congressman i guess one place to start would be where the mayor jokingly actually started which is with the simple word indiana and to get your reactions to what's been unfolding there in recent days i was on the defensive the reaction to that effort to sanction bigotry has been very encouraging indiana is not the deep rooted heart of liberalism it's been one of the most socially conservative states and the fact is that there has been an overwhelming reaction within india and against this to the point where the mayor booker it's a sign that apology huge political trouble when he has to say something that totally contradicts the facts that he knows no one will believe but he hasn't gotten any other thing to say so governor pence announces that this measure the sole purpose of which was to allow people to discriminate against gay lesbian bisexual transgender people is not about discrimination that's it's only purpose and when people deny the truth that's a good sign because they know they're in trouble and what was particularly encouraging was who was against it not just the usual suspect it was the business iconic rust belt mainstream american company the people that make diesel engine for big trucks and they said this is a terrible idea you've got to stop it angie's list threatens to not go ahead that's very encouraging and by the way the reason business really does it is one they don't want to be associated with eight and two they understand this kind of bigotry is bad for business so i don't know how this ultimately ends but it is a further indication of how much we have progressed and i think no matter what pension tried to do here i was very unlikely that any other governor no matter how angry he thinks he may be a judge is going to try that again there is a deep deep thread throughout this book which and this is just really an incredibly insightful self aware but also informative textured look at how power operates right and i think one of the things that is so notable about that and one of the running themes in this book is how an appreciation for the pragmatic for what might seem to patient activists as incremental ism is not just something that you have to remember but it's almost core to the enterprise of politics can you see a bit more just about kind of this is view about incrementalism and it's been about first of all how come a great believer in free speech you know i've always very clear hate crimes i'm for ending that is if someone assault someone else to faces your property but i have never been from criminalizing age beach i believe in free speech and if you believe in free speech that means you believe obnoxious people should be able to say people think but if i was going to start making exceptions and outlaw certain parents or speech i would make it a misdemeanor to use pragmatist an idealist if they were opposites they in fact have to go together if you want to do any good of course you begin with your ideal you have no business using the course of mecca civil government to use other good other people do things and i citizen support of a genuine vision of making things better but once you are committed to a set of ideals in fact the more deeply you are committed to ideals the more you will morally obligated to be pragmatic ideals that people hold indifferent to whether or not they have implemented or great indulgence they based you with this warm feeling of mar stupid things do not exist in society that have no basis whatsoever there were no phenomenon including those who dislike that just fell to the earth with no real the very fact that something is there and has been obstructive to you means that it reflects forces into society and you have to muster counter force and the notion that you can do well with no one is that it's very unlikely secondly it is almost always the case that winning a partial victory is to infer the victory because you have you have banged away at the rationale when we won some victories on l g b key issues we helped defeat the notion that oh king was an inspirational mom you know and one of the smartest we would say in boston one of the cutest political strategists you ever saw because he understood you go here you pull back you do this you do that  first supreme court challenge you did not say that separate but equal was unconstitutional they said that separate but you go isn't being fairly applied that they say is separate but equal but it's not equal at thurgood marshall and it is coming from one lawsuit originally and oklahoma texas not challenging the doctrine of separate but equal but saying in practice it is unequal and you have to treat us better and that was a way to undermine the whole separate but equal first you prove that separate but equal was in fact impossible but i basically agreed with the thrust of what they were saying and i very much disagree with tea party although this is none of the tea party with whom i've been aligned myself in terms of pulling back america's excessive military intervention but the occup people had very little impact on public policy unfortunately and the tea party unfortunately had not in the part of the promise it has been the case when they are angry and think public policy needs to change it was an instinct on the left to march there was an instinct on the right to vote and voting beach marching when you're trying to change things so one of the things i mean it was a great moment and here is how disciplined and thoughtful and incremental you have an american movement was our purpose and mission ship in which to demonstrate that black people were being physically and we could be denied the right to vote and the rac allowed to to challenge the seating of the white segregated demonstration at the democratic convention so we conducted a model registration upside the regular system to document that the key of that summer was to make it clear that people were being that i do i do vote as this summer began in july of that year was one thousand nine hundred eighty four lyndon johnson signed the civil rights bill and it became legal for black people to eat at restaurants and lunch counters in mississippi which had voting was more important then then integrated lunches although one was going to be to the other so the summer of sixty four some of the voluntary observance of continued segregation which had been made illegal in the interest of putting all the was sixty four he was still sophisticated enough about how to do it well people have said well the black community gandhi they believed in marches and demonstrations you know in both cases in gandhi's case and martin luther king's case they will either demonstrations when the people they were representing couldn't vote in fact what did the black community we got the voting rights act scandalously you know as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the terrible sacrifices to get it we have a right wing supreme court that gutted the voting rights act but what was the king and gandhi were fighting for was the right for the people to go and once they got the right to vote what would demonstrations diminish because voting was more effective you alluded a moment ago to the generational dimension of this and it's true both in issues of racial justice it's true in issues of l g b t q just justice and opportunity particularly today's younger generation of activists may not see it the way that you're describing we have here in seattle a group of young activists from ferguson who essentially were saying exactly what you would have predicted that we don't need to learn the system we don't believe in the system that we're not trying to enter into politics that what we believe in is protest and  fortunately black people vote that viewpoint is been judged or that you appointed spoke to us and then what happens what happened how does that i don't understand the mechanism how does that change things now by the way demonstrating marching that can be a very effective part of organizing it can be the getting people together can help them if then what you do is say ok and now but struggling much i mean i complained with occupy official that i never show a voting registration which one is how do you go about it the other which one the goal and it was true both in the movement for civil rights among african americans and among some in the movement there was this notion that we were not trying to integrate the discriminated against move into american society because american society stank it was stifling and culturally dead and therefore you take the group that has been denied participation that they become the cultural sphere by which you transform the society into a much more lively communitarian body and it was my experience in mississippi and my experience now that the great majority of african americans in the great majority of ga people have no interest in transforming american society and being the cultural vanguard which would be like your body else they want to be able to be left alone who enjoy themselves and i that was one of the problems that some on the left had but i think overwhelming marriage was always going to be voluntary and secondly the overwhelming majority of gay one thousand people wanted to be able to show their love in a formal way in one of the health benefits and the ability to pave over taxes they want to be like everybody else and i think a sense of inadequacy because yesterday in indiana the voters at least one district probably ratified the idea that i should come to washington with a radical homosexual agenda and i don't have one but i do have things i want to achieve for gay and lesbian people here they are i want to be able to get a job get married and join the army now in the history of the world what self respecting radical take is his platform good very good job and join the army at contests inadequacy you know you say this with with that self deprecating humor but in fact part of what undergirds a lot of this though you may not i don't know i don't know how come when you are with work is a deep abiding sense of patriotism aiming to do here is to claim the institutions of the country whether it is marriage or service in the government or in the military i good you are good you know this very well and you said people said they don't want to give a pertain of you accept universe what the hell have alternatives going to you're going to say you don't accept it going to go away in fact if you don't like the system there's only one way to change it which is to grasp it's leverage or power you know with nori something never makes it go away country right or wrong and in fact they they complain that obama apologize a couple times for thinks america did you never apologize for america but we want to where you can apologize for america when i was in congress one of the things i was very proud to do was to sponsor the right so the right believes more that the system works and so when they're dissatisfied with the public policy they blame the people in charge some on the left are more inclined to blame the whole system and that becomes self defeating so yeah i affirm and look i have been critical of about a lot of when america does say this i want to cut military spending substantially but i still want to marry going to be the strongest nation in the world and some of my  a comedian of the old porche borscht belt circuit from the catskills the kind of jewish humor milton berle and jack benny and george burns and one of the staples of that humor was to insult your wife and mother in law and  and of their mothers in law they said any young at the shortest joke in history take my wife that was but one which god just wasn't really insulting it was quite profound how your wife compared to what i mean i occasionally might say well looks like an improvement but it's going to make it harder that's very rare so compared to what has always been what i talk about and yet in terms of america there were very few schilens in the world that seem to me on the values that i care government for america for mayor for other elected officials and of course in parallel as you were getting that apprenticeship in politics and understanding how the system works in developing this worldview you are privately reckoning with your own sexual identity and you begin the book reflecting on what you were like when you were fourteen you say you're pretty normal fourteen year old who's really kind of really into government politics except that you also like the other guys who are involved in government politics and no i don't like the other guys but i got to actually adept with my own and i don't like the other teenagers but you know fortunately we are a community with a great diversity of attraction because everybody was attracted to the same kind of to semitism in one thousand fifty four which is a potential obstacle to careers that's pretty much disappeared from crackpots out there but but but there was no one were buried abuse doing things the way they used to be and that's a sign that our society is capable of much what i try to do in the book is to talk about how i'm happy being gay is going to a problem now i want to make government better than as i said when i sip of that two thousand and twelve when i would drive congressman jim and i get married for each member form and to this broader your case you make for the role of government but just to rewind a half step you know there's a real poignant parallel or contrast throughout the book between on the one hand the way in which a lot of your early career you say very happily was the result of accident phone calls that you got that suddenly turned changed the course of your your interests when you thought you were going to go into academia when you thought you're going to go work in this job and a sort of openness to that while at the same time you had this by what you felt was necessity this tightness and sense of control that you need to exercise over your own sexual identity and about just kind of what would be known to how did you reconcile on the one hand that spirit of hey i'm just going to go where things lead me and in a sense kind of that risk taking entering into public life with at the same time this need to ring those early years to keep a lid on things such a good question a in and i thought that was important but in every stage i had to say to myself ok how will this affect my decision to because it and i started out thinking i would just repress my personal life and i guess maybe i believe this thing people say that i now think it's nonsense oh she doesn't need a career he doesn't need to he doesn't need a private life he's warning that it does what a private i'd like to i've never found anybody from that it's true that one needs we all have personal emotional physical that no career will satisfy in fact what i found is my career took off more public acclaim the disparity between being a highly regarded public figure and a very lonely private person made it worse it exacerbated the thing so i began to i would think ok if i move into this next stage what can i do  and it became critical at this point i made the decision when i first ran for office that i was going to be a coward not a broker namely that i would be a state legislator and i would not tell people i was  possible for the first time to do things supporting the rights of ourselves but i was never going to be able create that is i would be an election official but i could be and i would be an advocate for the rights of gay people even though i would voluntarily deny myself those rights and i have no patience whatsoever for people who are themselves gay and then get elected office and penalize other gay people that's not privacy that's hypocrisy and they should be exposed as hypocrites for  late seventy's that was too much of a strain that degree of oppression and self denial and i said you know this is ridiculous i am fighting for the rights of gay men to have a good life and then voluntarily refusing to exercise any of them solace sensible way to behave so i started coming out to my ship wings and close friends and i was in the process of coming out and then one of those events over which i had no control intervene pope john paul the second  there was a college in the district next to mine named robert joined in which is very liberal very articulate jesuit priest and conservative catholics went to the new pope john paul the second and said you've got to get him out of congress because he's way to go and he's given people the longer idea of the church what about that collar and being a liberal so the pope ordered him not to run again creating the vacancy which i was able to fill meaning driving to tell me they did that he deeply regretted that he had never been allowed near the pope finally seven years later i said ok and at that point by the way when i did publicly come out and told the newspapers to ask me and i would tell them the post of over a particular i wasn't sure what's going to be interesting many of my liberal colleagues because they knew i was thinking about this urged me not to come out because they said you know you're our ally on this issue and that issue and the other issue if you identify yourself as gay you'll become a one issue guy you're going to enfold will be diminish worked out well calls to mind a brief story to tell in the book that when you did come out or about to and you told speaker tip o'neill that he sighed in disappointment and sadness and and you thought maybe at first it was because you were gay but then he said strands throughout the book about the role of government and your view i mean one of things you observed is that democrats even when democrats are not in power bear essentially in the court of public opinion the burden of defending government right so when things go wrong with government they blame democrats give you the best example by the way the democrats have had control of the house the presidency in the senate for exactly four years since one nine hundred eighty two years with bill clinton w brother in the administration and the first few years of barack obama so we are held accountable when for thirty one of the thirty five years we did not have the power that people attribute to us and as an example of how we get blamed when people are mad at government no matter who is in power and then the banks in general and the tarp every one of the five bailouts was initiated by george w bush to have both initiated and complete without congressional involvement and three congress intervened in one case fortunately with the auto dealers with the auto companies to help save them better than he wanted to but all five belittle bush but people blame obama for the for the bailouts and yet the dish the republicans benefit because we are an issue we believe much more than they do in government but we don't get blamed for their mistakes so one of the things that i think is interesting about your defense of government that runs throughout the book is reckoning with particularly a lot of working class whites who have left the democratic party over the last generation and you say it's not for the reasons that are often bandied about by pundits which is god's gaze and guns to use that formulation but that it is simply because in their perception government hasn't delivered for them economically that their four at the only one but a critical one the proof that it's not the social issue which people argued for a while including thomas frank what's the matter with kansas and i thought there might be something to that i was always a little bit worried about it americans made anything and sold it everywhere and if you were an american without any particular advantage skills or degree but you were willing to work you could go into a factory make you good nobody you could become a member the building trades and help build this americans could just go into manufacturing so what's happened and it's been exacerbated by a trade and she's the way we dealt with them and the way it is today is very simple the great increase in wealth in america is done better than any other developed country men now find a relative economic position as you voted and the problem is not that they don't believe in government philosophically but that they do they believe deeply instinctively that if the government really cared about them then cathedral you're letting me down you didn't do nothing when my baby left town you could have done something you didn't do nothing that's their view of the government the government didn't do nothing when their economic position which being eroded and here's the frustration because the managed governments are not helping or maybe at their economic situation they punish government by voting for people who don't like government and that makes it even less likely that we will be able to do anything and so they construction program to not just repair but expand the infrastructure we could in this country usually pull everybody in the construction industry to work with overtime and bring in new people and by the way by now thanks to technology the construction industry can be integrated by gender because there was not as much good strength acquired so we could hire one hundred people in construction history we could have a situation where if you were good enough intelligent up to go to college you could go for a thousand dollars to a good state university which used to be the case and now it's been gone because we've taken the money away we could move medicare down from sixty five to fifty five that would take an enormous burden off working people worrying about their time we could do a lot of things that would make those people white working class people more that's an equal we treated we could give them more of a sense of economic security and that's a twofold think it's good in itself and it reminds in the government it's a source feel good that government can be productive of these benefits the problem is that we don't have the money to do that because you're not going to get tax situation with the current right wing republican group we extended military budget if we hadn't gone into iraq would have had a trillion dollars more that we could have used and we don't need to be the policeman of the whole world yes we need to defend ourselves yes we need to protect others s navy exactly now on the assumption that the navy in the air force will not go to war we could probably would do one or the other without endangering our security secondly in addition to reducing and you would do some military by not intervening where we can't do any good where we get in battle and trying to make the military can stop it take from happening they can't go into iraq or afghanistan or yemen or any place else and create a coherent society where there was not among the people the willingness to do that and we get bogged down and waste a lot of money secondly that you have led the way in what we can stop criminally prosecuting people because we just approve of the choice of recreational drug and that would save an enormous amount of money i would have to think no it is not possible to fulfill the current agenda we have set ourselves to the military interventions around the world less expensive which is i would tell you is a member of congress yes i will vote against some of those interventions but if we send more young people in war i have a moral obligation to make sure they are protected we're not going to wait what cheaply and for the criminal justice system people have said well why does it cost so much let's make it more efficient why does it cost more to send someone to prison than send to the state university well there's a very easy answer people do not try to escape from the state university when you send people to a place where they are confined against their will seven days a week twenty four hours a day it costs a lot of criminalize poor choices that people make it's not free society when we do it and there's no there's not enough money in the world to keep people from making those choices on their own if we had that amount of money i believe we could in fact improve this  future so i want to turn now congressman to some of these questions and actually the first one in the stack here picks up on where you left off i mean the more you read this book the more you see  identification with the blue collar and almost against elites and there's a through line as you said of this kind of approach to things but one of the things that is also through line in the book is you know how and when to use it and the force of ideas both to beat the other guy but also to win other guys so here's the question what can we do to stop this apparent attitude of quote i'm right you're wrong so shut up till you agree with me congress in our political structure as far as the having yes i do believe my taste are similar to those of most people doesn't make them better or worse but i think there have been times in some areas where my liberal friends have at the upper end of the socio economic scale tried to impose an aesthetic that is not widely shared and you know you telling people they can't have a job because we don't want climate change that's very important but if we don't want them to have a job because of some instead of consideration i think that could be a mistake and i  bored and you know it makes me happy to think of funny things like look i have i don't have great mechanical skills i mean i you know i can still hear him in my head  two things first of all humor is important because you you are competing for people's attention span this is wealth of information if you can say something funny then like you to remember it you can also use it as a weapon but i'm going to get to the second part of that question you can people don't like to be laughed at but i've always well with very few exceptions i have tried to be humorous at the expense of people's ideas or political views not th something is that the basis and then you can work things out from there but we work with george bush i'm going to people on the back of the book who talk about what a good book and it's only good one and hank paulson the treasury and i disagreed with the public and he's not a good mentality of it because he treats democrats as honorable people with whom we disagree and we have to sit in the corrupt it said that began to work and then started but even then there was a khomeini between the parties we got things done to some extent w the tea party started democrats have had to respond in kind but what is this is if the public and didn't used to be that way i got a phone call before i can only assume you will remember john miller very good powerful about this question is do you think the reforms that are enacted through the dodd frank law are in danger of being rolled back what's your assessment of how effective the been x number of years now since enac what we were going to do essentially did the dow jones industrial average was sixty five hundred it's now just short of triple that americans at the best economy in the world the unemployment figures have been enormous we've created millions of jobs so clearly it has not hurt i believe it is help the consumer bureau already begun to do some things a id came to the bush administration in the fall of eighty of two thousand and eight said you know eighty five billion dollars that we can pay in debt  they way they could have many more people people one can make the bed long if we don't want them that they've been making that cause the problem they can't get this deeply into and so i am pretty confident that we have made it highly unlikely that there will be to people they have talked to said to the treasury there will be no weakening of that bill between now and the end of two thousand and sixteen the president would veto any however whether or not we maintain financial reform it one of the issues that will be decided  will the question of whether or not we do anything about climate change so well the question about whether we do anything about noonish whether or not by the way the terrible decision that allowed corporations to flood the zone with money was a five to four justice for the right vacancy that could be overturned so the answer was i am very confident that financial reform is safe until the next presidential election and if the democrats win the next presidential election it will then be long enough to be deeply embedded but if the democrats lose in the republicans win we will go back to the bad situation we were in before by the way one of the interesting insights chapters you have about financial reform in a crisis is that contrary to a lot of popular perception it's not so much that the big wall street financial institutions tell congress what to do in that congress pals to them but rather organize people rather than organize money makes a difference organize people like car dealers enters the hobby for the bad homes came in part from the people from the realtors and the home builders who want to be able to do this so the next question shifting gears here how can we that the reality there are very few issues where the go between the two parties is as wide as the right unions one of them portion is another potential form of course but happen until you have a democratic speaker what about the role of culture in speeding that along right so one of the things that's interesting about people have talked about how in the swelling of social norms and changing attitudes about marriage equality that going for as far back as will and grace on t v in the mid ninety's began through popular culture to express that same thing i'm your dentist i'm your friend i'm your neighbor know there's no it factor there do you see the same thing happening today with the transmitted through popular culture and it's being done better with the transmitter i think there are more compelling favorable characterizations in the transshipment i i was never a believer that having in will and grace jack be an obnoxious jerk was all that good for our community  block namely republican primary voters they already own represent a right wing group that may be the only fifty percent of the public but there are they dominate that party and until we find some way for the