the Sierra Club joining together with the Tea Party to push for renewables. Sierra Club, because it's good for the environment, Tea Party because it's consumer choice, let the marketplace decide. And I'm from Long Beach Island, New Jersey, which is here's a pop culture reference, it's at the Jersey Shore, it's a Republican leaning area, too, where I'm from, we're not all concerned about who's getting married when, how many 20-year-olds are having sex, but we're concerned about rising sea levels, and everybody discovered their love for FEMA last year after Hurricane Sandy. So I'm more interested in about state and local lessons to be learned on climate and energy policy. Thank you. I'm going to go to Teve because I know he has an interview and then we'll go with the government and Whitman and down the line. So we have our five questions here on who's listening, on empathy, loss of business, childhood, childhood, climate and energy. Take any of them. We have five minutes, a minute of peace, a tall order, rock and roll. I'm going to connect, I think actually several back to Ann, your earlier point as well, which is there's a proverb with lack of a vision that people will perish, I think part of the problem is a lack of vision for this kind of internal catfighting take place, and I think there has to be that vision. And again, my earlier worry, if we're not going to get it until summer of 2016, we're in deep, deep problem. And that gets into both the empathy gap and who's listening. I think there is an agenda, you heard pieces of it here, where I think business communities can be working together with social conservatives and working with moderates and put forward something that actually does unify the party to some degree, and I think that's, you know, that potential exists, the question is who is going to take the leadership to pull that together. And that's why my hope is not in our existing party leaders right now, it's in a group of, I think, very articulate, I wouldn't call them back benchers, but promising folks, and so my call out again is the same as before. We need to see a few of these folks work together to lay out an agenda, a vision. Thanks. I'll go very briefly because we're coming to the end, and I will address three. The question is number one, on who is listening? That is kind of the roughest, cruelest questions you can ask a think tank person. We lie awake at night wondering if anybody is listening to what we have to say. A question about the business groups. I think that my agenda as I laid it out would actually be right in the wheelhouse of business groups, and I think that business groups would appreciate. Also, you suggested that the business groups lose, have lost influence with the relevant party. I think Boehner's moved to raise the debt ceiling at least in the short term is in part a reflection of his listening to business groups and their concerns, and in terms of the Jersey Shore reference, which I appreciate, I will tell a quick story, that the original title for my book was from Cicero to Snooki, how our culture shapes our presidents. But the publisher told me I could not use that title because the Venn diagram between those who know who Cicero is and those who know Snooki does not intersect. That's it. Well said. Jennifer. Empathy as I said at the beginning matters as a connective value when it connects to something that is true to reality. And so I think when we are looking at the question of marriage, we have had marriage policy that has said we recognize this institution because of the needs of children, and that takes a front seat to the desires of adults. So what we're looking at in the question of marriage policy continue to do that is empathy for the welfare of the child. And that's what this discussion about welfare reform was about in the 90s. That's the kind of conversation that I think we should continue to have. Ron. Let me just say one thing about the early childhood question. Look, Obama puts a $90 billion initiative on the table, and Republicans are going to say let's go to the table and discuss it. Come on. He just did it wrong. I mean, I think it's a great issue. I would be willing to have my taxes raised to pay for more preschool. There's a lot of quality issues and so forth. But when you start out at $90 billion, what Republican could possibly take it seriously? They cannot take it seriously. It was a mistake from the beginning, although it's a very important issue. Okay, environment's mine, obviously. And the Jersey Shore as well. There is a lot going on in the states, and that's a good thing because, again, the National Party seems to be out of step with where the American people are. Most American people do go outside from time to time, and they do watch the news. They know things are changing. They're willing, they're confused about why and what it is we should be doing, but they know things are changing. And there's a very good book called High Tide on Main Street by John Englinder that I would recommend anybody that's made it very clear, in very clear everyday language, what it's going to mean to us fiscally as well as from a national security issue with sea level rise. It is happening. You can argue over why, but you got to start by recognizing that something is occurring because you can't solve a problem unless you're willing to admit that it exists. And many of the states are. Even in New Jersey where Governor Christie took us out of Reggie, which was the carbon trading program that the Northeastern states had entered into, they're now thinking about getting back into it, taking another look at it because we do need to curb our carbon emissions if for nothing else in health. I mean, okay, so you don't want to say that greenhouse gases are real and that they have an impact, that humans cause them. But we know they're carcinogens, they're pollutants, they're bad for human health. We don't want to go back to those days when we had people being dying prematurely because of bad air quality, being hospitalized in the summer. And asthma is an epidemic today in this country where you can call something not contagious and epidemic, particularly among children. We don't know what causes it. We know what can trigger an attack and we know what can exacerbate one. And that's PM 2.5, it's called. It's particulate matter in the air and it's stuff we're putting into the air. So it's in all our best interests and from a fiscal point of view, that's a slam dunk for Republicans. You just go right to the fiscal line and say, and it's empathy too because we're going to make live longer, healthier, better lives and we're going to save a ton of money by anticipating some of these problems and dealing with them ahead of time. We think about who is listening. We hope that both leaders of both parties are because these are fabulous panelists who have wonderful ideas. Please join me in thanking all of them. Thank you, friends. Thank you to the Annie Casey Foundation. And thank you for all of you who are listening in person and on the internet. We are adjourned.