2020 Silfen Forum Transcript

"Civil Discourse in Uncivil Times"

Panelists: Donna Brazile, Jeb Bush, Julian Castro, Peggy Noonan, Ashley Parker and panel moderator, Michael Delli Carpini.

Narrator - Welcome to the David and Lynn Silfen University Forum. Please welcome University of Pennsylvania president, Dr. Amy Gutmann.

Amy - Hello everybody and welcome to the 2020 David and Lynn Silfen University Forum. Today we can be in a blue ribbon panel, two former presidential candidates, one former governor, one former mayor, one former head of the DNC, two Pulitzer prize winners and one eminent professor and former dean. Only six individuals have achieved this and much more in their contributions to our constitutional democracy. We were all originally scheduled to meet together in the spring but then everything changed. Over the past 10 months, the novel Corona virus has claimed over 1 million lives worldwide and over 200,000 in the United States alone, a staggering disproportion of black, LatineX, native Americans and low income Americans have died or been hospitalized. The largest mass movement for racial justice in generations arose in the aftermath of the horrific killing of George Floyd. With 20 days to go before a presidential election, political scientists are documenting hyper partisan divides, demonization of political opponents and rampant misinformation gone viral over social media, even about basic matters of life and death. But these phenomenon are not new to 2020. It's well documented that we tend to listen to like-minded media, we tend to shut out facts that challenge our own beliefs. Anonymous, social media comments pillory the unpopular while protecting those who spew hate. And it takes hard work to counter these heard tendencies. Before the pandemic seven out of 10, seven out of 10 Americans, an overwhelming majority called incivility in the public sphere a serious problem. All who value open expression and respectful and robust discourse across divides core values of our university. We must ask ourselves, what can each of us do to overcome this problem that so many people see as so serious? So to address this question and many more, we have a phenomenal panel of experts and civic leaders with us here today. Tuning in are Donna Brazile, Jeb Bush, Julian Castro, Peggy Noonan, Ashley Parker and panel moderator, Michael Delli Carpini, welcome everybody.

Jeb - Thank you.

Amy - Welcome, welcome, this forum is made possible by the very special friends of Penn. We honor the memory of Penn's former trustee, David Silfen, David and his wife Lynn generously endowed The David and Lynn's Silfen University forum. We could not be more grateful and now let's get to know our panelists and moderator.

Welcome to Pulitzer Prize Winning columnist and Penn honorary degree recipient Peggy Noonan. She is the bestselling author of nine books on American politics, history and culture. Miss. Noonan brings unique perspective to our conversation having served both as a member of the media and within a presidential administration, as special assistant and speech writer for president Ronald Reagan.

Welcome Julian Castro, Julian Castro is the former mayor of San Antonio and the 16th US secretary of housing and urban development. A former democratic candidate for president, Mr. Castro began his political career as San Antonio's youngest ever city Councilman. He made history again in 2012, when he delivered the keynote address at the democratic national convention, the first Latino to do so.

A special welcome to Ashley Parker, Penn class of 2006, Pulitzer prize winning White House reporter for the Washington post and senior political analyst for MSNBC. Miss. Parker earned her Pulitzer for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. During her 11 years at the New York Times, she covered the 2012 and the 2016 presidential campaigns.

Former Florida governor, Jeb Bush, welcome governor Bush served two terms as our leading our nation's third most populous state. Governor Bush is a leading voice on closing socioeconomic achievement gaps, immigration reform and achieving political consensus. A former chairman of the national constitution center and the Penn presidential practice professor, he has strong ties to Philadelphia and Penn. Welcome back Governor Bush.

And welcome to Donna Brazile. Donna Brazile is a veteran political strategist and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 2000, Miss. Brazile became the first African-American woman to serve as the manager of a major party presidential campaign running the campaign of former vice president Al Gore. She speaks widely on a number of topics, including inspiring civility in American politics. When Miss. Brazile joined Fox News as a commentator, she wrote in her announcement, listen more, talk less, be civil to one another, find common ground.

And finally, I'm pleased to introduce our moderator, Michael Delli Carpini, Penn's Inaugural Director of the Paideia DIA program and professor of communication in our Annenberg School of Communication. Professor Delli Carpini served as Dean of the Annenberg School from 2003 to 2018. A prolific scholar, he's an expert on the role of the citizen in democratic politics with particular emphasis on the impact of communications technologies and the mass media on public opinion, deliberation, knowledge and participation. Professor Delli Carpini has taken on the transformative task of leading Penn's new SNF Paideia program. I hope he'll say a few words about what that program brings to Penn as he launches our discussion. Thank you all for joining us, let's get started, take it away Michael.

Michael - Thanks a lot Amy and thank you to our distinguished panelists and to our audience for participating in this year's Silfen Forum. I'm honored to serve as the panels facilitator and also pleased as Amy mentioned to have the SNF Paideia program be co-sponsoring today's forum. Paideia is the ancient Greek term that means educating the whole person. With the intellectual and financial support of the Stavos and the Arcos Foundation, the Paideia program at Penn strives to provide our undergraduates with the knowledge, skills and values to live meaningful and productive lives as individuals and as citizens broadly defined with a particular focus on dialogue across our ideological and cultural differences. We do this through courses that are open to all Penn undergraduates, a fellows program that provides a more immersive experience for smaller cohorts of students and as with today's forum sponsoring and co-sponsoring events that address and model robust but respectful dialogue. You can learn more about the SNF Paideia Program by visiting our website at SNFPaideia.upenn.edu. With that public service announcement If you wanna think of it that way, let's turn to today's topic. We have a lot to cover, so I apologize to the panelists in advance if I need to occasionally interrupt so that we can move on to the next question. We're gonna start with individual questions to each of our panelists to get the ball rolling and I'd like to start with Governor Jeb Bush. We are three weeks out from a national election that both presidential candidates have called the most important in a lifetime. It has also been one of the most unusual campaigns and elections we've ever seen. As an experienced candidate and office holder, what do you make of what you're seeing? What do you think is coming down the pike, not in terms of who will or lose but what you are expecting or fearing or hoping in terms of the remaining days of the campaign, what election day will look like and regardless of who wins, the reactions of the candidates, media and public in the elections aftermath.

Jeb - Wow, you want me to be brief?

Michael - These are also topics we're going to continue with.

Jeb - What I would say is that we're likely to see more what we used to call Black Swan events, the high impact unforeseen events but they happen now almost every other day. So my expectation is that we're in for a pretty volatile ride between now and election day. One of the things that I think there's been a lot of statements about how this could go on for months. The system doesn't really work that way and there are enough States, more importantly, Florida and Ohio are States that will count their ballots on election night. Florida has, we learned our lesson down in 2000, you may remember where we had all sorts of different ways of counting ballots. It was really decentralized to the County level, in Florida, we centralized all that. We require supervisors of election to count the ballots when they come in, both early voting and absentee. So we'll have our results and Ohio has a very similar system, we'll have our results in even if it's close, 99% of the balance will have been counted. Only the overseas ballots will have a little extra time. And so if the election, if Joe Biden wins those two races, all of this talk about that the thing is rigged and all, that I think is really dangerous to try to make sure that people don't believe in our institutions, that'll subside pretty quickly. And I also think there's a large number of people who'd just say, it's time to move on. So I'm expecting a relative closer election than what we see now. I think there's gonna be a massive turnout which is encouraging and what I would pose to you all is the question that I'm interested in is, if a vice president Biden wins, which is likely today, will he focus on reconciliation or will he double down on the fairly poisonous political environment we have now? Basically, will he say, now it's our chance, it's our chance to expand the Supreme court, it's our chance to eliminate the filibuster, it's our chance to carry out our agenda which was never really a big topic in this election or will he be the person that he has been historically as a public servant? So that's what I'm looking at and I'm hoping as you might imagine for the reconciliation, Joe Biden.

Michael - Yeah, that's great, that's great. And a lot of the points you raise are points that we're gonna touch on I hope over the course of the next hour. Actually, I'd like to turn to Donna Brazile with something that's related with what Governor Bush said, you're an experienced strategist and an expert on public opinion. What do you think in general is the mood of the country right now? Are they excited, scared, thoughtful, angry, expectant, exhausted or something else or all of the above? But most importantly, how does it feel different to you than other election periods you've worked and lived through? And what do you think the mood will be as we both approach and especially after this coming election?

Donna - Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's so good to see many of my friends on the screen. I miss traveling to Florida, of course. I love Florida, Governor Bush knows that very well, all 67 counties and I've been through. In fact Governor, I spent my last holiday before this pandemic in the Panhandle just to reacquaint myself with the fact that that's a different time zone versus the rest of Florida. But there's no question that the majority of Americans are quite frustrated today in addition to the pandemic, the economy, which has soured as a result of a health crisis and of course some of those social unrest and people just feeling anxious about what's happening in their own lives. We have millions of our fellow citizens who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own and they're struggling to make ends meet at a time when they don't know if they're going to have the resources to make it through the next month and pay their rent, et cetera. So there's a lot of anxiety out there. Millions of Americans are preparing to vote early, the enthusiasm to get out there and vote is much higher than I've seen it before. On average it's around 69% to 70%, today it's at 84% among Republicans as well as Democrats and of course the important group of voters, the independents who are not aligned, but will make up the margins. I agree with governor Bush, that this election is gonna be one in the margins. And that's why it's important that even during this pandemic, we find ways to canvas and to talk to neighbors and to go out there and try to engage as many people as possible. The key of course is to get this young generation, what I call the millennials generation X, Y, Z, to get them more engaged because they are the majority of the electric. There's no question if the election was held tomorrow, I would be happy because Joe Biden would clearly when that just the blue state, that then candidate Trump was able to win in 2016, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But I think that the vice president clearly has put additional resources, Florida, of course, Ohio, North Carolina, but and I'm sure Secretary Castro is pleased that Texas is in play. I don't know if Texas will ever turn blue in my lifetime, but if it's gonna happen, we'll see the real results this year. And of course out West, in addition to California, Oregon and Washington state, Colorado, Nevada but also Arizona. So more States are in play this year in large part because we have a very competitive Senate, a slate of candidates across the country and not so much to house, 435 seats only, less than 44 competitive compared to two years ago when we had about 87, it's about 44 this year. So overall great frustration, country is looking for leadership. If it's a referendum, then I think the president will lose, if it's a choice it's gonna be close but I do believe that Joe Biden has the inside straight to get to 270 electoral votes.

Michael - Thank you, thank you. You mentioned Secretary Castro, I'd like to ask that question to Secretary Castro and I wanna talk a little more directly about the issue of civility in politics. So you've had a long record of public service and had run for office with both the local and the national level. In politics, things like name recognition and familiarity count a great deal in order to capture the attention of the public and ultimately win votes. When you were first running for office or when you were running for president regions outside your home base, could you talk a little bit about some of the pressures to maybe start to attack your opponents in ways that might cross a line, just to grab headlines. How does a candidate negotiate this essential political reality while staying true to your core values and beliefs, especially in the face of what might be opponents who draw the line in a different place than you do?

Julian - Yeah, yeah, great to be with you all today. Hello from Texas. It's a great question, Michael. I think that's on a lot of people's minds these days and has been during the era of Donald Trump. He did something that you rarely see a politician being able to do, which is to base his campaign so much on negativism without any history or credibility and electoral politics and still to be able to prevail, usually you don't see that. Usually somebody has to establish a credibility with voters before they're able to effectively go negative on an opponent and what I found in the 2020 primary was that voters on the Democratic side really were not very responsive to pure negative attacks. What they wanted to hear was amongst, with regard to other Democrats now, I do think that they were open to negative attacks on Donald Trump and very frustrated with the Trump administration and I absolutely yearning for a change there. But what they wanted were solutions and they wanted to know what your plan was. And I think that in this election that Joe Biden is doing well, not only because so many people are voting against Donald Trump, but also because they believe that he actually does have a plan and that he has the experience, the wisdom, he's been there before and even if they haven't heard the specifics of his plan, they believe that he knows what he's doing, that he has one. And to me, I see that as the strength of the positive. So yeah, I think that in our democratic primary, 2020 was a year where people wanted to hear the positive amongst the candidates, they didn't like it when one of us attacked the other. And at the same time, there was no question that part of what's fueling to turn out that you're seeing in state after state, I mean today, Texas started it's in person early voting and you had lines from before the polls opened at 8:00 AM Central Time. Part of what's fueling it is gotta get rid of Trump but in the primary, it was actually the opposite, like they didn't wanna hear a negative about other candidates.

Michael - That's really interesting, thank you for that. I'm actually talking about the various factors that are involved in this one is obviously the media and I'd like to turn to Ashley Parker now. As a professional journalist who covers political campaigns in Washington politics more generally, has the landscape changed significantly? I know it has, I'd like to know how you think it may have and are journalists being treated differently? How has access to political leaders been affected? And has the role of journalists themselves change? And what is the fallout for that, for journalists, for elected officials for the public, even for our democracy?

Ashley - Sure, the landscape is absolutely changed and a brief point of personal privilege was in 2016 before I covered Donald Trump's campaign, I covered Jeb's campaign. That's where we first know each other from, that's actually the only place we really know each other from. And I am sometimes not frequently but I just pause and think, what would this be like on earth be if I was now covering a Jeb Bush administration? But it feels like it would be quite different, not necessarily even in policy as much in some ways but certainly in tone and in norms. So it's an interesting thought exercise, probably more fun for me than for the governor. But two ways it's changed. I mean, one thing is I often think if you were an alien, the way the president Trump has cast the media, if you were an alien and you came down to planet Earth and you just sort of like glanced in on what's going on electorally, you would think that there are three political parties. You would think there's the Republicans led by president Trump, you would think there's the Democrats led by Joe Biden and you would think there is the fake news, CNN, Fox, Lame Stream, Amazon, Washington Post Media party. And he has turned us into the opposition and that is deeply different. And that's not to say that the media always play as a combative role with whoever's power, Democratic or Republican. One thing we do of many things is we hold people to account. So governor Bush, he didn't always love our questions or our stories but we have never, I don't think at least since I've been covering politics, been cast so much so clearly as the opposition where there is a moment in every Trump rally during the campaign which I covered during the primary, I mean that now during COVID, but the media is kept in a pen. And I wanna be clear, most candidates the media sort of behind bike racks for any campaign. But with Trump rallies, the rallies are 10,000, 20,000 people, the cage is in the middle of the arena and there was a moment, it is part of the Trump show where he turns around and he calls out the media and the crowd chants, CNN sucks or whatever else it is and he calls people out by name. He once called me out by name at a rally in San Diego. Luckily, I'm a printer analyst, so no one knows what I look like. So when he was like, "Here is that woman named Parker here." I just looked around too like, "Is she here?" But I mean, it is just a fundamentally different dynamic than his previously existed. Said some of it the last final brief point I will make is and again, I wanna say the first administration full time I've covered as a White House gate reporter is the Trump administration. But my understanding was again, Democratic, Republican administrations, there used to be sort of arbiters of truth. If Karen Hughes and the Bush administration or Karl Rove or Valerie Jarrett or David Axelrod told you something if they were in the room, you could sort of trust them. And in the Trump administration, there are so many fewer arbiters of truth. That's not to say that everyone lies and even some people who give you bad information, it's not intentional, it's that when they were in the office at 10:00 AM, the president was gonna pull out of that trade deal, right? And by noon, he's changed his mind. But one of the reasons in Washington post stories, we often have a line that says, this portrait of the president in this moment is the result of interviews with 27 senior White House advisors, Republican lawmakers, operatives and friends of the president is because we find to do what our job is, which is to authoritatively tell the truth as best we know it in that given moment, we have to do a kaleidoscopic approach where you have to talk to 27 different people and you have to understand what they all saw and what their agendas are and what their spin is. And if they're a known truth teller or if they're like Wikipedia, right? Like a good jumping off point, but you had never cited in a term paper and only then can you bring to your readers some semblance of what is actually going on in the administration, I think that is new as well.

Michael - That's really insightful, thank you. If people are MSNBC viewers, I think they know what you look like though Ashley. So, okay, I'd like to now turn to Peggy Noonan. Peggy you've been on the inside and served as a speech writer for a president who was known as the great communicator. I know or I think I know you believe that the words of presidents and other elected officials matter for the policymaking, in leadership during moments of crisis and beyond advocating ideas in bottling modes of acceptable behavior. Could you talk a little bit about why you believe this and also what do you make of the state of political rhetoric at our current moment? And I mean that more broadly, I mean, we've been going after president Trump for reasons that I think are obvious in some ways but more broadly the state of political rhetoric. And has your thinking about what effective communication by a political leader looks like changed in recent years?

Peggy - Well I think in general, in the broadest way, Michael, how a president acts, what he says, how he comports himself, how he walks into the world, how he relates to people nearby him at an event or relates as Ashley says to the press with respect or with not, all of these things are vitally, extremely, definitionally important to the president. I think one way of proving how important these things is, is to look at president Trump and to see that in what he says and how he presents himself, he has often been unusual, utray, surprising only when he's not surprising, off putting sometimes a Garrish creature. Okay, that's how he acts. Look at the context in which he's operating. He had until coronavirus a really, really solid economy as economies go. He had relative peace in the world. A president who acted and thought and radiated the part of the presidency would have had numbers of 50 or 58 or even 60% with accomplishments like that, if you will call them accomplishments and with acting as a presidential person would. Instead, this president is fighting for his political life. Nobody wants to go on the line and say, "I think this is happening or that is happening." But it look like history is unfolding before our eyes with each new and kind of strange and lengthening in the distance between the candidates polls coming out. If this president had acted perhaps and thought as a president, I think he would not be in the terrible fix that he's in. So to me, he's almost proof that decorum matters, that how you think and how you present yourself matters. If I'm allowed to, I would love to throw a question to Ashley just quick. When Trump crowds are around you, when the president does his thing about the press and the crowds whip around and look at you, do they look like people who feel they're in on the joke or do they look like people who are genuinely mad and kind of make you think, "Wow, this is really bad."

Ashley - That's a great question and it really depends. I should say at the outset that the Trump supporters who get the most attention are the ones who behave badly of course and 90% of them are not like that. In terms of, so if you're doing man-on-the-street interviews at a Trump rally, even people who are critical of the media, right? Before they go to insult the media, they're sort of, "It meant no offense, "I'm sure this isn't you very polite." But in terms of sort of that friends in crowd, again, it totally depends and it's a really weird alchemy, right? It can be the crowd turns around and they're booing but they're smiling, right? And we're all in on the joke and they're booing us in the same way they chant build the wall, right? And it's just part of the Trump show, like a favorite Bon Jovi by hit, like "Living on a Prayer." And it's all good fun and then sometimes again, depending on the place and what's in the news and kind of the president's mood, because he, more than anyone, frankly is a master fall sort of orchestra conductor, it can be very. And again, this is probably a lesser percentage but very angry, right? With people kind of wanting to pick a fight and leering and coming up and yelling and spitting. And again, that is not the norm but one thing I realized was in 2016, I was going into campaign rallies and this is at the end when you're in the bubble. And so you're sort of getting, you're coming in with the motorcade, you're getting brought in and he's filling arenas and you're kind of like running out of the, like the little alcove where, like NBA players would run out, right? And I was at the time at the time a colleague of mine who was at The Post at the time, we realized in one crowd we were running and kind of, as we're running through, we were like looking up 'cause we were and we didn't even articulate it, we were worried that people were gonna throw stuff at us or try to hit us and we were kind of just like on guard with our laptops and I remember thinking like, this wasn't like what it was like when Jeb Bush crowds, this wasn't what it was like in 2012 when I Mitt Romney. So, there is that element but again, I would say most of the time it can be a much more warm dynamic.

Michael - It's a great inside view of what that must be like both sides of that. So what I'd like to do now is ask questions of two of you at the same time and I'll ask one of you to start and then the other person can react to what they've heard or throw in your own views on the topic. And for this start, I'd like to start with governor Bush and Secretary Castro. It's been eight months since the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Currently the U.S. leads the world in positive cases and in deaths. Our economy has taken a brutal hit with millions of jobs lost and with them, both paychecks and health insurance for countless citizens. As public officials, you've held the physical and economic wellbeing of many people in your hands. What's your diagnosis of what the U.S. hasn't done well, what we have done right and how the pandemic has influenced our politics and political dialogue. Let's start with you Governor Bush and then we'll bring Castro.

Jeb - Michael, I'm gonna use a tactic that I wasn't very good at in the 2016 debates. I'm not going to answer that question first until I get another one.

Michael - (laughter)That's totally legitimate in this forum.

Jeb - finally learned how to not answer questions in debates. Representative Castro you probably had to learn the same thing cause our parents taught us to actually answer questions. It got a little confusing for me in the midst of all this. But I would just wanna add as it relates to the Trump effect, my personal belief is that the presidency has prime ministerial duties and kingly duties and soon queenly lead duties at some point. And the symbol that the presidency has, the institution of the president and the person that fills that space, I think the president has failed completely. I think Peggy was saying in a different way, the prime ministerial duties as a conservative, I think he's done some good things. So I'm not a never-Trumper obsessed about the president and all that and I think there are a lot of people that are kind of in my camp, worried about the institution of the presidency being diminished by his personality and hoping and wishing that it wouldn't be that way because more good policy could go to come out.

Second thing, I just say quickly, our politics is a mirror, a circus mirror perhaps as a mirror of our culture. And this is a cultural phenomenon not a Trump phenomenon. President Trump would not have been elected a decade ago. We have changed as a nation, we are more vulgar, we are less civil, we don't interact. Social media is maybe exacerbated this, but we don't interact amongst people that we may not agree with anymore. We're in this kind of bubble where we're getting our views validated regularly. So I think maybe we'll have more conversation about that because I think the obsession about Trump kind of misses the broader challenge that we face as a country.

As it relates to pandemic, what I would say is it would have been better to have a president that acted like some of the governors, basically provide the information, bring out the experts, educate people, give people a day to day kind of update on where we stand, say where the problems are. Look, this was an unprecedented challenge. If we're expecting a president of United States from a standing start to deal with this global pandemic and shutting down the entire country, not at any sympathy for the status that a public official and this kind of environment has, I think we're missing the boat. But the public leadership side of this is really important. You've gotta give people hope and you have to have empathy about the plight of millions of Americans that have either lost their jobs or have loved ones that have been infected or worse their elders have died. So I think that the lessons I had going through eight hurricanes and four tropical storms and I know, being married, you have crisis that you have to deal with. Those skills, and you could see it with governors, I think they did a relatively good job of communicating what was going on, giving people hope, giving them information, relying on science and experts. And unfortunately I think while the response was probably better, that the federal response was probably better than what it appeared because the president made it all about him and it became hyper partisan. I mean, wearing a mask is now a political statement. Good God man, that's the weirdest thing in the world. We've allowed ourselves to fall prey to some really dangerous things that hurt our recovery. And so I don't give him good grades as it relates to the public leadership side of this, difficult not answering your question.

Michael - That's great points, I'll say that I do public opinion research. The public opinion polls definitely show that local leadership and state leadership was admired by the public much more than national leadership and some of that is perception, some of it is real but your point's well taken. Also wanna make the point that it's perfectly fine for any of you to take these questions in another direction. Your microphone will not be turned off if that happens. So secretary Castro, you can talk about the pandemic and its effects or you can respond to some Governor Bush's other points or you can talk about some other aspects.

Julian - Yeah, no, no, I certainly agree with his assessment of the president's public leadership. I think the president has failed to live up to the role of the presidency and not just to act a part but everything that goes along with that, the confidence that that inspires in the American public, the buy-in even among some people who disagree that that can inspire, the role modeling effect that it has and I think of president Obama, even people who disagreed with him, I think that he was a role model for many young people and for families across the country. But you also asked part of your question also was, well, what did we get right? Were there some things that we got right? And when I think about what we got right, I think about the people and what they got right. Even though wearing a mask has become partisanized, unfortunately and largely because of president Trump and some other folks out there, I do think that the vast majority of people have taken this seriously in different ways, by taking precautions, by doing social distancing, by wearing a mask. Also when it comes to housing, which is near and dear to my heart, right? We did this cares act pretty early on in this pandemic. Of course there were disagreements about how far it should go but Washington worked the way the Washington should work. They produced investment that people needed and there was a lot of worry in the housing world that we would face millions and millions of people who would be evicted, right? What we found was that people were responsible in how they husband did their resources. And they knew that they had to make sure they paid the rent and took care of their family and that they had a safe, decent place to live. So, when I think of getting it right, I think that the American people themselves in a lot of ways have gotten it right, even in the backdrop of a highly polarized partisanized America. There are certainly people that are not doing that. I think of these images that we see of the rallies that the president is holding right now. I guess he just hold held one in Sanford, Florida yesterday, where people are not wearing their mask, not social distancing. So I'm not naive about that, I'm not dismissing that, but I do think that the majority of people, the vast majority of people actually have taken seriously. And so I believe that we may have a moment and this connects, I think to what Governor Bush was saying earlier about if vice president Biden becomes the president. What has been missing in our country for some time is the sense of national identity and purpose. And I feel like even though this has been partisanized, this pandemic experience, we may have a moment early next year where with the right leadership, we can sermon that sense of national purpose and identity with a vision that has enough buy-in that President Biden can get good things accomplished, that will put people back to work, get our economy back going and keep people safe, get us closer to the highest ideals, including of equality and fairness in this country. That's the focus on the positive.

Michael - Those are great observations, thank you for that. I'd like to now turn to a question for Ashley and Peggy and again, take this in any direction you want or respond to what you just heard but what I'll start us off with is media and communications have changed rapidly and profoundly in the past two decades. We've talked a little bit about that and many reports from various intelligence agencies have warned our nations leaders and the American people that social media outlets are prime breeding grounds for foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns. Do you see a relationship between the increase in disinformation that appears to be in the air now and what also appears to be an increase in incivility? And to what degree do you think social media is at the root of these problems? And do you have any thoughts as to what might be able to be done to resolve that if that's the case? And I'll start with Miss. Noonan.

Peggy - Well, I think Michael, social media does many good things, we're familiar with the wonderful things. Tomorrow morning I will get up and just fire up my iPad with a click and I can see all of the headlines of the world and the commentary of everybody and the funniest videos from overnight. So there's that wonderful, undeniable, fabulous part but also the internet when it turns to political coverage and political thinking, it just leads everybody hopped up, it leads everybody just jacked up, excited, they are subject to algorithms that feed their perceived biases and so the algorithm supports what they were already thinking but sharpens it more. All of this stuff turns out to be highly divisive and I think in some funny way, leads people in the morning when they do put on their phone or their laptop or their iPad, just thinking as their favorite news site comes up, "What fresh hell is this?" You know what I mean, it's a constant feeling of expected mayhem in a way. I don't know what to do about it. I'm gonna jump here very quickly to my, if you don't mind since we were talking about the pandemic, my great pandemic frustration is this, we have a nation that has an economy. You cannot kill that economy in order to fight an illness. You've gotta work it in very subtle ways, close what must be closed but have a bias towards opening, towards having an economy that works, towards having schools that are open and work. So I think that's where your bias should be while at the same time, if that is where your bias should be, you should be able as a political figure to say, "These are the conditions that can get us to safe opening "so that America can open up again "and New York will wake up again "and everybody won't be in their pajamas." What do you gotta do? You have to wear the mask, you have to be safe, keep the distance and wash the hands, use the Purell. We all know this but we need leaders who say it and once they say it, which is a way of acknowledging the illness, then you will start to follow them in terms of, yeah, we can feel safer about opening as long as we do it in a safe and mature way as a mature people. Instead we never quite got that and it has led to part of the confusion and just general pandemic mess that we have. So let me just throw that out there as my big frustration.

Michael - Thank you, I think that's very consistent with some of what I've heard from Secretary Castro in terms of the role of citizens and leadership. Ashley, on any of those issues or something else, how would you like to jump in on this?

Ashley - Sure, I'll jump in on social media, which is I think I probably like everyone have a very complicated relationship with social media and that I'm convinced it is ruining my brain. I fundamentally know that those moments when I would sit down on the couch and open a book before I go to bed, open a book, I am stunned to see how much time I can waste on Twitter and on Instagram. When I had a new baby, like I reached a really disconcerting phase, I would be up in the middle of the night breastfeeding and I'd be scrolling through Instagram and then I would get that notice no one wants to get, which is like, you viewed all new content, right? Like I had gotten to the end of the internet on Instagram. So the relationship is complicated but one thing that I think is fascinating and this I did a story about for the Times back covering Romney in 2012 was the way campaigns and political operatives react to Twitter is stunning. So I would write a story about Mitt Romney run on the front page of the Sunday Times. It might be somewhat critical, not something he likes and maybe someone would yell at me if they saw me at an event and pass it, right? You sent out a stupid tweet that you send out because you're bored, like I can't believe the Romney team gave us soggy Panera again on the bus, right? And the tweet goes viral and everyone on the campaign is furious with you, right? Like how can you say that about our Turkey clubs? And I kind of personally came up with a rule of like, if I'm gonna get in fight and again, I'm a journalist, so being in a combative stance, it's confusing cause I'm also a people pleaser but it's very natural for me. But I sort of felt like if I'm gonna be fighting with the campaign, I want it to be over a story that I made 50 calls over and dove through documents and reported and ran on the front page of the Sunday Times, not a stupid tweet I sent to try to impress another reporter sitting next to me on the bus. So that was my own personal rule. But the interesting thing to see was how the campaigns rival and the ones who were covering would monitor reporters tweets almost as a Precog alert system. So they would see the smart operatives, I'm sure Jeb's team did this and knows this and Julian's too. But based on reported tweets, they might see that a comment is being misinterpreted in a way that's gonna be very problematic for their candidates. So before the event has even ended, someone on the candidates team is reaching out to you and saying, "That's not what he meant and here's his record," and "here's how you should view this." Or vice versa. They see something about the opponent and they think they can fan it and they say, "I noticed you observed this about Donald Trump. Well let me give you 20 other things he said about women that also fall into that bucket. I think there's a really good story there." And so, I don't know if it's good or bad but that sort of interplay where campaigns believe they know where the story is headed before I have literally sat down and typed "by Ashley Parker" exists when they closely follow the social media.

Michael - That's fascinating and a real insider's look at that, thank you. My next question is for Donna Brazile and Julian Castro and this is a question that's close to my heart because of, it's something I struggle with personally, but also because of this Paideia program that I run, which is centered on the notion of civil discourse. In the aftermath of the brutal killing of George Floyd in June and many others before and since us, the U.S. and places around the world have witnessed the largest mass movements, excuse me, a second here, the largest mass movements for racial justice in several generations. At the same time, there's been growing call for a return to law and order and the painting of protesters as riders, extremists and outside agitators. Have we reached a point where calls for civil discourse are or at least appear naive or even counterproductive from the streets of Portland to the tweets of the president of the United States, do you think this moment will ultimately bring positive change regarding race in America and more generally or exacerbate the already sharp divides that we have in this country? I worry sometimes in talking about civil discourse, that it feels almost naive and antiquated in this moment where there are such wicked issues that we're dealing with that, what do you think about that? And I'd like to start with Donna.

Donna - Well, I think the best way to preach civility is to practice it and I wanna take a page from Governor Bush when he said, I'm gonna answer this question, but not answering the question at first. And I was thinking back to March of 2020 and when all of us, I was grounded. I haven't been grounded my entire adult life. I've been living out of a suitcase since I graduated from LSU and I love it. I love seeing this country, I love getting around, I love interacting with people, I love teaching my class. And here I was sitting here in Washington DC, and my inclination is always to help. And the mayor of the District of Columbia called upon Michael Chertoff, who served in the Bush administration and Susan Rice, who served in the Obama administration and she put together a reopen task force with the belief that we could all come together during this pandemic to figure out the best way to bring the nation's capital back, okay, back. The one thing we figured out, Democrats and Republicans is that pretty much we were on our own. We have no governor, the White House abandoned us, the Congress abandoned us, they treated us like a territory and we had to fight for resources. And the good news is that we had the kind of leadership with Secretary Chertoff and Ambassador Rice to try to get it done, Anthony Fauci And we began to get this pandemic on the control of the district. We got no cooperation and I kept calling up everybody I knew in the White House and I still have friends inside the White House and I said, "Look, we just wanna help you." Right down the street from the White House is a hotspot in Columbia Heights, they need help, right across the river at Anacostia, a hotspot, we need mobile testing sites, we need PPEs. Nothing. Think about 15 years ago when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Gulf. And when I picked up that phone and I call over to the White House, Karl Rove took my call, I still know his number and I say, "Karl we need help." Not only did he respond for three years, I got a chance to go and sit inside that White House with Jeb's brother, my friend and we talked. We talked about how to rebuild the levies, how to get the schools reopened, how to get new hospitals, including the new VA hospital. That's leadership, that's what's missing in this pandemic, that's what's missing throughout this crisis and that's what's gonna miss if we get it wrong. I think on November 3rd, because the country wants to heal, I think the majority of Americans would like to see, see our country move forward, so back to your question. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, I live in a pretty much a mixed neighborhood, 3.2 miles from the White House. Ashley, unlike you, I actually know the distance from me in the White House and I have most of my white neighbors. Most of them, they have Black Lives Matters, they have posters out, they have flags. I finally had the order on Amazon, I'm like, hell, I'm the Black person, I have no flyer up. Because I think most Americans want racial justice, they wanna see us come together, they want reconciliation. So in the aftermath of George Floyd when we saw the peaceful protests gathering, when people demanded the law enforcement work with their community, when we started to talk about what it would look like to have equal justice under the law, that was the moment that I thought the country could finally turn the page. And then, God knows, a tweet later--we condemn the protestors, we lift up the law enforcement and we're back to divide and conquer. Now we need to bring our country together, we need to bring people in the room to sit down and we can have an honest conversation about how we move forward. I wanna say one last thing, I'm a Democrat through and through but I worked with the Reagan administration when I was a young kid and we got the King holiday bill. I work with Jeb's father and his brother and we twice in my lifetime, I went over to the White House as I saw Republican presidents renew the voting rights act. So I'm not a partisan when I say this. I feel like I'm a patriot. I just want somebody in the White House who's saying, who gives a damn and who can bring us together and that's so all of the divisions that we're seeing today in our society. He didn't create them, but he's not helping to heal the wounds, to bind the wounds and to bring us closer together.

Michael - Thank you, thank you for that. I hope you didn't just give Karl Rove's cell phone number to 2000 people.

Donna - No, that's an old number but I have his new number.

Michael - Secretary Castro, how would you like to weigh in on this?

Julian - Yeah, look, Donna gave us good examples of working together and I think your question was, this calls for civility, are they naive or are they misplaced or are they productive? I think that they're always productive, if what we mean by stability is the opposite of what we've seen from Donald Trump, which is suspend to bust through all sorts of norms and the meanness and the vengefulness and the self absorption. Yeah, I mean, what we need are leaders that are focused on serving others and not serving themselves and are willing to, even when they disagree, try and be productive by working with members of the other party. One of the things I'm most proud of in the Obama administration is that when president Obama laid down the marker of trying to end veteran homelessness, that Washington worked the way that it should, Republicans and Democrats allocated resources to HUD and to the VA for housing choice vouchers for veterans. Mayors across the country adopted best practices because of that veteran homelessness fell by 47% between 2010 and 2016. That was very much a bipartisan effort and things worked the way they should. So, calls for civility for civil discourse, I think are trying to get us back to a norm that could lead to productiveness. However, on the flip side of that, sometimes people use calls for folks to be civil and what they're really trying to do is enforce the status quo. I grew up with a mom who was a Chicana activist and people who were marching on the streets, in the civil rights movement, the larger civil rights movement, that Mexican American civil rights movement, all types of folks. Today, people who were protesting inequality in this country and police brutality, you often would get called on civil, you're out of order, you're not committed to progress and so forth and oftentimes whether it's in corporate boardrooms or other places, people who try to rock the boat a little bit and don't necessarily just want the status quo, that's not seen as civil discourse. So I do think that we have to parse that out. We absolutely need to get to a civil discourse that is focused on the highest aspiration, the ideals of our country and people working together productively but that should not mean just the status quo and anything else is like, "Hey, that's out of bounds, and we don't need that here."

Michael - That's a such an important point and I think that applied wrongly, the idea of civility is often used to silence people who are justifiably angry. Civility doesn't necessarily mean that you have to agree with everything that's going on at the moment. So thank you for that. In a way that's kind of related to that, this next question is a starting point for Peggy and Donna. In recent years, particularly over social media, we've seen the rise of call out culture and even more emphatically, the cancel culture. This is a form of public humiliation and shutting of individuals, often celebrities and public figures but also average citizens who are on social media often whose actions or beliefs are perceived as offensive to some cause or certain groups. It's a complicated and does this form of public shaming limit public dialogue and expression or is it warranted and useful? And how do we know the difference between those two things? And I'll start with you Donna.

Donna - Well, president Obama called it out in October, I think October of last year, this so-called woke culture, this council culture that tends to ashame public officials or celebrities when they're not practicing whatever the hygiene of the day is, it's dangerous, it's poisonous. And it doesn't allow people to take time to reflect on what they said or what they tweeted or what have you, so it is dangerous, especially now when social media is such a dominant platform and the way in which people get their news. When you see this then you say, Oh my God, this is a bad person because they made a statement about something and then now your boycott and now you're saying all this other stuff. It's part of this culture that we're now living through that I think we need to expose and try to help at least young people understand that you can disagree with someone without being disagreeable. I tell people I disagree with myself sometime. But we have to learn how to be respectful of others, even when we disagree with their viewpoint or their tweet.

Michael - Yep, that's great. Peggy thoughts on this.

Peggy - I do agree with what Julian has said. I guess I'd ask a few things and I add a few things. One is that cancel culture becomes really problematic when people are threatening your job or threatening, say if you're a university professor, your tenure, if you're said to have said something that was unacceptable and suddenly your means of making your living, which you had felt you were doing honorably is canceled out and taken from you. I see it more as a phenomenon that is successfully used by the political left in America than the political right, for various complicated reasons. Certainly that's been true at the universities and the colleges. Part of the problem with cancel culture is that it's based on the idea of gotcha. You said something that I can use against you, gotcha, you did something, I can use that against you, so I gotcha. Gotcha is part of human nature, it is part of human malice. You can't cancel that. We can all try to be better people, but James Madison said if men were angels, they are not. Cancel culture of course is only hyped up and jacked up by the internet. Before that we all criticize each other as opposed to canceling each other out. I think that's probably all I have to say about it beyond I truly hate it.

Michael - Yeah, I can understand that. There are times at least in my thinking, think about some of the effects of the me too movement, where a line seems to be crossed, where it's not just something someone said but a pattern of behavior where, I don't know if you'd call that cancel culture or not, but where it feels different to me, but it's a really difficult line.

Peggy - Sure, because it involves suspicion and we're all suspicious of each other, but it was also redolent of 1954. Was your cousin a commune? I have that suspicion. So we have to watch each other. I guess the best we can do is police ourselves and encourage those around us to police themselves well too.

Michael - Thank you, okay, next for Governor Bush and for Ashley Parker in this combination and again, just a suggestion and you can take this any way you'd like but I want to return to the issue of misinformation and disinformation. Daniel Patrick Moynihan has quoted most recently without attribution by vice president Pence in the recent debate and saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion "but not his own facts." Yet we appear to be living in a moment where facts no longer matter as much at least for public leaders and citizens alike. We see this dramatically and opinions and behaviors surrounding our response to the COVID-19 pandemic and yet at the same time, the heightened attention to racial injustice seems to have educated white Americans as Donna was pointing out on the realities of being black in America. So what's your sense, are we living in a post-truth error or has this been exaggerated? Can democracy and representative government survive without at least some common agreed upon facts or truths? So I'll start with Miss Parker for this question.

Ashley - Sure, it's a great question and I think one thing i talked about how the president made the media its own opposition party. But one thing that was striking was normally in politics, if I covered, if let's say, since we're doing this together and I covered him, the governor said something and it wasn't quite right. He said Florida was number one in job creation for five years running but in fact it was number one. Three of those years, one year it fell to number three. Spinning hyperbolically. Normally we would do what we always do. We would do a fact check, we would note it in the article, the governor said this, in fact he's sort of right, but here are the set of facts and Governor Bush and Mitt Romney and most politicians would change what they were saying. Not because they cared what I, Ashley Parker or I, the New York Times or the Washington Post said but because they believed, I think correctly, that there wouldn't be a societal penalty, that voters would force them to pay a penalty, right? Because voters demanded truth and one thing that Donald Trump correctly intuited and I in some ways still think that these rules generally just apply to Donald Trump, I don't think everyone can be post-truth and I think that has made for some asymmetrical warfare between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But Donald Trump realized that if he just didn't care, right, if you just continue to say the false thing, the misleading thing, let the media say or write what they want but demonize us as fake news, that his voters, certainly his voters and his base would not care. But so that sort of shamelessness and that brazenness has been a tool that he's been able to leverage very sadly to his advantage and in doing some of these stories on, do we call it a mistruth, do we call it spinned, do we call it a lie, cause a lie in some ways implies not quite knowing what's in their heart, but knowing there is retention, right? One thing that researchers who study misinformation had said is that the more a false it gets repeated, the more it sort of feels true in that Stephen Colbert truthiness sense. So you say, oh yeah, I've heard that before and you kind of think it must be right. Or the moral equivalency, even if you know it's wrong of passing it along is lowered and that's something the president has exploited quite masterfully.

The second point, since you sort of mentioned racial justice that has been tricky to cover is that some things are just facts. And there is a world in which you can feel like if you call out something for being racist or sexist or misogynistic or antisemitic, you are somehow being anti-Trump. But sometimes if the president says something that is racist, then you can, as a reporter, you can call it out for exactly what it is and you're not taking sides, you are just being factual and accurate. And luckily those decisions get made well above my pay grade, right? So if we can call something racist in a story, that's probably the trickiest one but sexist, misogynistic, antisemitic, any number of things, that's a decision that is made at the mass level. But I do think on some of these key issues, we work really hard to say like, there are facts and this is racist for this reason and we can say it and it doesn't mean we're against the president, we're just pointing out that that thing he said about the squad and having them go back to the countries from which they came, that's fundamentally racist and you feel comfortable doing that.

Michael - That's great, thank you, Governor Bush, thoughts on this course?

Jeb - Of course I got to talk about the pet peeve I have about the PolitiFact, this idea that the press is judging and jury of statements. I'll give you an example, I would always say that we spend more per student than any country in the world and yet we have really lousy outcomes in terms of student learning K-12 and I got PolitiFact-ed by the Washington Post who said that I was wrong because the Benelux countries spend more. And my response to that is, the Benelux country student population is smaller than my county's. Anyway, I feel better now that I've got that of my chest. The first year of the administration, Kellyanne Conway, who I was a friend and I think she's a talented person, she used the phrase alternative set of facts. And my first thought was, man, that's like 1984, it's like Orwellian and it wasn't a big outcry. And from that moment on, I think there was a realization that the trust that the press has is so low as well as any institution now in our society, that the Trump administration, president Trump led by president Trump, they could say whatever they want. And we were gonna have to rebuild that trust and confidence that when people say things, there are times when it's not truthful, there has to be, you can't have an alternative set of facts, you have a set of facts. You may have opinions that are different and I think the press is somewhat culpable of kind of blending opinion with covering, with determining what the facts are. And the less that they applied and the more that they actually cover stories in a professional way and the less they get on Twitter and have their opinions meld together with what their coverage is, I think that that would be a positive step in a post-Trump era. Oh, by the way, one other quick thing, I'm probably the only person who has been canceled. I don't know how many of you have been canceled? It's not a good feeling to be honest with you. I got over it but kudos to the University of Pennsylvania, because I was a presidential professor of practice there for two years and never, ever in my interactions with students or professors was I treated in a uncivil way as a conservative and I appreciated that greatly. Like I can tell you in other universities, it's not that way.

Michael - I'm really glad to hear you say that and I attended many of the events that you were part of when you were here and I thought the students got a lot out of it, it was great, it was great, yeah. So this is probably gonna be the last question we have time for before we go to questions from the audience and I just wanna, wasn't even one of the questions I was thinking about, but given this conversation, I wanna address no pun intended, the elephant in the room, which is Donald Trump. We seem to keep coming back to him for obvious reasons, I think, but I'd like to ask this of each of you, when Donald Trump is not president in anymore, whenever that is, do you think things have changed fundamentally as a result of what we've gone through in the last several years? I mean, several of you mentioned that what Donald Trump did is or implied that what Donald Trump did is exploit changes that were already there, not following the norms and getting away with it in the broadest sense of the word, no matter who becomes president, obviously personalities are gonna change, but as politics and the way we think about what can and can't be said and what the role of the media is and how we can treat the media and how we use facts, do you think this is gonna last in a way that has effects beyond the current Trump presidency? And let me just start with you, Donna, and then we could just go around and just give me your thoughts on that.

Donna - I think it's gonna take us a long time to get back to normal, whatever normal is. I'll never forget when I went to Illinois and they say, 'you are in Normal' and I said, where is Normal? and he said, 'it's here' and I said, where? And there's a city called Normal, Illinois. The truth is it's gonna take more than just a new president and a new Congress, it's gonna take us believing in one another, rebuilding faith in our public institutions. There's so much damaged out there that we all have to attend to and it's gonna take not just our elected leaders but people outside of government to help to restore as vice president Biden often calls it, the soul of America. There's something that is missing in our call, just something that is missing. And I think we're going to have to work very hard as Americans to sort of find our place back, not just within our own communities but also across the world, across the globe, rebuilding our lives, so a lot of homework.

Michael - Yeah, thanks, Donna and Governor Bush, I'd like to go to you because you will also mentioned that this was a larger cultural issue in some ways.

Jeb - I think it's a cultural issue and I think my generation, the baby boomer generation, which created this counterculture that became the dominant culture in our lives has run its course. And the next generation, the next cultural change, culture doesn't move linearly, the next cultural change is likely to happen with the millennials and Gen Z and their values are very different than those of the baby boomer generation and it gives me hope. So a cultural change from the bottom up could yield a very, very different political environment but it has to be from the bottom up. We've lost our ability to think about how we interact with one another in our communities, the institutions that we relied on in the past, it really diminished and then importance kind of. I view it like we used to have really strong horizontal institutions. You could be a Rotarian and you'd have people of all walks of life being a Rotarian and that created a vibrancy, that's all gone. And in its place, we kind of have a horizontal world or a vertical world where we aggregate ourselves in like kind of columns and so we have to tear those columns down and we have to go back to a bottom up approach and ultimately our national politics will change if that happens.

Michael - Great, thank you, Secretary Castro, any thoughts on this?

Julian - Yeah, I mean, just quickly three things. I think, cause your question is, is Trump after he's not president but is Trump-ism and Donald Trump gonna have a longer lasting effect, just three quick things. Number one, in the way that politics is practiced, and especially on a national level, I think he's given wanna be Donald Trump's that are coming up like a peek at what's possible in terms of how to campaign and appeal to people. Now it's hard to pull off because I really think he's a kind of unique character with unique history that you usually don't see rise up like that. But I do think that you're gonna get people that attempt it. Secondly, maybe more substantively the electoral map. I believe that on November 3rd, what you're gonna see is places like Arizona and perhaps my home state of Texas, Georgia that are moving over to the democratic column. Maybe not completely firmly yet, but have become competitive and are on their way to becoming democratic States. Just like I saw 2016 as the application essentially of a Southern strategy to the Midwest and we'll see what happens in 2020 with that. And then the third, which is even broader is that I think he's expanded the power of the presidency. These would be the other two branches of government and we'll see what the next president does in the right way to tamp that down and be hopefully more respectful of those other two institutions.

Michael - That's great, that's great, thank you. Ashley, some thoughts on this?

Ashley - Sure, I largely agree with everyone. I think as the secretary said, Trump has given people sort of a window into what is possible, but I think so far, what we've seen is people who try to beat Trump at his own game are not successful. The best example that comes to mind is Marco Rubio and the primaries when Rubio decided he was gonna get down and insult Trump with similarly crude insults. The voters who loved that from Trump were like, "Marco that's disgusting, right?" And it turned on him. So I do think it is way harder to do and I generally subscribe to the David Axelrod School of Politics, which is that each election or just looking at the country more broadly as sort of a reaction and oftentimes an overcorrection to what you saw previously and so I do sort of think at some point the country will swing back and whether that's a return to more traditional civility or return to boring or whatever it is, I do think if you just look at ways that, that is what will happen.

Michael - Great, yeah and I can't see Peggy out of my screen but Peggy, you still there?

Peggy - I am still here. I will say very quickly that the question was, --does, if you can hear me, can you?

Michael - Yes, we can hear you.

Peggy - Okay, oh my gosh, somehow here we go.

Michael - There you are.

Peggy - Well, look, I think Donald Trump changed a great deal, I think Jeb is right. He came from a particular culture. If the president is not reelected in November and leaves office in January, it's not as if we'll all wake up the next day and say, "Oh, "we're classy again." Do you know what I mean? That's not going to happen. When Trump walks through the door way, he took out the door jams, the entrance area to American politics now is bigger than it ever was. So I think longterm, we just have to be open to the idea that some interesting, some normal, some accomplished people may come through that door but some really fresh and surprising people in a good way. Heck, a Harvard professor could run for president and win next time. In a bad way, a wrestler for the World Wrestling Foundation with no particular political experience or even interest could come into, so we'll see, but it's not as if his departure will change everything. As Jim said, he was a reflection of a culture.

Michael - Great, thank you very much. Amy, do you want me to move to the questions from the audience or do you have anything you'd like to add before that?

Amy - No, I think you should move to questions from the audience, Michael, I'm riveted so.

Michael - Okay, so we have only about 14 minutes. We'll try to keep these go through a few of them. The first question is from Matt Nelson, a first year law student at Penn's Carey Law School and his question, which I'd like Governor Bush to say a few words about is, what brings you hope during these uncertain times and as leaders or respected individuals in your professions, how does this hope manifest itself? What can we do with students and faculty to help facilitate this?

Jeb - First of all, the WWF that just was disparaged by Peggy Noonan? Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was an alumni of WWF and I think he would be a pretty damn good president. Anyway, I'm hopeful because life doesn't move linearly. We have these moments in history where there's a catalyst for new thinking. And man, if we don't think new after the turbulence of the greatest depression, because of the most dangerous pandemic that we faced with racial strife and with a broken political system, I think Americans are pretty resilient and I think Americans are tired of this and I can't read the future, but I do think I'm hopeful that there will be a sea change of attitude and the outcome of which is work in progress. I'd love to have the power to go four years into the future and peak back to see what the hell happened and where did we end up because I think it's gonna be dramatically different.

Michael - Yeah, that's great, that's great, thank you. The next question is from Mega Ilapu, a first year student in the College of Arts and Sciences and she writes, I have a question for Secretary Castro. During your presidential run, you used your platform to bring attention to causes that we're not necessarily in the public eye at the time, such as ending police violence and poverty alleviation. Considering our current media environment where often more attention is often placed on the horse race or the president's latest tweet, no offense, Ashley, I'm just reading this, what strategies have you found useful to get the media's attention turned to these important issues?

Julian - I mean, it's a great question and it could be worth a 100 hours of discussion about both the, I think good things, the media and also the feelings of American media. I do think that, let's take police violence or police reform which I brought up on the debate States several times and we made that one of the big issues, which feels a lot more resonant in 2020 than it did in 2019 but it had also been resonant in the 2016 election because of what had happened in Ferguson with Michael Brown in 2014, 2015 and Bernie and Hillary had addressed it in the democratic primary in the 2016 cycle. But by the time the 2020 cycle came along, I think to the media and to maybe to voters as well, a lot of voters, it wasn't a top of mind issue the way that it was much closer to now. So I say that to say that one of the challenges of American media is that it tends to do that. It focuses on immigration is hot and then some other issue is hot. And of course Trump is having his way. I think that one of his talents is manipulating media coverage, distracting and getting the headlines and so forth. And so you're operating in that environment. What we see less is the ability to focus a lot on issues that are not necessarily the hot issue of the day on the campaign trail. And so, what we tried to do in highlighting those issues was to make them as visual as possible and to go to places, for instance, I think about going to visit the Storm Drainage Tunnels in Las Vegas, where people are living there homeless to try and highlight the issue of growing homelessness in the country, which today is more resonant because we have so many people on the brink of eviction, but back then, it was not being covered in the same way. I guess I don't have any deep wisdom on that except to say that, I think the media have to be more thoughtful in the intensity, the amount of coverage and to check their tendency to operate with a pack mentality toward certain issues and then leave others alone and also an obsession with timeliness, which often overdrives coverage of something and under drives coverage of other things. And for candidates, if you're trying to get attention on issues that don't normally get that much attention, you have to make them as visual and as interesting and also unfortunately highlight the conflict in issues because I think that's another media value as much as possible.

Michael - That's great, that's great, thank you very much. This next question, which I'd like to ask Donna to respond to, comes from James Wolfe who is a staff member at Penn Nursing. In recent year movements like #Me Too, Black Lives Matter, the Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock have renegotiated the terms of our cultures discourse around issues like gender, race and the rights of indigenous people. What does civil discourse look like at a time when the foundational terms, context and power structure of discourse is being renegotiated? What does discourse, I think the main point here is what does civil discourse look like, whether it involves bringing in groups that have not really been fully part of the discourse prior to that?

Donna - You know that's been one of the greatest challenges over the last couple of months when confronted with the hashtags of these movements that are essentially online and growing but there's no headquarters, no ability to really work with the leadership in order to try to bring about the kind of changes that they're hoping to see. And so over the last couple of months, I mean, many of us have been engaged with them online, yes, in conversations like this on Zoom, to talk about the principles of the civil rights movement, and the cornerstone of the civil rights movement was nonviolent change, and how you bring about that change and that context and how do you build community and how do you dialogue with those who you might disagree with? So we've been working with them to try to help them, not just communicate their goals but also practice what they preach in terms of trying to bring about change in a nonviolent way.

I have to tell a story, back in 2016, when I was chair of the party, I received a phone call from one of my nieces and she said, "Auntie Donna, we're going out to protest." I said, "Really, for what?" She said, "Well, there's been a killing of an innocent black man." This was in Baton Rouge and she said, "We're going shut down the I 10 and I 12 during rush hour." I say, "Who the hell shuts, I mean, you can't do that, you cannot shut down I 10 during rush hour." She said, "Oh, it's online." And then I went online. I said, "That's not Black Lives Matter." And I called, everybody said, "Well, how do you know?" I said, "Because I'm Black. Black people do not shut down I 10 at rush hour." And come to find out this hashtag, this particular hashtag, emanated from someone in Australia. And there was no ability try to redirect people because the hashtag had already gone out. It had been tweeted out and posted hundreds of times and I was able to get my niece to stay home, but guess what? Several hundred kids went out and shut down the freeway for several hours. So my point is, is that we have to communicate where people are and if they're online, we have to talk to them. We have to engage them. And one of the things I've done over the last couple of months is work with elected officials and community leaders and say, look, we have to talk with our police department, we have to talk to our community service representatives and educators to try to bring people together. But you gotta be able and you have to be willing to get on this internet, which my old boss created when he invented all of this, Al Gore. And you have to constantly engage and build that community of hope so that people know that you care about them. You care about these issues but they must go about addressing the change in a positive way that can impact not just themselves but the entire community at large.

Michael - Thank you, thank you, that's an excellent point. The last question, which you'd like to pose to both Ashley and Peggy is a tough one. It's something we've talked about, but and again, much too broad to be able to do in the three or four minutes we have left but do you have any suggestions for what we might do to get back to a point where facts and truth matter, where we can disagree but where there are some common set of facts that we at least are willing to accept as a starting point for our disagreements. Peggy, do you wanna take a shot at that?

Peggy - Yeah, here's my thought about an area of improvement that I think is possible as we discuss politics and what's the right way to go. We often say there's not enough civility and that's true enough but I don't think it's the essential problem we got. We can see that data has been corrupted by ideology and politics and that's a problem, but it seems to me, one of the things that is also a problem is never mentioned and it's our inability to get at the meaning of things--discuss politics, getting to the meaning of things. Quickly, back in 2019, it was long ago, a year and a 1/2 ago, I had breakfast with a person who was going to run for president on the Democratic side. And he said to me, it was a man and he said, "I don't know, what are you thinking? What should be talked about?" And I said, "Why don't you talk about being a Democrat? Why don't you talk about why you're a Democrat? What is a Democrat, what are Democrats believe in? What is a liberal, what is liberalism? What drives the democratic party? What are you trying to get? What philosophically is behind the democratic party?" Nobody talks about these essential meanings now. I'd already done it about four years before with a Republican who was thinking of running, but he looked at me with a kind of shock as if I were deeply naive. Nobody talks about the meaning of things. I think they should, I think it would be fruitful.

Michael - That's great, that's great. I should say before I turn to you for the last word, Ashley, that I may have forgotten to mention who this question was from, it's from Matthew McDonald, a 2011 alum of the Graduate School of Education, so Ashley.

Ashley - So this is somewhat, self serving but I would say, we talked about how social media in particular serves you these algorithms, right? So if you're interested in one thing, it takes you down a rabbit hole, a more extreme rabbit hole often times, but of your interests and so I would just urge people and I know no one has any time as it is, but in the same way I talked about covering the administration, seeking out a range of sources, a kaleidoscopic approach. If you really wanna understand your world, I would recommend that in terms of news sources. So as much as I would like to say, get a subscription to the post, I stand by that, get a subscription to the post but also read the Wall Street journal, read the New York Times, right? Read conservative publications and liberal publications and I have to assume, I know some of my fellow panels have books, I assume all four have books, right? Read their books, watch Fox News and MSNBC. If all you do is watch MSNBC and you're on a first name basis with Nicole and Rachel, they're wonderful, but watch Fox news, see what they're saying over at OAN, see what CNN has to say. And because you are gonna get served and who you're friends with are already what you wanna hear, so I would just recommend a range of news sources and then you can make your own decisions but you'll be best informed to make your own decisions doing so. And also a local paper, local blogs, local websites, local paper, that's the best way to know what's going on in your own community of course.

Michael - That's great, that's great. A great note to end on, I mentioned at the beginning, let me hand it right on over here to you Amy.

Amy - This is, I mean, it's just been fascinating. Thank you so much. It's been a fascinating conversation about not just an unusual president and a devastating pandemic, but as Governor Bush so rightly noted, this is a cultural phenomenon and our honored guests and moderators have done a phenomenal job laying out the stakes and also giving us a call to action. I'll just quickly sum up some of the things I took away. As Donald Brazile said, the best way to preach civility is to practice it and it's challenging when as Peggy Noonan observed social media hypes up everything and not only everything but everyone, but as Peggy also said, get into the meaning of things can't be done that way. And we desperately had a longing to get into the meaning of things. Ashley Parker noted that there is now a three party divide in American politics, Republican, Democrat and the fake media. Secretary Castro observed how much more civil local politics is and how things are bubbling up from the bottom and need to do that more. Governor Bush also emphasize that and everybody mentioned the word reconciliation and how much our country is yearning for truth and reconciliation. That harks back to how South Africa dealt with anti-apartheid. If a country can get over apartheid with truth and reconciliation, surely our country needs a moment and more than a moment of truth and reconciliation, our honored guests, the moderators have laid up the stakes and it's up to us to take their advice to heart, to mind and to action. So I thank you Michael for being a wonderful moderator and thank you to our amazing panelists, Donna Brazile, Jeb Bush, Ashley Park, Julian Castro, Peggy Noonan, thank you all. This is an opportunity to keep the conversation going and there is an opportunity to keep it going. When you registered, you received an invitation from tabletop pen and the SNF Paideia program to join an online dialogue discussing the ideas that we've heard here today. That conversation will begin shortly and I hope you will drop in to share your own thoughts. My thanks to all of you and our audience for attending the 2020 David and Lynn Silfen University Forum, please everybody, take good care.

Everyone - Thank you, thanks so much.