org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim hart anderson i'm a senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the form it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker for three decades mark mckinnon has been solving complex strategic challenges for causes companies and political candidates including george w bush john mccain and richards charlie wilson and bano who actually it was not a political candidate i don't believe but it certainly a cause mr mccain is helped engineer five winning presidential primary and general election campaigns he's a co founder of no labels a nonprofit organization dedicated to bipartisanship civil discourse and problem solving in politics he has taught at harvard's kennedy school of government and the lyndon school lyndon  school of public affairs at the university of texas in austin he's a regular columnist for the daily beast and the daily telegraph and he's currently a fellow at the institute of politics at harvard university perhaps his most noteworthy pursuit was the time he spent in nashville working as a songwriter with kris kristofferson an experience he has described as wildly unsuccessful mr mckinnon has been identified by broadcasting  cable magazine as one of a handful of players behind every big decision in washington putting unique sometimes hidden stamp on the outcome of today's debates in his presentation today stop fighting start fixing making government work by the way he was selected several months ago and here we are in this week of all time that with that topic in the cli's asacol world we say that's providential presentation stop fighting start fixing making government work he will offer his perspective on both the challenges and the possible solutions to the political paralysis and gridlock in washington ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster tonally forum mark thank you tim tim is as you can see is literally a towering presence and this is fun for me because i actually get a little stool and i remember i've had a lot of debate negotiations for presidential debates where we're trying to sneak in a little stool so that so that i look taller because i'm actually a little guy so thanks i can't tell you how great it is to be here and not be in washington d c as although i've only been here a short time it's very clear to me that this is true no labels country in every of the word and i'll talk a little bit more about that later but as tim said the timing couldn't be better or worse given what's happening in washington d c and i just grabbed the wall street journal this morning that's just one example many to your seeing and reading but here's the headline u s running out of cash more quickly treasury now sees crunch by october seventeenth no deal to fund government in sight and one of the paragraph says unlike the previous budget battles that have consumed the federal government since two thousand and eleven there appear to be no backroom negotiations aimed at crafting a comprehensive deal that might offer a respite or even a small deal to get past the deadlines and then it's quoting senator mark warner who says i think we've got this false sense of security this time the wolf really could be at the door so we are in a crisis and unfortunately it's been a series of crises and we've managed somehow to survive until today but as we look at the road ahead and what's happening today there's a lot of reason and rationale for deep concerns and that's that is one of the primary reasons that we started a label so let me let me back up just a little bit i want to just give you a little bit of bio information on myself i know you're here not because of me but because of a topic that we're talking about today but i just want to give some context about how i come to this table in this place and as tim said i had a wildly unsuccessful musical career i went to plan b at a certain point after i realized i was going to be the second act at the st paul many apples holiday and when i was fifty years old and  and i ended up in journalism i covered politics and then i started somebody i knew ran for an office and i went to work on their campaign and then i got involved professional i work for some governors did a lot of campaigns ended up in new york with a group of godfather of our business in media and advertising and got to work all over the world working for people running for president here and in other countries and sauced you know the real power of democracy particularly in third world situations and an appreciation for democracy and then through an odd bit of circumstances i ended up back in texas and colorado really but ended up in texas for the for music in austin texas and i worked for ann richards who  for governor and was sick and was governor a real great character but at that time in texas there was really no republican party to speak of it was you're either a conservative democrat or a progressive democrat and in one thousand night i think when she was elected every single constitutional office and there's either eighteen and i think is twenty eight actually and includes supreme courts and the courts there were all democrat eight years later they're all republicans so as soon as the republican party was a stablish texas is a very conservative state and and i had sort of evolved myself political had always been just either what you'd call left of center or right of center as became of the more right of center and then there an odd bit of circumstances i got to know then governor george bush and  and he at the time was working very closely with a democratic lieutenant governor who was kind of a lyndon johnson type of character and he wanted us to he connected us and he was very supportive of his republican governor even though his godson ran against george bush he endorsed george bush over his godson and so i just tell you that because people don't really remember unless you were there what i buy partisan environment there was in texas in the ninety's between the democratic lieutenant governor and in the republican governor i went on to work for his presidential campaign is that all the media and advertising for both those campaigns i then for a number of reasons went to work for john mccain in two thousand and eight but i told him when i went to work for him that and i wrote a memo to this effect just to make sure i said senator it's an honor to be working for you and all you've sacrificed for your country i'm glad to help out though i have one cabbie which is there's this guy barack obama who is running for the democratic nomination it appears highly unlikely he's going to win but if he does i would be very uncomfortable being your attack dog against barack obama still supports you one hundred percent of vote for you but i think his candidacy be good for the country and i would not be comfortable as the person trying to tear him down in his candidacy and i don't think it be good for me and i don't think be good for the campaign six months later it happened he forgot of course i brought in the memo so i sent him remember this and he said right and he he was very mccain like  and and gave me a big hug and said thanks for help me get here be very on mccain like for you do anything but walk away which i did it was hard to do but then given the way the campaign when i was i was happy with that decision  but stepping back from all that having spent a lot more time in washington that i've ever planned or intended to and having watched pretty closely both george w bush and barack obama some very similar things happen to both those as different as they are both those presidents and that is they came to washington with a real notion and intent that they were going to change the culture and be a great story for a reporter to write to look back at the for some reasons for reasons that are similar and different they both hit the wall you know george bush had the contested election a lot of people didn't see the legitimate president cause a lot of problems on his own accord and we know what happened  washington having watched these presidents and part of and it's an interesting conversation that we don't really have time for this morning but we could talk all morning long about how why it's like it is and there's there's  there's the evolution of the internet talk radio the media is complicit in all this citizens united ruling on campaign finance laws of lots of things and that's an interesting discussion maybe we'll get to that in some of the q and a but i want to jump ahead to say that any time that i'd leave washington i was struck by the fact that you know as i go to colorado or texas where i usually am i had lots of friends and families that were self described as strong democrats a strong republicans and yet at the end of the day they would say i i just i can't i can't understand what's happening in washington because they know that even if we have to disagree at a certain point you have to cooperate in order to make some progress for the country particularly the time we have the challenges that we do and that's the way it has historically been i know we've had tough partisan times in our political history but we've always been able to at the end of the day tip tip o'neill and ronald reagan you name it there was a time in which you say ok to put the swords down and it's not about who wins or loses it's about the country and moving forward and that's where things have become paralyzed and again we can we can talk and maybe we'll do in the questions about how the how that's happened but i saw as  i travel around the country that there was this enormous energy outside of washington which i which was largely frustration and people being in comprehensible in looking at what was happening and saying how is that possible  possible in part because the incentive structures in washington are all upside down now and and people are getting punished for what i would call adult behavior and the wrong sort of people are getting rewarded by very vocal  vocal minorities that again this is kind of going back into constitutional stuff but because they can raise own limited amounts of money often undisclosed they have an inordinate voice and an unfair voice i would argue so  what we wanted to do when we started no labels a few years ago was capture this energy in the country to provide a kind of an electronic blanket of support for people who we would describe doing the right things and right things means meeting with people from across the aisle having discussions understanding that cooperation is important in public policy negotiations and the just that doesn't exist in washington and to until we cranked up this operation called no labels but it was this energy that i see in in rooms like this for people are so hungry to choose to do something about the paralysis in washington as we see the as the public policy consequences get worse and worse and worse as we read the paper every day so a few years ago what we did is we launched this thing called no labels and we weren't really sure what we're going to do with it at the time we just knew that we wanted to do something capture this energy and somehow apply that force to congress and and it's been a very interesting evolution because at first i am a kind of self described radical centrist and i thought that there were lots of people in the country who had that same sort of ideological positioning and i think that's true and and i could argue for reasons of redistricting and what have you that the congress is not particularly reflective of the country so i thought maybe that's what the organization would represent and i and we discovered very quickly and i did  that you know you get one hundred people in a room and talk about what a progressive or moderate centrist is you're going to get a you know probably a hundred different opinions and that became just a very difficult conversation in terms of getting anything really productive done  additionally we realized that that the country is polarized not just the congress but the country's polarized and we wanted to in order to be effective in what we were doing we had to represent everybody and then we had a kind of a discussion about w let's think about what are some of the systemic problems causing the problems in congress and and i think there are some very clear systemic problems that relate to how we fund our  politics back to this issue of how people how they draw districts primaries and how they're constructed so those are things we looked at and we thought you know those are really important and i don't personally support all of those things and have other efforts that i'm involved related to some of those things but we realize as other groups doing that and b those are very long term things those are five ten twenty year efforts and we want to have more media traction and this is when we kind of found our sweet spot which is we said well one of our supporters mentioned this morning that the media and i talk about the end of the program by the she spent some time in washington and and the media makes it worse and it isn't except that's really true because the media loves the conflict that feeds the beast by the way i'll just tell you an example quick example the media i was on a media show with a somebody that you're very familiar with a well known television personality and i was talking about no labels and what we need to do to bring people together and we went to a break and this person said mechanic could you just cut the bipartisan crap and give us some red meat so that's that's the kind of media culture we have in washington so we decided that that the that despite that there were people who really wanted to work together and do the right thing it's just that they've been conditioned so badly by this distant upside so we want to do is find a bunch of issues that were really democratic or republican not really left or right i describe them as more process issues that we could start getting a conversation get people in the same room and kind of start over and build some trust between the different sides of the party and so we did a lot of heavy lifting on the policy side and looked at things that we thought that people might be able to come together on and we came up with a lot of really good ideas and i'm just going to go through a few of them and again we can get to more of them later but things like an up or down vote on presidential appointments as as you may know hundreds of thousands of jobs in the federal government clued in the judiciary and the treasury having a meltdown don't have like half their people in their jobs because of this political infighting i was appointed to something called the broadcast board of governors which oversees voice of american or non military communications overseas i couldn't get confirmed for four years and it didn't have anything to do with who i was i was just a republican george bush appointee and so the democrats didn't want to let me through and this went back and forth those kind of hatfield and mccoy fighting but in the meantime we didn't have a quorum of that board to meet to address released important stuff that affects our national security and a lot of other things so that's an example filibuster reform for fifty years over fifty years until a few years ago the filibuster was used thirty five times in fifty years so not even once a year last year was used one hundred times ok so that's the kind of breakdown that we have this jamming up government question time for the president just like the british system of fiscal report to congress that they have to hear read in all science and they start with the same information no pledge but the pledge of the oath of office to many of our elected representatives go in handcuffed because they have all these special interest that make them pledge to do one thing or the other in the most famous one of the grover norquist tax pledge just there are similar kinds of move on pledges on entitlements so if paul representatives go handcuffed to congress and can't make decisions and deal with the environment as it evolves what are we sending them out there for and a series of others again i urge you to go to no labels dot org and see these ideas but the most popular one that truly reflects what the grassroots can do was an idea we came up with called no budget no pay and it's as simple as it sounds we just said the most important thing that congress does is writes a budget and appropriations bills and they're supposed to do that every every session right and there's a deadline which is right now and  shockingly until last spring i'll talk about that but the senate hadn't passed a budget since the introduction of the i pad until this spring and the reason that they did was because of no budget no pay so here's what the idea was we said simply if our i'd our broad idea was that if congress doesn't show up and do their job which is to write the budget appropriations bills and like any business the budget is the blueprint for what we do that's how we plan policy and he said if you don't do that you don't get paid  this idea suddenly popped out there and people loved it that came out of the tricks of it that makes sense i don't go to work i don't get paid i don't do my job i don't get paid and just to give an example how powerful was so we got a hearing in the senate joe lieberman the hearing but we couldn't get a hearing in the house because the chairman very powerful chairman that committee didn't like it and didn't want to apply to him or his friends and so he said we're not going to hear and we said it's fine to here and say it's a bad idea just have a hearing have a public hearing he refused to do it and you know how hard it is from an incumbent congressman to lose an election these days almost never happens and this is a powerful committee chairman who raised a ton of money he got beat because somebody said i think that's wrong i think you should have a hearing on the side in no budget no pay and they ran on that idea and became so and then this last spring as you may recall another in a series of debt ceiling crises the way that they got a budget bill out of the senate is they said ok we're going to try this no past no budget no pay idea and that's how we got through the last problem although is a temporary fix and it only applied to producing budget so the problem is we wanted to apply to the entire budget  appropriation process that just applied to producing a budget of course the senate finally produced a budget but the house has a budget and they haven't reconciled the budget and that's part of the reason that we're where we are today so but there's a great momentum behind making th supply to the overall budget appropriation process and if that were the case i guarantee you we wouldn't be at the situation we're in today fast forward we here's the exciting thing for us so i said this has been organic and evolutionary but what happens to me is i come to forums like this and i see people so hungry for this kind of an idea to just say you know what we can disagree but let's get together talk about it work it out so we realize that in order to make this really work we had to have members of congress working and invested in this idea and we knew that was a tall order given every all the environmental issues that are going on and but we knew was important for us to ever be really effective we had to get them involved and bought and so this january we announced the formation of what we call the problem solvers caucus and we had and we had a big announcement we got i think twenty members of congress to agree to be part of the caucus and we said ok that's a great start and and quietly our ambition was to hopefully someday to get to fifty members well i was going to tell you today that it was eighty four but then a breakfast i found out it's eighty six so we're really excited because what happened is that and by the way that's eighty six half democrats half republicans and they agreed to when they sign up they what happened is that they start having these meetings with their counterparts and say they did they discovered the people in the i s i were actually some good people good and decent people with honorable intentions and motives and that they could work with them that they could get stuff done if they had bipartisan support  and so they went from meeting monthly to meeting weekly on their own because they found them so productive and and in the last three months now you've seen what's happened with the rest of congress in the last three months they've written seventeen different pieces of legislation that they call make america work  and that's all moving right now and they're also moving the whole no budget no pay idea so this thing is really kind of a hockey stick in a way and by the way when we mention to the leadership of the house and senate both republican  democrat about this idea initially when we had twenty members they kind of smiled at us patted on the back and said come back when you have fifty because they never thought we'd get their business i'm sorry they said come back when you have seventy so we have now exceeded not only our expectations but a number that the leadership never thought we'd get to so they've got to take a seriously now and and they are and that's the exciting thing is because when you have a bloc that many votes that's the you know leadership understands that and hard to get something done and you and we've got a pocketful of eighty six votes powerful things can happen so we had a big event this a month or two ago when we rolled out all these  have a congressman rick known as part of the organization and we have a great no labels local community and shelley stone as the person i was talking about who who gave up a month of her time to actually work at our office in washington d c but they've done a great job of working this at this level and and so i'm going to i'm going to let it end here except to say and go to questions but what i want to say is talk to shelley talk to the rest of our local representatives get involved  labels dot org because i think you have eight members of your congressional delegation and i mean seven of them are part of no labels yet and they should be so that's something you can do is go to your members and find out and just urge them to be part of this because it's  it's we're getting traction we start to get some results and given all of the chaos that's happening in washington that's critical thank you thank you mark mckinnon you're listening to the westminster town hall forum broadcast live from westminster presbyterian church on nicollet mall in downtown minneapolis learn more about the forum online at westminster forum dot org and going to like us on facebook and follow us on trip twitter as well i'm tim howard anderson senior minister at westminster presbyterian church in moderator of the forum our speaker today is mark mckinnon co founder of the washington based organization no labels will be taking questions from our speaker for our speaker from the radio audience through twitter and facebook or twitter handle is westminster t h f and you can find us on facebook at westminster town hall forum while the answers collect questions from the in house audience i want to invite the radio audience to join us here at westminster for our next forum on tuesday evening october fifteenth at seven pm when national security expert valerie plame wilson will be our guest speaker and now mr mckinnon if you no labels strikes me as a populist movement and other populist movements in over the years have tried to make change in washington very few of them have made significant inroads there's one called the tea party can  describe the impact of the tea party as a kind of a populist movement is it in fact a populist movement well it's certainly captured the energy of an important constituency in america one that is highly mobilized highly vocal and again it's been very effective over the last five six seven eight years not in ways that i as a progressive republican endorse but it shows the power of capturing that energy and again there's there's a variety of reasons that groups like the tea party have been as powerful as they have because they've they figured out how to use the tools and the kind of the new money in the system to mobilize and i think it's just it's an example of what you can do in the current environment with the tools are available and that's what we're trying to do with no labels employ the same kind of tools the same kind of power and the same kind of energy if one side in the political process refuses to compromise and the questioners says for instance the g o p and punishes those who attempt  compromise within their own party how can we make any across the aisle progress is if you do well i'm an optimist and i think that the fact that we have as many grassroots supporters as we do and people mobilizing is it is a i see i feel a tipping point coming on where people are fed up they've had that they say this idea of these interests in washington simply shuttling sand into the engine of government is bad for the country and what's happened is that people have gone from a place where they were they may not have like what's going on in washington but they they generally became apathetic because they didn't feel like there was anything they can do now what's happening is that the consequences of this gridlock are so great that people are mobilizing the people are coming to no labels recognize that they see the consequences down the road like i just read the wall street journal and they know that it could be catastrophic and so i'm compelled and by the way you know there's a there's a couple of tea party members in no labels and so are our ideas that we get those people into a room and meet with with their counterparts and recognize we can condition them to understand at least have a conversation that we can change behavior and change the outcome so that's part of our our goal is to get everybody in the tent and everybody talking we think we get everybody talking of that that's a great start and that's what we're discovering money seems to be a particularly key part of this problem in politics what are the prospects of overturning citizens united well this one is close to my heart this is this part of the reason i was initially supported senator mccain i feel very strongly about the corrupting influence of money in politics and i think it just permeates everything  and is that the root of a lot of our problems i want to just tell you a brief anecdote from texas this is kind of a classic texas story i work for another governor before and richards and when he was elected in typical fashion his campaign manager became the appointments person right so the campaign manager who raised all the money now becomes the guy who selects the people who get all the jobs and government well in texas then and now unbelievably you can give as much money as you want to anybody you can give ten million dollars to somebody run for governor so he was having a meeting with a man been a counterpart from minnesota is either minnesota wisconsin and so was the campaign manager an appointment chief or the governor of minnesota or wisconsin and which had very different laws or has different laws and so his counterpart said yeah we here you know you can't give more than five hundred dollars or a thousand dollars to somebody running for governor and the guy from texas  but you can't get more than five hundred dollars to somebody is right for governor the guy said yeah stuff for second shakes his head says well so how do you know who to appoint and he was serious so citizens for those of us who are concerned about money in politics citizens united is a crushing body blow my hope was that the that decision and for those of you may not know that decision basically said you know corporations are people and and it just sort of struck down all of mccain's finance reforms and unfortunately i think there's about to be another decision from the supreme court that makes things even worse because i think they're grown women ate any caps on giving so anybody can give as much money as you want to to anybody it's just astounding to me you know i believe in free speech but i believe in fair speech and if somebody can g millions of dollars like some people are doing through pacs now and i can compared to somebody else that seems to me completely unfair the problem is that until the supreme court changes it's unlikely that anything is going to anything will change and so we have to wait till that up that said there's a lot of good people doing a lot of hard work on a lot of legislative and regulatory fixes that can happen that have to do with making sure we know how much money is coming in who's giving it where it's coming from  transparency full disclosure so there's a number of other remedies that we can work on in the meantime but it's it's a very frustrating circumstance right now and so overturning citizens united is probably not happening any time soon but has to be done but in the meantime there are things we can do with our government to work better if we push for and get public financing of elections well again i i support the idea of public financing of elections i think the notion of anything well let me back up i spoke to the freshman class of congress that came in this time every single one of them and for that matter anybody else you're talking congress hates raising money i mean it's very few people  can find actually like raising money and the numbers are astonishing in terms of how much time they spend having to raise money i'd say on average it's probably about seventy percent of their time that they say they spend raising money so  reduces that imperative to raise money and i think that small donor financing public financing the those a number of different different mechanisms that create safe you raise x amount of money from hundred dollar donors you get a match for that money at a forty one match just just good ideas that mean that the candidates don't have to spend as much money raising time so i support it and i think there's some good ideas and there's some states  there working on these these kind of ideas in the doing it successfully to what extent do the political player polarities evident in washington d c and elsewhere merely reflect the culture of the us today well great question i kind of touched on that earlier which is to say you know i like to think that there's a bunch of people like me ideologically out there in the country aren't being represented and i think that's true but to the questioners point this country's become more more more ideologically  separated and part of the reason for that well there's lots of reasons but we've become such a mobile society that people are clustering now among like minded people we used to have to live and go to church and go to school with people who  different than us but now because of technology and mobility and a lot of things people sort of self aggregate around people who are like them and it reinforces behavior and so i think for those reasons we have a generally more polarized country and that's why that's part of the reason that no labels it's part of our mission to make sure that we represent as broad a constituency as possible but because that's the way the country is and which here's a question for one of our high school students not just becoming a voting age people in their twenty's and there are people i've spent time around last few years teaching because there's there's a they have a you have a real different d n a which is that you're passionate but skeptical you recognize that there are huge problems out there had that have been dropped in your lap that are going to be fixed to the traditional channels and so what we're seeing is a lot of younger people are not going to sort of to work for the local democratic party a local republican party or local member of congress or whatever it might be what they're doing is they're going to places like no labels you can't believe the number of people we get who want to in turn at our office we had seventy in terms of summer and we have an office that's like a you know a third the size of this room we had seventy interns in there out of fifteen hundred applicants but but is it but it's the it's that kind of power and enthusiasm that the younger generation who are going to nonprofits very entrepreneurial directions but very nontraditional directions that i think and advocating for change in new ways that gives us hope and so through a lot of their energy and your energy the reason we have eighty six members is because people were using social media while a lot of younger folks contacting their local representative saying you know there's no label things sure seemed like a good idea why aren't you part of this and so it's one that fired up that's why we went from twenty to eighty six so it's been an integral part of our success speaking of social media years a question from twitter questioner wants to know about redistricting what that what is the impact on the extreme partisanship in our politics of redistricting and what can be done about that on the state national level yeah it's a huge problem and arguably the primary the primary reason behind the truly hyper partisan nature of the districts that are in congress because it's become a self protection racket and because in most states you have what's called redistricting every ten years where they kind of do a census count and reallocate the congressional districts and you have a bunch of politicians in a room drawing those lines and so they draw the lines in a way to protect an incumbent if you have an incumbent republican what you do is try to get all the democrats out of that district drop in ridiculous ways so you know it i just found out i had been in colorado the my congressman now in austin texas is from dallas and i don't know how well you know texas but that's you know that's a long way away so that's a huge problem some states like california are experimenting with new ways of doing redistricting which is they get a non political panel and sometimes a camera for this california specifically but sometimes they have judicial people involved so which is not to say it's a perfect solution but but they are looking at ways to d politicize the process which is a step in the right direction now the question from a high school student what's one idea you have to place restrictions on the ability of senators to filibuster without a specific reason yeah well they have  that they have to have a reason and now i mean really it because that's i mean that's the way it is now it's like the threat of a filibuster creates this enormous chaos so the idea is that if you did if you are really going to filibuster then you've got to actually take the floor and articulate what your filibusters about and so that that would that would reduce the probably by eighty percent the filibusters that we have now what happened occupy wall street a political force in this country yeah well that's a really interesting idea it's an interesting question i don't know the answer that although i will say that i taught a course at harvard the name of course was disruption and so i examined all the kind of movements in the country including the labels that are trying to do things differently and up and change the the political dynamic current experience and i had somebody from occupy wall street come to class and he was fascinating it was really interesting about kind of their the way they think about change and power and but it's distributed there's no real leadership in the movement and that's part of the reason that that energy has dissipated but i do think that it was a a powerful movement at a critical time the draw a lot of attention to two issues particularly around wall street that that i think at i think people generally agree have yet to be addressed so and i think that that's likely to be an ongoing issue so i think occupy wall street gets a lot of credit for that but you know the exact status of the organization right now actually i really don't know and i'd like to know another question from twitter do you think there's such a thing is moderate extremism well that's kind of why i think call myself a radical centrist you know i think that i think in order part of the part of the part of what needs to be communicated and i speak for myself only now that there's a notion that people in the broad middle of politics are not passionate which is not true and so i think that it's important for people who find themselves in kind of a middle politically to show their passion to show their enthusiasm to show their advocacy and not to sit back because because of the because of the pot because of the partisanship because the redistricting i think that we have lost a voice  american politics that needs to be returned and part of it needs means we need to be get extremely bad what do you do if the best solution to a problem is perceived is not a central solution but rather one leaning toward one end or the other of the spectrum then we go with it that's that's that's that's the exact purpose of no labels is to get in a room and forcefully articulate our ideas but at the end of the day we say we've got to move on and  the if the mood of the room seems to be heading one direction then that's then that's the way we go that's that's what that's what our politics should be about we get in we are you forcefully our positions but if we disagree at the end of the day we don't just draw a line in the sand sand not going to play we say ok we're moving on and it's not everything i wanted but progress is more important problem solving is more important in my party one of the questioners wants you to go a little bit deeper on the media question of the impact of the media the us today on political pla discussion about the media and bias and a lot has been written about you know the media left leaning is a right leaning and that's an interesting discussion and  there's some relevance to that more importantly though the bias the media has is toward conflict it's not ideological it's all the conflict what they want is red meat just like that  that celebrity told me when they went to break they don't they're they they want conflict they want fire they want sparks and it feeds on itself and it's a it's a very it's a very disturbing trend and i'm not sure what to do about it i can tell you just another anecdote again i can't name names but there was a there was a there was a program and i had knew the producer there and this had to be a kind of a left leaning show and for a while they would have me and some of my brother and sister in on to sort of reflect a republican point of view although some might you know rush limbaugh i would say i'm a squish and not not really representative of the party overall they were least make some attempt to use to show the republican point of view on that program and then this friend of mine a producer called said mark i hate to tell you this but when i was just in a meeting they said we're not going to have any republicans on anymore and i said well you know personally i don't care if i'm on but i but i think it's bad for you i think it's bad for the show and i think it's bad for the country that you've made an editorial decision not to show a different point of view and that's is exacerbated by the technology that we have now today because we're all kind of living in tribes isolated tribes and and i'm i'm guilty as well you know i've got i get up every morning and i have my little kind of internet sites that i go to and and it's kind of leans a certain direction and in us not like the old days or we just had you know three television entities that had a you know pretty broad point of view so people have to really work in order to expand their horizons and not limit the conversations and just deal in so it what we're sort of in a world where we live in what i call confirmation bias which is we live in these kind of bubbles where thanks to the media we just get information that reinforces what we already believe what's the difference between a progressive republican a democrat well not a lot generally you know i'd say that a progressive republican is probably has different views  on take two for example trade in unions you know i think that because of a separating line and where is a republican to be more open about trade not as restrictive on trade and have a lot a lot of sort of more different view about u nions particularly public unions is this the time or will there ever be a time for a viable third party alternative so it's a great question i would  it is is that i think that there's there's powerful forces at work that can really turn things on its head i mean we elected a african american president and it was never said that would happen so when the country gets mobilized and passionate about something it can throw conventional wisdom out the door overnight it's happened time and time again so if what we see happening in washington continues sure if there's if somebody is out there and says i'm going to you know i'm not going to be hostage to either party i'm going to do things differently i'm going to you know take a different point of view and i think that you know obviously it's huge hurdles to do that and an organization tried to do that in the last in two thousand and eight unsuccessfully because they just didn't get the right candidate to step up but i think given the current circumstances given the environment absolutely it could have been how do you respond to this potential criticism does your block of eighty six votes violate your principle of no pledges having those votes in the pocket as you said no because we they're not pledged to do one thing or the other i mean they're not they're not pledged to vote one way or the other all they've done is they've just said we're going to we're going to meet we're go discuss and we're going to so we don't know we have no control over what they do or how they're going to vote so they're not pledged to any sort of action except to to put their labels aside to meet regularly and try and create some problems on a question about candidates who start out in a candidate in a lection season as one person and then kind of morph into an alternative personality as the campaign progresses and especially following their election is that the way it has to be in american politics well it doesn't have to be and it's all about accountability and i got an interesting question this morning from some of our supporters about how do we make sure that people who sign up just don't use that as kind of a shield to go home say oh i'm a problem solver you know and not behave in a way that's sort of in accordance with our philosophy and as something we've talked about we do we're not exactly sure what the solution is going to accept that there's going to be accountability because we've gotten the kind of numbers now we're going to say our leadership ok this is fine but if somebody goes out and behaves in a way that's contrary to our general philosophy then you've got to bounce them out and so the they've got to be accountable to the sort of policies and ideas and behavior that we've outlined in no labels so that's one way the way to keep people accountable this is from a student in the audience what can students or young people do to problem solve in their own communities well inspiration that things can change and they're going to in the going to change in this country so we've been so successful in washington that now we've had some people step up some some grant we got some graham money and some other donations of people say this is so good let's take it to the states so starting next year we're going to really start coming to places like your city and saying we're going to start having problem solvers coalitions in the local legislatures so look for us next year we're i mean i think you all do pretty well compared to a lot of other states but i'm sure you i'm sure you could use a little no labels activity your state legislature as well will the next presidential candidates from either the republican or democratic party be part of the problem solving we would love that you know i think that i think what ultimately is going to happen is that you know the people who are in the problem solvers are finding it so rewarding both in terms of productivity and the feedback that they're getting from their constituents  think increasingly if not this election and that's when i think it's very likely that the candidates will be members of the problem solvers would it help our system if the election season were a little shorter absolutely absolutely you know i like the  like the british model and i think it's a british model but there is certainly foreign models that i've seen where sixty days that's the election you know all the advertising all the debates everything happens within a sixty day window so yes i'd love to see a short time for one final question are you hopeful about american democracy i'm really hopeful i'm inspired by what we've seen as i said it's it's frustrating when you look at washington particular the way the media portrays it but i'm convinced having dealt with these eighty six people who are now in the problem solvers caucus that there are good people with good intentions they just need a little cover and the more cover we provide the better our democracy is going to get thank you mark