>> at staples center. sen. bennet: how are you? so good to see you. it's like an out-of-body experience. >> you good? sen. bennet: i'm good, yeah. do you want to make it out to stephen, or for stephen? >> i saw your interview on book tv back in october or something. that's how i -- sen. bennet: thank you. >> i decided you were the man. sen. bennet: thank you. thank you very much. i really appreciate it. i hope you get a chance to read it. you will enjoy. hi, everybody. nice to see you. they asked the librarians here asked if we could start a little bit early because they have to close a little early because of the snow, so i'm going to, being the son of a librarian, i'm going to accede to their wishes and get started if that's ok. we're about five minutes early, and i think we have until about quarter past. >> [inaudible] sen. bennet: ok. thank you very much. those of you who are from laconia and from new hampshire, thank you for coming out. those of you from other places, thank you for coming from those other places. come on in, please. grab a seat. maybe we could keep our eye out just in case more people want to -- i'll tell you a little bit about myself and why i'm running, and i'd like to spend time in a conversation with all of you about whatever it is you want to talk about. that's what i want to talk about. i followed my wife, susan, out to colorado 25 years ago. she's a public interest environmental lawyer, and she wanted to go work for a group called the sierra club legal defense fund, now called earth justice, and she wanted to work on saving western public lands, which is what she's done the last quarter of a century. i wanted to get out of the practice of law because i thought if i stayed in the law, i'd become the world's worst lawyer, and i went into business for a while, buying companies that were well run but had -- come on in, please. we started a few minutes early because the library is closing a few minutes early. there are chairs -- there are plenty of chairs. here. i got three right here. rep. gabbard: -- sen. bennet: here. i was just getting started. i said that i followed my wife out to colorado 25 years ago. she's a public interest environmental lawyer. i went to work in business and restructuring companies that were well run but really poorly capitalized, so the last deal i did out there was regal cinemas, united artists, and edwards theatres, movie theater companies going bankrupt at the same time, and we created regal entertainment group. and then naturally after i was finished doing that, i went to become superintendent of the denver public schools, which is a school district of 95,000 kids that's got a budget about -- a billion-dollar budget, which is, just for ease of comparison, is roughly three times the size of south bend, indiana's budget. that village in indiana that mayor pete comes from. [laughter] and i was doing that -- that's where i was when i was appointed to the senate to begin with, because my predecessor had gone into president obama's cabinet. that's who i am. i have been in the senate for about 11 years. i come from a state that's exactly a third republican, a third democratic, and a third independent. it's sort of like new hampshire in that respect. it is a swing state. it is a purple state. i'm actually the only candidate in this race who's won an election in a swing state, and i've done it twice, and i think that's going to be really important as we go forward to have somebody who we nominate who can win purple states, not just blue states on the coast, not just win in the commonwealth of massachusetts or in vermont or california, but in places like colorado, if we're actually going to not just win the presidency, but win a majority in the senate and displace mitch mcconnell from being the majority leader in the senate, which i believe is vitally important for us to do. if i had to summarize my town halls for the last 10 years in that state, it is really easy to do it and new hampshire is no different. it's people coming, saying, michael, we're working really hard, but we can't afford some combination of housing, healthcare, higher education, or early childhood education. in other words, we can't afford a middle class life, we can't save, we feel like our kids are going to live a more diminished life than the life that we lived and maybe even a more diminished life than the life their grandparents lived. i think about the families i worked for in the denver public schools who are not coming to my town halls because they're working two and three jobs to keep their heads above water. they would say we're killing ourselves, and no matter what we do, we can't get our kids out of poverty. those are the reflections in the town halls of an economy that, for the last 50 years, hasn't worked well for most american people, hasn't worked well for 90% of the american people. it's worked well for the people at the very top but not for everybody else. we have the lowest economic mobility of any country in the industrialized world, and we have the largest inequality we've had since 1928. it brings me no pleasure to say this as someone who ran denver public schools, but across the country, our education system is reinforcing the inequality we have rather than liberating people from their circumstances, because the best predictor of the quality of education is a parent's income. that's not the way it has been, but it's the way it is today. is of that taken together one of the reasons donald trump got elected, because people looked at economic quagmire and anxiety in their own lives and said nobody in washington seems to care much about it, nothing ever changes, we send democrats and republicans there and nothing changes, we might as well send a reality tv star to reality tv star to washington, we couldn't make matters worse. of course, now we know we actually can make matters worse. when i talk to people at home all the time who voted for donald trump, why did you vote for donald trump, very often the answer is, we wanted to blow the place up. and i say, congratulations. you have achieved your objective. but now what are we going to do for our kids and our grandkids? what are we going to do for america's place in the world? and i think those are a couple of questions we need to ask right now as we think about the next steps after donald trump. i'd say something else. i don't know where you were when barack obama was elected president, but i know where i was. i was sitting in not our house but a rental house in colorado. i was a civilian. i was the superintendent of the schools. and all i could think about is he was standing in grant park with michelle and the two daughters in chicago that night was how far this country had come and what this would mean for the kids that went to school in the denver public schools, what it would mean to them when they thought about what a president was or read about a president in the history books that barack obama was who would come to mind. i thought about what that would mean for my own children, what it would mean for their future in this country and to me it just felt glorious, and what i was not thinking about at that time was the reaction that would set in, in part, a reaction to president obama's election. and what i really wasn't thinking about was three weeks later i was a united states senator in washington, d.c. getting sworn in at the same time president obama was getting sworn in. i was quite aware of the fact that president obama was getting sworn in. i doubt very much that he was aware that i was getting sworn in, but my arrival did coincide with his arrival, and i have been there ever since. and in my first election, which was 2010, a terrible year for democrats, we voted for the affordable care act. i barely hung on, barely survived and because i did and harry reid did and patty murray from washington state did, we held on to the majority another four years, which was good, but this was the beginning of the rise of the tea party and the beginning of the rise of what then became known as the freedom caucus, people who rode into washington, reacting to the election of barack obama, not with conventional republican ideas, not with traditional conservative ideas, but with sort of sarah palin's cartoon version of what the founding fathers were engaged in when they were founding our country, pulsing from the veins in their foreheads, and they showed up in washington and have basically been dismantling our exercise in self government ever since, in the name of that ideology. and for the last six years barack obama was president, he couldn't get anything through the congress as a result of that. we can't pass a simple infrastructure bill in the senate. this is all before trump got elected, and it's one of the reasons he did get elected, because he rolled in as kind of king of the freedom caucus to smash the institutions up, because it didn't look like we were getting anything done, and we weren't getting anything done. i can tell you exactly who was responsible for it and it wasn't barack obama. it was this cast of characters. when i hear the vice president sometimes say, look, if we just got rid of donald trump, it will all go back to normal, i can tell you that there was no normal before donald trump got there. one of the reasons he got there was it wasn't normal, and we have got to find a way to close over this freedom caucus, not just beat donald trump, but be able to govern the country again . i think the only way to do that is by winning more states in this country. many of those are purple states. i think that's the only way. today was reading an article in the "new york times" about how mcconnell thinks he outsmarted everybody on this impeachment stuff and for years. and in the book you've got over there, steven, called "the land of flickering lights," i said to mcconnell once -- thank you very much. advertising. i'll use this as an opportunity, thank you, thank you. i will use this as an opportunity to say if you ever write a book and you decide to run for president, please have the publisher put your photograph on the front cover, which i did not have the sense to do. but i told mcconnell, i said, man, i've written this book and i've said mean things about you in the book and he said, well, i don't really have much of a relationship with him but he said, well, that's ok, you're running for president, naturally you'd say mean things about me. i said, come to think of it, mitch, you're probably the only person in the senate that will like this book, because i say things like mitch mcconnell is impervious to give-and-take unless he is taking everything which he almost always is, and he got this big smile on his face when i said that. but that is, in that article today in the "new york times," what mcconnell says is, look, we had process. i disagree with that. we didn't deny witnesses, i disagree with that. we had process, we had witnesses. he says, but what they didn't have was the votes, and he said the reason why they didn't have the votes, the democrats, is that we're not winning enough races, and that's my point. we're not winning enough races. and sometimes people ask, in fact, in every meeting i have, people ask what will change the dysfunction down there and there's not an easy answer but one of the answers is we've got to win races and in order to change anybody's mind down there. i think that's really important when we think about who we're going to dominate because it's got to be somebody who can win in these purple states and that we can all rally behind. this is a difficult time in our political system. it's not -- we're not going to change it, it's not going to be easier to change -- sorry, i'm getting a little tired. it's not going to be easier to change than the last gilded age was easy to change, but in the last gilded age, the american people rose up and said we're going to make some changes, we'll amend the constitution so that women have the right to vote in this country. we're going to amend the constitution so we are directly electing senators, instead of having senators bribe their way through state legislatures, which is the way it worked from the founding until then to get into office to give themselves railroad rights of way. we're going to do things like invent high school because we realize a middle school education isn't going to do what's required in the 21st century. education won't do what's required in the 20th century and i think that's what we need to do, too. and i don't think we should feel we're burdened by this. we should feel privileged to live in a country where what we do makes a difference and all of you have the opportunity in this moment, at this time, when we've got a president as disgraceful as the one that we have, to make sure that it's only one term that he's there, and that on the back end of there, we create a new politics that could actually leave the democracy in better shape for our kids and grandkids. i really believe that the task in front of us is the task of creating a constituency for change out in the country to close over a broken washington. washington will not fix itself, no matter which person we elect president. we need somebody who can mobilize americans with a set of ideas that can galvanize not just the democratic base but also win back some of the nine million people that voted twice for barack obama and donald trump. that's the perspective i bring to the race as someone who has won in tough places a couple of times. thank you for being here. i'm happy to take any questions or any criticism. i tell people to ask me stuff you wouldn't ask any other politician because you're worried about hurting feelings. i was an urban school superintendent for a number of years, so you cannot hurt my feelings. they've been beaten out of me a long time ago. >> as president, you have to deal with war and peace. do we have enough nuclear weapons? too many? not enough? when would you use them? or not use them? senator bennet: i certainly believe we have enough, and i believe the way they should be used is only to be threatened to be used in a balance of power. that's what i believe. i certainly wouldn't want to be a president who used a nuclear weapon. >> for a strike -- senator bennet: i can't imagine a world where that's a view i would endorse, but i also want to remind you that we have a president right now who's trying to miniaturize nuclear weapons to make them more helpful on the battlefield, which is a direction we don't need to go in. >> i'd like to give you a thank you if you'll take that. sen. bennet: i will, thank you. >> as a bird dogger for the self-employed, i want to tell you the tax fairness for the self-employed from delgado's office are excited about working with your office. that enables me to ask you a question on my mind all the time that you may not have heard before. but i respect and appreciate the fact, how committed you are to addressing climate change. so, here's my question about climate change. according to the gallup poll, for the last 20 years, 40% of americans believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old. how do you convince people that climate change is a problem, if those people don't believe in time? sen. bennet: i've not ever been asked that question, but i have an answer. i have an answer. >> you think well on your feet. sen. bennet: i do. by the way, i appreciate your bringing -- i want to use this opportunity it talk about two things, healthcare and climate. you mentioned delgado. delgado is a guy in upstate new york who won a very, very tough congressional race last cycle. do you remember that? do you remember a time before 2018 when we were in the minority in the house of representatives? do you remember that? and the republicans were in the majority so they were doing things like defeating the immigration bill i wrote with john mccain and others in 2013 that if we had passed it, i think actually this president probably wouldn't be president. you remember that time? and then we won the majority, and delgado was one of 40 people that flipped house seats to get that majority for us. 39 of those 40 ran on a public option for healthcare. one person ran on medicare for all. one. and i just think it is such a reflection of where the politics actually is in the country. those folks were able to run an offense against a president who is the first president in american history to take healthcare away from millions of americans. that's donald trump. and we should running on offense in this election, as well. if we're running on medicare for all instead, donald trump will say he's the guy protecting americans' insurance, he's the guy protecting medicare. and i can tell you that will be a huge mistake and if i were wrong about that, then 39 of the 40 would have been running on medicare for all the last time and they weren't. and by the way, if i would say this to my friend, bernard, if he were here. he's not here today. if he were here, he'd say, i wrote the damn bill on medicare for all, and i would say, you're right, bernie, you did, and i wrote the bill on public options called the medicare acts. so a thought on the good of the work. come on in. we started early because they're closing early. i'm michael bennet. you missed some boring stuff. [laughter] >> i came all the way from florida! sen. bennet: who wants to go back to florida? [laughter] sen. bennet: i hope you have a big automobile. but let's talk about climate for a second, because actually the majority of americans believe climate change is real and -- we got plenty of chairs here. the question was, how do we get people to believe that climate change is real when -- >> the gallup poll says 40% of americans believe the earth is less than 10,000 years old, so if you don't believe in time, how do you believe in climate change? sen. bennet: right, and i said i had never been asked that question before. i can't explain the time part of it, but i can tell you that gallup and other pollsters say that the majority of people believe climate change is real, humans have contributed to it, and we've got to do something about it. my deep disappointment is we have a climate denier in the white house, and i think it should be disqualifying to be elected president if you are a climate denier. i mean that in moral terms, but i also mean it in political terms. i ask myself all the time, how is it possible that he won and stayed there? he didn't make a secret about his views on climate. the answer is, we lost an economic argument to donald trump. donald trump argued that if you ignore climate change, the economy is going to do great. if you try to do something about climate change, you will destroy the american economy. that is a preposterous argument. it is a ridiculous argument. but we lost it, all over america, to donald trump because not enough of the american people thought the democratic party was worried about their jobs and worried about their income. in the context i described earlier, where people feel like they can't get in the middle class or if they are in the middle class, it can't stay there, the anxiety people had. first of all, i will never lose that economic argument to donald trump, and it is one of the reasons why my climate plans looks different than other climate plans in this race, because i believe we should get to a place where we are paying farmers and ranchers to sequester carbon in their soil and foresters to sequester carbon in our forests. let me come to a second point on this, because it is vital for people to understand this. i was asked a question the other day that was like this but slightly different, when somebody said, can western democracy solve climate change? that was the question. and i said to them, you just asked the most existential question of