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Question and Answer Session with Students and Faculty

Christine Todd Whitman
Question and Answer Session with Students and Faculty
July 23, 2009

Questioner 1:  Governor, thank you for being here today and talking about an important topic, partisanship. When I think about the most virulent invective that is launched across the party lines, I think a lot of it comes from people who align themselves with the right wing in the Republican Party. What responsibility does the Republican Party have to rein in—or to address—that virulence that is coming from your side, that is contributing to this partisanship in the American people?

Gov. Whitman:  Well, I think you’ve hit on a very important point. First of all, language shapes behavior. …. Many of the people you’re talking about though, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, are independent radio personalities and they’re gonna say what they want to say. Now, we had an instance when I was governor of New Jersey of a talk-show host—and I’d appeared with him—who started to say some things that I thought were just totally unacceptable on racial lines, and I called him out on it. And I said I would not go back on his show unless he was willing to have a real conversation about this … if he was promoting himself as a thoughtful person and a thought-guiding person—that he had a responsibility to acknowledge the impact that his words would have.

Now to ask the Republican Party as a whole in Washington to be responsible for Rush Limbaugh, I think, is a bit much, and I think we also have to understand that it behooves the Democrats and many of the media to hype this, to say, “Here is the spokesperson of the Republican Party.” He doesn’t speak … [for] me, and that’s why I have the Republican Leadership Council with [Sen. John] Jack Danforth. Someone with whom I disagree on some social issues, but we agree together on the most important things that make us a Republican vs. a Democrat … and we believe a strong two-party system is necessary, so we’re willing to overlook where we disagree, focus on where we agree, and try to get some things done. That needs to happen on both sides of the aisle. We need to ensure that we understand that, for instance, you can criticize this president and not be racist, and yet there is a great deal of implication that you gotta be careful about that.

Now, we have a very long and sordid history of racism in this country, so we have to understand where the sensitivities come from, but we can’t let ourselves get sucked into a feeling that we can never discuss some issues and we can never say, “Hey, now wait a minute, I have questions about this policy. It’s not because of who you are, it’s because of the policy.” And we need to get back to that position. Yeah.

Questioner 2:  Hi … I’m a government teacher of high school students and I live in a very small town in Postville, Iowa. Last year in May, we had a humongous raid from ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. They ended up, we have a kosher meat-packing plant in town and a lot of illegal immigrants worked for that meat-packing plant and this has occurred for the last 10 years. And, so, families that were Hispanic, some of their children had become U.S. citizens and they [the adults] were very established in the community, but it took 10 years for this to occur. My daughter, who is currently in fourth grade, that morning when the raid took place they brought in 800 federal agents armed with—they had bullet-proof vests on—had enormous guns. They came into the meat-packing plant—I had to go in with part of the ambulance crew, there’s only six of us that run on the ambulance crew.

What I saw in that plant made me lose faith in my government, and it’s to this day very, very difficult to teach about government and to believe in government when I believe that I saw one of the greatest human-rights violations in history. I saw people chained, thrown to the ground by these agents, threatened with guns. I had to go in for a stabbing victim. The agents were laughing about the fact that they enjoyed going in and slamming these people up against walls. One of the Hispanic individuals was so frightened by what happened that he hid in a freezer. We came back three hours later to get him out of the freezer. A pregnant woman of six months hid in boxes for six hours until the agents left. We know of a couple individuals that hid in trunks of a car. They didn’t recover their bodies.

The children, six of the parents after the school day was out, all the Hispanic kids that the parents did not come back for, there were six of them where the parents never showed up. There were helicopters flying over our town, black and yellow. Hispanic kids were screaming and crying. My daughter, who has 17 students in her class, had seven when she returned the next day. These children are afraid of the black helicopters today. They’re afraid of their federal government. I don’t know what to say to these students anymore. I can’t believe that something like this happened in my own country, and I don’t know … [how] to go forward …[with] my own teachings of government. Sorry that took so long, but I think it was important.

Gov. Whitman:  No, it was important to hear, but I say to you, I think you’ve identified one of the primary issues where the need to get over the hyper-partisanship is so very desperate. We had a bill passed in the House and we had a bill passed in the Senate three years ago dealing with the immigration issue. Now, whenever you have a House and a Senate pass pieces of legislation on major issues, they appoint a conference committee to resolve the issues between them, to establish policy. They never even appointed the committees. They never once held a conference committee to reconcile those pieces of legislation. Why? Because each side wanted to use it against the other in the upcoming electoral campaign. Each side wanted to say, “They’re either bigots and they hate all Hispanics and they want to throw them all out of the country,” or “All they care about is letting in all these immigrants, they’re gonna take your job away from you and they’re gonna cause crimes.” That’s the kind of language we had from both sides of the aisle. That’s the kind of language we have. And for the United States Senate and the House of Representatives—our federal government—not to have appointed a conference committee to have resolved those issues because of partisan political gain is absolutely unconscionable.

What you have to tell those kids is they’ve gotta start voting, they’ve gotta start communicating, get their parents to vote, they’ve gotta communicate with their government.

Every elected official at whatever level—and I can speak because I’ve served on almost every level of government—if they don’t answer their own mail and pick up their own phones, they have someone who does. They have someone who is monitoring that, telling them what people are thinking about, telling them what their constituents want. And if it doesn’t change their opinion, it does change their priorities. And let me give you just one example, because it’s pretty recent in the way things go on how things work, and that’s the Terri Schiavo case.

Now, as you’ll remember, Terri Schiavo was the woman who … had been determined to be brain dead and she was attached to life-giving machines. And the issue was whether or not she should be disconnected and whether the federal government should step in after this had been through the courts and the state of Florida had dealt with the issue. Now nobody won in that issue, nobody. That was a disaster; I don’t care which side of the aisle you were on on that one. Everybody lost. It was a tragedy for everyone involved. And yet the people who felt that disconnecting her was murder were absolutely single-minded in communicating that to Congress. They flooded them with emails, with telephone calls, with faxes, with letters, to the point that you had moderate, pro-choice Democrats voting for federal intervention at that level. And they passed a bill in three days and the president [Bush] cut short a vacation and came home to sign it.

Now, again, whatever you think of the right or wrong of it, if you look—depending on which poll you looked at—the next day, between 70 and 80 percent of the American people felt that it was the wrong thing for Congress to do. Congress had no business interfering, whether they were for or against that issue. The converse of that is 20-30 percent of the American people were able to get Congress to move, to act, to sign a bill, and to get the president to sign it. Now that happened not because the other 70-80 percent didn’t care, they did, but they were having arguments with their car radios and their television sets, and they don’t vote. And until we get that through our heads, until we understand that we’re the ones—if we care about something we’ve gotta get engaged, we’ve got to communicate that to the people that are making the decisions. And until we start doing that and do it on a regular basis, we’re gonna have these kinds of things happen.

Immigration, again, whether you like George Bush or don’t like George Bush, I happen to think the immigration policy he proposed was a good one and certainly deserved to be heard on the [Capitol] Hill. It was disregarded from the moment he sent it up there, not on policy reasons, purely on political ones.

Questioner 3:  Good morning. I appreciate … the opportunity. … I’m a faculty [member] at Walden University and my area of expertise is financial economics and applied management and decision sciences. I have learned a lot from you, not just today, over the years. My question now is a little, I don’t mean to change the subject, but I am very much interested in financial environment and the financial crisis that we are in right now. I have come to some idea that you may or you may not agree with me, but I really … [believe] that our agents on the Senate and Congress were not educated enough about financial instruments. I mean, how did they know about bankers’ acceptances, repurchase agreement, mortgage-backed securities? I learned, unfortunately, from their appearances on TV that they didn’t know anything about these things. Yet, we are trusting that these people are protecting our financial system, financial markets.

So, I thought in my ideal world—unfortunately, I’m not a student and now I’m not that young to change this world that much—but in my ideal world, maybe there has to be some requirement. Maybe these people should be educated every now and then, some regular classes, you know? Such that we don’t have another recession like 1929/33. Then I listen to [what] President Obama … says, and Federal Reserve [Chairman] Ben Bernanke, that if we didn’t have this stimulus plan we would probably see something like the Great Depression, and I don’t disagree with them. This was like [a] patient in ICU, what would you do? So I want to know your perspective.

Gov. Whitman:  Sure. Well, as you know, as a professor and a student of democracy, the whole purpose of representative government was to have people in office who represented the people, and there is no school for politicians, it’s up to us. It’s up to us to decide which of the criteria that are most important to us, what do we look for in our elected representatives? If it’s a blacksmith, fine, and we’ve had one in the Senate, he just left a few years ago. His background was as a blacksmith and then he became a mayor. I smile a little bit because, yes, we do have a lot of people who don’t seem to know a whole lot about a lot of things and yet pontificate for a long time on them. And one of the greatest frustrations that you’ll find if you ever have the joy of testifying before Congress is they really don’t care about your answers. It’s all about their questions and how the headlines read back home.

But in fairness to them, they do have staffs. Most of the representatives and the senators really do try to do a good job and they do try to learn. They get on a committee and then that’s where they turn their focus. They may not have been financial experts to begin with, but they’ll try to learn as much as they can. But they can’t if they’re not getting their bills until 2 in the morning and 3 in the morning. That’s the problem there. Even for the best-intended of them, you can’t do a good job when you’re having to operate like that. And I wouldn’t denigrate all of our elected representatives but where we have those who have nothing. I don’t know. Al Franken’s latest bill to provide guide dogs to returning vets who are facing serious difficulties has a lot of appeal to it but what’s his background to be in office as a United States senator? We find some of our best representatives come from non-traditional backgrounds and would not necessarily have the formal education that you would expect of them. But again, we’re the ones that have the opportunity to make that determination when they come before us in the polls, and that starts in the primaries.

And, oh, by the way, a statistic that we should never forget, that until this last primary, this presidential primary, our average voter turnout in primaries was 10 percent. Now, I don’t think that’s gonna change too much in the next few years; I’m afraid it’s gonna slip right back to where it was.

Questioner 4:  Hi, I’m from New Jersey, actually, and I work at Paterson School District at this point, and … . I’ve been noticing that there’s been a lot of problems with the special-education population, and the finance of the schools are not able to accommodate all of it. And so many teachers in that school are getting laid off and put out. What procedures do you think might need to be taken within the next five, 10 years to fix the special-education population ….

Gov. Whitman:  Well, let me try to broaden it just a little bit. In New Jersey we’ve had problems with educational funding, which are not dissimilar from those in other states, although it’s been a huge problem in New Jersey. It’s on the back of the property-tax payer, that’s how you pay for education in our state. It’s almost exclusively that with the state government obviously putting in money for the special-needs districts, which are more impoverished districts. The governor has just changed that funding formula to focus on the student, not on the number of students or the district, but to follow the student individually, and special-needs kids have always been a challenge. What we do in the state of New Jersey is you’re required to provide [for] that special-needs child, depending on the level of need, with the kind of support that they require, even if that means sending them out of the district …, some districts are paying $17,000 or $20,000 a child to send them out of the district. …[Other districts are paying] for students that need help and can function in the mainstream classroom but can only do it with [the] help … [of] a personal aide assigned to them, all of which are enormously expensive when that expense flows back to the school district and that means your property taxes, and so the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. That’s not dissimilar to many states that have real issues with how do you ensure that every child has access to a good education, and again you might like or not like [the] No Child Left Behind [Act], but I think the idea of the federal government standing up and saying, “It doesn’t matter where a kid lives or what the economic background of their parents is, they deserve the opportunity to have a decent education,” we should have that. That should be an understanding. The problem was the money didn’t flow with it, which it needed to do because the individual states couldn’t handle it on their own, so this is another one of those issues where it’s gonna be an individual state one. The federal government, the [U.S.] Department of Education, now is looking at how do they revamp No Child Left Behind, and that will incorporate an approach to special-needs children, and how to ensure that they are mainstreamed whenever possible and given the support that they need. But ultimately, it comes back to the local state, and very often that is done on a local basis, on a county or municipal basis is where the funding and those decisions are made. So, for something like the Paterson School District, it’s gonna be take a good, hard look at what Gov. Corzine … has proposed in his new method of supporting our schools and changing the funding formula. And in our state, as in many other states, the [U.S.] Supreme Court gets involved, and it has mandated in New Jersey a number of different approaches and things that have to be done for the special-needs districts and special-ed kids. And so it’s a balancing act between the legislative and judicial branches, as well as the school systems, the school systems themselves.

Questioner 5:  Good morning, governor. …. I’m a student of health sciences. My program here is health management and policy. I read your book, “It’s My Party, Too.” I just finished reading that a couple of days ago. You expressed some dissatisfaction about the way things are going, but my question, the environment to you is, you were one of the environmental leaders under President Bush. What actions did you take to look into the pollution, the water-pollution matters of American countries doing business in foreign countries? … Nigeria is my country. Our water has been highly polluted.

Gov. Whitman:  What are we doing about pollution or what do we do about pollution? One of the major things that we did when I was there [at the EPA] was to introduce a water-tray-based approach to water management, to understand that first of all you have to go after the polluters—and we did, we got some very strong enforcement in spite of what you might hear—at least during those early days we got some good enforcement penalties on water polluters. But the biggest problem we had was not point-source pollution, it’s non-point source pollution. And that is the thing that you and I do every day in our everyday lives, and we go out and fertilize the lawn and we use, ah we got a little extra fertilizer, we’ll throw that on, what difference does it make? We change the oil in our car, or we have a leaky oil pan and we don’t bother to change it. There’s as much oil deposited along the coastline of the United States every eight months from non-point-source pollution as was released during the Exxon Valdez [oil] spill [in 1989], which remains our single biggest environmental disaster in this country [to date] … , every 8 months from what you and I did.

So, what we did is take a watershed-based approach to this in saying, “You’ve got to look at the watersheds and see where all this pollution is coming from in order to capture the full scope of it.” We got into a nutrient-trading program that we could provide ways to increase the cleanliness of the water without putting everybody out of business along the watershed. We enhanced the CAFO, the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, we proposed new regulations on that, on the CAFO and on the [TMDL], [Total Maximum Daily Load], on the rivers, did an analysis of that. In the two-and-a-half years I was there, those were the major things that we did. And, of course, you cannot talk about water without talking about air, because much of the pollution comes from air. And so, we continued to do—we got actually the largest, before I left, the largest settlement under the Clean Air Act that we’d had up until that point. But there is so much more that needs to be done.

To me with all the talk we have of climate change—and climate change is very important, don’t get me wrong—we need to take steps now to avoid real disaster in the future. But the most immediate problem for the United States and the world is water. Quantity and quality. We are facing with our water infrastructure a sum [of] —last time I looked—between $500 billion and $1 trillion worth of infrastructure needs. We have sanitary-sewer overflows that are enormous problems. If you look down the line, this is something that is becoming an issue that we can no longer avoid. Right now I chair something called the Water Policy Institute. We are releasing papers on individual issues within this country and looking at the broader scope of issues around the world as to what can be done on water. And how do we manage this? How do we get people beyond the pure territorial boundary fights that we have in order to preserve them? But until we start looking at water management from a watershed-based program—and there was one other thing that we did that I’m not sure how far it’s gotten, but it was interesting, because studies have shown that the public is most engaged in learning, watching television, during the news, when the weather is on. Because you have all those neat maps that show you here’s the high and there’s the low and this is what’s coming in from here.

So, what we did is, we started a pilot program. We went to the Meteorological Association and started a pilot program to educate the meteorologists so that they could say when there was “a big front coming and you get a lot of rain, don’t over fertilize your lawn today, because guess what? It’s going to wash down and it’s going to go into this storm sewer and you may not live on a river, but this storm sewer connects with another, and eventually it ends up in this body of water and it flushes out into the ocean and this is why we get dead zones.” So start to educate people to their overall responsibility. So it’s a combination of both specific regulation and enforcement and penalties, as well as trying to educate the public in general to the fact that we all have a role to play.

Questioner 6:  Good morning. My question is this, well, let me say it this way. I am very disappointed, and the reason why I’m disappointed is this: When I think of bipartisan policy or approach, I think of unbiased approach. When I listened to your speech I heard—like I heard you try to be unbiased, but yet, at the same time, [you] input your political policies and all that stuff in there. How can we be unbiased? Do you see what I’m getting at here?

Gov. Whitman:  That’s a very fair point and I would actually recommend to you—and I haven’t seen the show I’ve only heard the song and I love it… a [Broadway] show called “Avenue Q,” and it says, we’re all a little bit racist. And you know what? We all are; we all have our prejudices. And the point behind the song is, recognize it. Recognize that this is your bias and then try to get over it, try to work with somebody else. We all have it, whether we look at somebody walking down the street—and we make judgments, depending upon the length of their hair, the way they’re dressed—we make assumptions. And guess what, folks? That’s bias. We assume going in. I will tell you that if you say to me, “I’m a born-again Christian conservative,” I’m already thinking, “Oh, boy, I know where you’re going.”

But in the last election cycle, I was in Iowa and New Hampshire and I had people come up to me saying, “I’m a born-again, pro-life Christian Republican who believes in stem-cell research.” You know what? I gotta be careful. I gotta be careful that I don’t take my biases and immediately assume. Do I have a point of view? Absolutely. And I’m going to express my point of view and anything I say is gonna come from that. And I can’t apologize for that, because that’s who I am. I will try always to say, but I can listen to what the other side says, because I know, I have learned, whether it’s being a mother, or being in politics for as long as I have, or now being a grandmother, that there are very few all-right and all-wrong positions. They’re just all sorts of shades of gray.

And I’ve been slammed on more than one occasion for being what’s called a “moderate,” and God forbid you should be a moderate. It means you have no position on anything. I would argue it takes much more to be a moderate, because you say, “You know, I’m not always right. It would really be great to think, this is the one position to take because I know I’m right and I’m always gonna be there.” … My response to people is, “Tell me the issue; I’ll tell you where I am, and then you decide.” Because I’m pretty conservative on fiscal issues. I cut taxes over 50 times, I kept state spending in control, kept it in line with the rate of inflation—we did a lot of things—but I’m pro-choice. I’m not offended with gay marriage. I mean, there are a whole lot of things where I would disagree with the far right of the party, but what does that make me, liberal or conservative?

Those are, we keep trying to lump people into various categories, and the thinking person usually is kind of in between a whole bunch of things, and that’s often a harder place to be. So, the best thing that you can do is filter out what you hear me saying that you think is just from a bias, understand that’s where I’m coming from, because that’s my background and my beliefs, and see where there are areas that we could agree and where we can move forward. … You’ve gotta do that with everybody, because you’ve gotta expect people to bring their own biases to the table.

Questioner 7:  Gov. Whitman, first, I’d like to commend you for your efforts to erode partisanship, I think you deserve a round of applause for that. … I’m an organizational psychologist student here with Walden’s Ph.D. in Psychology program, but my work for the past 28 years has been in water resources and sustainability—in particularly, water management, global-water equity …. And so, I would like to ask you to consider that the rising consensus for nuclear power is, I think, being done in ignorance and especially in ignorance with respect to the amount of water that that source of energy uses. It’s an order of magnitude more than coal. Really, the amount of water that it uses, [in] my opinion, precludes its increased use. … As a friend of mine often says, the No. 1 source of energy we have is conservation. If we simply reduce [consumption] by 50 percent, then we have a whole host of options that are not open to us now and, considering that 25 percent of our energy is wasted, we really only have a 25 percent gap to fill.

Gov. Whitman:  Well, let me just say a couple of things to that. You’re right that nuclear energy uses a great deal of water in the process, but in fact it returns most of that and the largest loss of water in nuclear energy comes from evaporations, because most of them have huge ponds—holding ponds that they use—and the water they return is warmer than the water they’ve taken out, but it has to be at the level that allows for aquatic life to be able to live and thrive. So, in fact, while it uses a lot in the process, it doesn’t take as much as it uses; it gives back, it reprocesses most of it. And the thing about it is, whether you like it or not, according to the EPA, this administration’s Environmental Protection Agency’s analysis of the Waxman bill, you’ll have to have a 50 percent increase in nuclear [energy]. We’re never gonna have that, but it’s 20 percent of our power today. But we’re never gonna get a 50 percent increase in that in order to meet the budget demands that they have in the reduction for greenhouse-gas emissions. What I’m talking about, I mean, I am a proponent, I will say upfront. I am a proponent for nuclear [energy], not as a silver bullet, but as one of a host of things that we’re gonna need to do in order to solve our energy problems. But I also believe very firmly and [that] we need to do much more in conservation, we need to do much more with renewables.

The issue that you have is renewables, for instance, are 3 percent of the portfolio today, the energy portfolio today. So even if you double it or triple it by 2030, you’re not gonna meet our demands—and we haven’t figured out how to make it base power. It will be base power eventually. And conservation, I’m a huge proponent of [government-backed] Energy Star [program], anything that we can do to help reduce our energy consumption. The problem you run into is how quickly we can get that kind of thing implemented in a way to impact the very rapidly increasing demand. You know when we saw gas prices go to $4 [a gallon] and above, I said, “OK, people are gonna stop buying their SUVs. I won’t see 60 Hummers going down the road in Florida—where I’ve yet to see a mountain or an ice storm, so I don’t know why people have to have them. That people will be sensible.” I always suspected that once gas prices went back down again that people would probably revert to their bad driving habits and not carpool and run out for the glass of milk and then back again to the store for the pound of butter. But I didn’t think they’d buy the light trucks and the SUVs; I thought they’d always be concerned that we’d see the gas price again. I was wrong. The minute prices went back down, we went right back to our bad buying habits, which is why, while I believe absolutely in conservation, I don’t want to try to rely on that as being the way we’re gonna solve our energy demands. We’ve gotta look at everything. It’s got to be a comprehensive approach.

Questioner 7:  Well, and thank you for that. I would encourage you, though, to revisit the water modeling for nuclear power, because it’s misunderstood. … Conservation is about behavioral change and that is a very difficult thing to effect, but anyway I appreciate your...

Gov. Whitman:  Well, we can all work on that one together, on behavioral change.

Questioner 8: I’m a U.S. citizen living abroad in a country with an emerging democracy. I and a couple of colleagues are trying to teach this new constituent assembly the concepts of critical thinking, strategic planning, long-term decision assessment. … Although, we’re not making as much headway as we want—it’s a cultural issue. But my question is that if we’re teaching other democracies how to do these things, and we’re not the only group that’s doing this, what are we teaching our own freshman congressmen that arrive in Washington? Do we not teach them these types of same principles to think and look long term at each and every question that they’re answering?

Gov. Whitman:  Well, it’s not a question of not teaching our congresspeople; it’s not teaching our kids. Civics—if you look at the curriculum in our schools, the teaching of civics has taken a real beating. We don’t teach civics in the way we used to; we don’t give it as much emphasis as we used to. We kind of take it for granted somehow that by osmosis they’ll understand how this whole process works, or what their responsibilities are in a democracy, and it’s very troubling. We need to do a much better job of providing civics education. We need to start at the earliest grades and work our way up. And in colleges I’ve always been a big believer, it’s great to specialize, but, boy, I think a broader education at the B.A. level is a really good thing. It’s not all bad to have some required courses where science students are gonna learn how to write so they can communicate their thoughts. I mean, it’s great to be an expert in math or science, but if you can’t communicate your thinking to somebody else, it doesn’t do a whole lot of good. So we need a broader-based, a Renaissance-type of approach. I think it behooves us to do that, and civics starts there.

There are freshman orientation courses for congresspeople when they come in, but another interesting telling point was it used to be that all the freshmen, [on] both sides of the aisle, went to orientation together to learn how it all worked, to learn how Congress was supposed to operate. Now they do it separately. Republicans do one side; Democrats do their own side. So they don’t even meet as freshmen working together and that’s something that needs to change, once again.

Questioner 9:  Good morning, governor. First of all, let me say that I am from a pristine part of the world called the Caribbean and, this is not a paid advertisement, but I do want to register my appreciation for your absolute passion this morning on bipartisanship. I want to correct one little misconception, though, and it may be my own misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what you said. In our part of the world we do have parliamentary democracy, yes, you are correct on that, but I want to suggest to you that it’s not a simple question of one party winning an election and coming in and imposing its views. There is much debate, rich debate, because there are two sides of the house and, of course, there’s the upper chamber and the lower chamber. So we mirror what actually happens in the United States of America. But further, I want to suggest to you that in this bipartisanship fervor that you want to sort of encourage, and in the face of millions of people dying because of the lack of health care or lack of access to health care, how long must the debate go on? How long must we wait for bipartisanship before, figuratively, Rome starts burning? Thank you very much.

Gov. Whitman:  Well, we have a very interesting model, actually, in Massachusetts, when the governor there expanded health care, and now it includes—there were about 15 percent of the population of Massachusetts that don’t have health care at the moment, so they have vastly reduced the number of uninsured. And there’s no question … that we must enhance our ability to have access to health insurance. But I will also tell you that if that’s all we look at, if all we look at is cost and expansion and don’t also consider the quality of that care, we’re gonna be missing a big part of the equation. We want to control health care costs. Forty percent of health care costs today are due to lifestyle choices—people who insist on smoking, on over-drinking, and overeating, obesity. So we need to start addressing them. We don’t want to put it all on them; it’s not all their fault. But we need to educate people as to what they can do to control their own personal choices and how this impacts a system.

We absolutely need to expand [health] care—we did that while I was governor of New Jersey. We did it for children and we did it for adults. Actually, we found one of the best ways to get adults into the system was to focus on their children and make it affordable for them to get their children covered, because the more attention they paid to the children, the more they started paying attention to themselves and looking for systems.

But I think we ought to look very carefully at what’s happening in Massachusetts to try to avoid some of the mistakes and try to anticipate some of the good things that have gone on there. The problem is that this health care bill at the moment is trying to accomplish everything at once, and my fear is it’s not that we wait forever to get a perfect bipartisan bill—there is no such thing. But if you leave it and ram through a bill that is only partisan, the other side is only going to try to undermine it from Day 1 for partisan reasons. You want to co-opt them, that’s why you want to get some Republicans on the bill, because then they can’t come back and just dump on it. They have gotta look for positive ways to reinforce the good things that are happening.

And we need to understand that it needs to be comprehensive. We need to give patients more understanding. There needs to be more transparency in the hospitals and how they work and [transparency of] the docs, so that you can see what the history is of the individual doctors, of how they’ve been performing. You know, 50 percent of your surgeons are below average. That’s just a fact of life: Of any doctor, 50 percent are gonna be below average. So people need to have more control over it. I don’t have the answer for the health care system, but I will tell you that I understand the frustration of people who aren’t covered. But to try to do something that’s not going to work could result in the fact that we just go back to doing nothing at all, and that’s not acceptable. That shouldn’t be acceptable. And by the way on the parliamentary system, I beg to disagree just a little bit on the British system, because with the rotten boroughs and the ability of the parties to pick where people can run, if you don’t vote for the party when they determine it’s a party-line vote, rich debate, I mean far more than we have in the sense of intellectual type debate, at least they used to, that you won’t get your seat. And that’s up to the party to decide, not your constituents. Your constituents only get to vote on the person the party deems as eligible to vote in that district. So it’s not exactly like ours, it doesn’t reflect the republican form of democracy in exactly the same way.

Questioner 10:  …I’m also from Postville, Iowa, and I’m an educator—I’m a high school math teacher—and I’m in the [education] program here at Walden University, and just in listening to your comments and the questions, one of the things that stands out to me is there just seems to be a recurring theme of, in a sense, kinda this hidden fear that people have. You know you talk about bipartisanship and you talk about the parties where you have representatives and congresspeople and presidents and everybody who go up and want to pass legislation and they fear debating it or going across the lines for fear of being slammed in the media or different things like that, and that seems to filter down.

As an educator, I go into my classroom teaching math with a little bit of fear behind me, because I look at the fact that I’m working hard, I’m trying to do all these new innovative things to help students learn math—which is a big issue as far as maintaining that—but there’s always, in the back of my mind, where, well, if these kids don’t score well on this particular test, they’re gonna label these kids as this way or that way—that kind of thing. And to me that seems to be in almost any topic that comes up, that there’s some issue that makes it hard for people to come out and just be able to talk openly about what’s out there. And, so, I guess my question kinda comes back to also, how do we initiate some of the systemic changes that seem to be necessary in order to do this? You know, when I go to the poll everything is very dichotomous in a world that, like you said, there’s a spectrum of thing. It’s like you said, you can’t be moderate when you go to the poll, because you either have to vote yes or no.

If somebody says, no child left behind, it seems like there’s the attitude that you have to say either, “Oh, I love this,” or “This is horrible.” You know, I mean, there are good things about that, but there are things that need to be fixed. And how do you tell your young students, “Go exercise your right to vote,” when we live with archaic systems like the electoral college, where I can live in a certain state and if I know that this is a certain colored state and I’m on the other side, then it’s like, I totally believe in going out and exercising my right to vote and I do that because I want to say that I contributed and did this, but how do we bring about that systemic change that’s gonna allow for us to actually work together in a situation where we can find those solutions that will be viable for everybody in the long run?

Gov.Whitman:  Well, that’s why institutions like Walden I think are so very important, to stimulate the kind of discussion, to stimulate the type of debate that does recognize that there are a host of different approaches and there [is] very rarely one all-bad and one all-good side to an argument and only one way to solve a problem. And it’s gotta start well before the elections. It’s not just showing up at the polls that makes a difference, you’re right. By then you’re already been limited in your choices. You have the names that are on the ballot, nobody else, and you have where their positions are, or if you have an issue of referendum, you have the yea or nay vote. You don’t have the discussion that takes place before that. And that’s where the good old New England-town-meeting-kind-of-approach comes in, that’s where getting communities together from time to time. We’ve lost, in many places, our sense of community. Here in the Midwest, it’s probably stronger than it is on probably either of the coasts—although I say that living in a small town where we have a very strong sense of community. But we need to get the people who have the ability to articulate the importance of this kind of an approach to do it. And by the way we need to reinforce those who stand up in the Congress and the Senate, at the local level, and are willing to engage.

Because what happens, I’ll just tell you a quick story. My congressman, who’s a freshman Republican, very well-respected on fiscal issues, voted for the cap-and-trade bill. Well, now, he voted against the stimulus [package], he voted against the budget, he’s not in favor of the current health care plan, but he is being absolutely ripped apart by the conservatives in the state because [of what he] he voted for. He said to me, “I don’t understand. I’m with them on everything else, and here’s the one vote, because I think it’s good for the state and I think it’s the right thing to do, and I’m getting killed.” I said, “Welcome to the world these days. If you’re not 100 percent [with your party,] you’re the enemy. You gotta be 100 percent on every bill.”

Well, you know what? I said to him, “I’ll write an op-ed for you defending you. I will explain this.” We need to do more of that. When we see somebody acting the way we think they should, tell them, let them know. Because people do respond. If all they’re getting is criticism, they’re gonna start thinking, “Well, maybe I am wrong and maybe I should change.” But if they hear some positive, no you know we like the fact … Those 14, the Gang of 14, way back when— what was it about eight years [ago], I guess, when the Gang of 14 came together. For years it was said that they were going to break the log jam on judicial nominations eight years ago and that they were Republicans, seven Republicans, seven Democrats. At that point, the Democrats were holding up the nominations; Republicans were putting up some unqualified people. It was a back and forth.

And they [the Gang of 14] said, “We’re going to break this.” They were excoriated by both sides, their party leadership, because they said, “No, no, no. We have party positions on this, you can’t come together and broker a deal,” which they did. And we needed to right them and say, “You know what? That’s good. We like the fact that you’re willing to work … [with] somebody across the aisle to get the people’s business done.” So we need to do more of that, too, but it is a discussion that has to take place long before the elections and has to be incorporated really into our every day lives, and it doesn’t mean anymore having to go out of your house to do it. We’ve got the Internet. We’ve got extraordinary ability to communicate and to raise ideas and to get people thinking. And I have great hope that this will be a tool that’s gonna allow for much more critical thinking much earlier in the stage as we address these really complicated issues. Because they’re tough. Health care’s a tough issue, believe me, presidents have been trying to solve it for some 60 years now; we’ve been trying to get it right. And we haven’t yet. That doesn’t mean we stop and don’t do anything about it, we do keep pushing, and I applaud the president for having it on the agenda, but I worry that if we try to do everything all at once and get it done just because we have this deadline of Aug. 1, we’re not gonna get the kind of legislation that we really need to have. Yeah.

Questioner 11: Thank you for coming. I applaud the university for inviting you. Especially since you’re a woman who’s in public office and as someone who aspires to go to public office, what is your advice, opinion, on encouraging a future generation of women to step up? Because we’re in the majority of the population, but we’re a minute minority in all elected offices. What is your advice to get all these women that are here to go and think about public office and running for public service?

Gov. Whitman:  … Start by remembering women can do anything and everything. One of the first things and one of the biggest obstacles that women have—well, there are a bunch of obstacles. I mean, there still is a glass ceiling; there’s a different standard to which women are held. But women have got to be more supportive of women. I have never argued that you should support a woman just because she’s a woman. But if you have a choice in the political arena … of two candidates with whom you’re equally comfortable, you believe that each could do the job, then it’s OK to let the fact that one’s a woman sway your vote. Because I will tell you, today’s problems are just too big, just too complex to think that one group of people has all the answers. White males don’t know it all. And we need more women, we need more minorities. We’re not getting more minorities at the federal level and that’s a wonderful role model that’s out there [that we need] … showing other minorities, “I can be that. I can do that.” That’s something that we need, and we need more women in those positions.

But in order to get them elected, we’ve gotta stop and say, first of all, understand that we will never just vote for a woman because she’s a woman. And I think maybe the Republicans figured that out last year. We need to be more supportive of women, and we, I will—again, just a short, very current thing: My daughter ran for Congress against that congressman I told you about—who’s a good friend by the way—in a primary open seat. When she went around [to campaign]—she’s 30, she has a real estate license, she’s run her own small business, she worked down in Washington in the Department of Labor, she worked on Capitol Hill, she’s run her own public relations firm, she has a husband and twin boys.

Every time she went somewhere, or very often, she’d get questions about, “Well, you don’t have enough experience. What’s your experience?” She’s 30. The congressman whom she would have been replacing, when he first ran was 30, he had two young kids, and he’d been a substitute teacher. Nothing wrong with substitute teachers, but that was it, and nobody said to him, “You don’t have enough experience.” Now a lot of that was women saying, “You don’t have enough experience.” We gotta start getting a little more comfortable, I think it comes from the fact that there aren’t as many women out there in those positions that we tend to have a more personal relationship and we think, if that woman screws up, that reflects on me. Whereas, if a guy does, it’s OK, ’cause they do it [run for office] all the time.

… Let’s get over that. I mean [President] Ronald Reagan’s eldest daughter, Maureen, said she would know … women had reached equality when we can elect to public office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there. Now that’s not a standard for which I would advocate by any stretch, but it tells you where we are. … We need good men, we need good women, we need a broad spectrum of races, of background. If we don’t bring those different perspectives to the table, given the complexity of the issues we face, we’ll never get the kinds of solutions that will be long-lasting. Thank you all very, very much.

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