Jim Kolbe was born in Evanston, Illinois but his family moved from Illinois to Santa Cruz County, Arizona in 1947. As a teenager, he worked as a Page for Senator Barry Goldwater from 1958-1960, then graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1965 and an MBA from Stanford University in 1967. After returning to Illinois to work in state government and a stint in the private sector in Arizona, Kolbe was elected to the Arizona State Senate where he served from 1976-1982.

In 1984 he challenged incumbent Congressman Jim McNulty for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He won in what had previously been a southern Arizona Democratic stronghold.  He was first sworn into Congress in 1985, becoming the first Republican to represent southern Arizona since statehood. For eleven terms, Kolbe represented the people of Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, which includes most of Tucson, eastern Pima County, Cochise County, and parts of Pinal and Santa Cruz counties. He was a leader for free trade and open markets, supported Social Security reform, advocated immigration reform, and was a proponent of the Republican tenets of smaller government, lower taxes, and individual responsibility.

Kolbe:
Thank you very much. Thank you.  Since we’re on a time frame here with KAET, I’m going to take my watch off so I have some idea of – try to keep my remarks…you know, politicians, telling them they can talk is…is that’s a dangerous thing.  It’s kind of an unlimited thing.  Except in the House of Representatives where we do have time limits, but we’re used to in the House of Representatives of speaking in a one minute segment or maybe a two minute segment, but a 30 minute segment, I don’t know how any of us can…can even handle that, butJack, I think we should just have let you do all the talking here today and give these reminiscences.  They were so good here…we might as well just let you continued doing that. 

Kolbe:
You stole my first line which is to wish you a Happy 95th Birthday for the State of Arizona.  I haven’t been around quite that long yet, but a Happy Birthday to all of us in this state.  I think we’re coming up on our centennial and in fact, the planning for the centennial is already well underway.  Jack, the laughter about J.D. Hayworth was because to know J.D. is to love him and all of us…of course, know J.D. and so when you say such things as that, we all laugh because of our love…for him. 

Kolbe:
You know, Winston Churchill once said that the best argument in democracy is a 10 minute conversation with the average voter.  Mr. Churchill was not a democrat, small D, very much, but…so he kind of had some…ideas about the voters himself.  But obviously, in this audience, I don’t have to worry about this.  This is a good argument for democracy because we’re in a very discerning group.  This is not clearly the average voter, the kinds of people that show up for…a lecture on a Wednesday morning on Arizona reminiscences about politics.  But I’m delighted to have this opportunity to…to visit with you today and to tell you just a few of my thoughts and what I want to do it to try to…weave kind of some of the things in my life in politics here in Arizona, weave it in with what I see as some of the things that are happening, both nationally and in the State of Arizona.  And…and where I see this taking us in…in the political world. 

Kolbe:
My drive this morning up from Phoenix reminded me of the differences that we have in Arizona today from the time that I first came here.  I was a young child when Tucson and Phoenix were connected by a two lane road that ran through downtown, Eloy and downtown Casa Grande and it took us a long time to make from one place to the other.  Then it became a very fast journey.  Now it takes a long time again…to make it.  …Because…Interstate 10 is always jammed.  It’s always crowded.  In fact, I believe I’m correct in saying it is the most…heavily used four lane freeway, two lanes in either direction, freeway in the United States today.  It’s about 300% of capacity at this point.  It…expresses some of the, I think, some of the tremendous problems a state like this faces with the growth that we are experiencing.  You have the fifth largest city in the United States located here where we are today in the urban area here.  Tucson…with it’s inferiority complex, much smaller but we kind of like that.  But still, just this year passing a million…people.  …So we have two very large urban centers now in this state.  It is a very different state than the time at which I arrived.  And what does this mean for Arizona politics?  And I’m gonna come back to this topic as I go through some of these…some of these thoughts, but first I want to just tell you a little bit…fill in some of the blank spaces there in Jack’s introduction of me.  Fill in a few of the background about my own…journey in…in politics.

Kolbe:
As he said, my family arrived here in 1947 from Illinois, from the Midwest.  My family grew up – my family lived at that time on the north shore of Chicago in a very…nice suburb of… Chicago and my parents’ friends thought they were absolutely crazy that they were moving out to the wild west where there were still Indians shooting bows and arrows at people out there.  But we arrived in 1947, or at least my mother and my two brothers and I, my sister Beth was not yet born at that point, we arrived by air.  And I don’t think there were too many immigrants to Arizona in 1947 that came by airplane, but we arrived by airplane.  I can remember the overnight journey as a 5-year-old.  My first time on a plane.  Coming from…Illinois…with stops, I’m sure, at St. Louis and Albuquerque and a couple of places ‘cause planes couldn’t fly that far, but getting off the plane in Tucson and thinking wow, this is sure different than Winnetka, Illinois.

Kolbe:
I can still remember having that kind of a…of a memory.  I’ve often wondered, thought about why my parents decided to make this move.  I, of course, had my own view that my father, having grown up on a farm, uh…in…Minnesota and having worked very hard because his father had passed away when he was a very small child and he and his siblings and mother worked very hard to keep the dairy farm in Minnesota together, that his vision of what a parent was supposed to provide for their children was work.  And in that case, if that is indeed the model, my father was a very successful father…he provided a lot of work for his kids on this ranch, cattle ranch and farm, ‘cause we had 500 acres or irrigated farm land which, of course, is the real work.  Any of you that have ever spent time on a farm know and, especially in those days when it wasn’t very mechanized, it took six people to operate the hay baler…that we first had when we came to the ranch…and it was a lot of very, very hard…hard work.  I’ve always been amazed at the dedi – the pioneering spirit, though, of my mother.  No, yes, this was not – we didn’t…we arrived by airplane, we didn’t arrive in a covered wagon and so I can’t compare it to the real pioneers of the 19th Century that journeyed this way, the women that came this way.  But it still was a pioneering experience for her having grown up in an urban setting, not lived on a farm or ranch at any time in her life.  Having grown up in the urban setting of Chicago, to have made this move to Arizona and to have…to have taken to it so well, in terms of managing the ranch and helping with the…the farm operations and I’ve always thought that it was a, to me, my mother has always been a model of the kind of person that I would like to be.  Somebody who is…who adapted to the surroundings that she was put into.  And did extraordinarily well and was a real helpmate and partner…for my…my…my chi – my father. 

Kolbe:
But growing up on the ranch there, not only did we do the farm work, but we learned to…I learned to drive.  I always remembered the first vehicle that I was able to drive was the dump truck.  Now I know that’s not exactly what you’d think of starting off with as a…as a thing to drive with.  But it was a dump truck and I was about 6 years old.  I couldn’t reach the clutch.  But I could…my father would reach in when he wanted to stop and push the clutch down and so I learned if I could hang onto the wheel like this and swing down, I could get the clutch…and it was a very proud moment for me when I was able to swing down there and finally…be able to…to do…and then from there we went on and learned, of course, to drive everything, the jeeps and the tractors and everything and by the time I was…was 16 and got a driver’s license, I had been driving many, many years and many, many miles…on roads around tthe ranch. 

Kolbe:
We went to school in Patagonia.  No, we didn’t walk through the snow uphill in both directions there, but it was a school bus ride and…we did get dropped off at the high school and those of us that were in grade school had to walk about a mile…down through the creek and up the hill to get to the grade school.  And I’ve often thought today what school with liability would permit the kids to be dropped off at the high school and say, there’s the grade school up there.  Go find your way to…to school!  Times have changed.  We do live in somewhat a different…different world. 

Kolbe:
But how about the interest that I came to have in…in politics here in Arizona.  I think a large part of this comes from the fact that…um…we grew up, and some of you are here are old enough to remember this, in an era without a lot of television…and we actually sat around the dinner table in the evening talking about issues and about things of the day, things that were in the newspaper or that we had heard on the radio, or that we had done at school.  And while we were often very tired at night and had homework to do, we would sit around and have these discussions.  Now, discussions in the Kolbe family were not the kind of orderly discussions that most people have.  They were whoever could raise their voice the loudest and get over the voices of everybody else in the family usually got to be heard there, so my younger sister, six years younger than…than me, I’m the youngest of three boys, Beth always said that she never got heard at all and she’s making up for it these days now, with that.  But we did have a lot of this discussion. We also operated, in addition to the cattle ranch and the farm, we operated a guest ranch there and by the time I was six or seven or eight, by the time I was about nine, we were mostly – mother would not make dinner down at our house, we would go up to the guest ranch for…for our evening meals.  And so I found myself exposed at a very early age to very high powered people who had come…to the ranch as guests, as executives of banks and major manufacturing firms from the Midwest and the East…and was exposed to the discussions we had on a lot of…of issues.  So at a very early age, I found myself talking about politics and talking about national and international affairs. 

Kolbe:
My very first political memory is coming home from school in the first grade in 1948, walking in the door and my mother saying to my oldest brother Walt, who was in…twelve and old enough at least to understand something, saying Dewey lost.  You know, this was the afternoon of the day after the election.  It didn’t mean anything to me, but four years later, when Eisenhower was running for election, I was the fourth grade chairman of the Eisenhower campaign…at the Patagonia Elementary School there.  And I’m sure it’s one of the reasons we carried the state…for Dwight Eisenhower. I sported a button every day to school, an Eisenhower button.  My parents tell the story of when they went down to register in Santa Cruz County.  Remember having come…come from the north shore of Chicago, they came home in shock.  I can remember, this was even before the Dewey election.  I can remember them coming home because they were the 94th and 95th Republicans to be registered in the county there.  And so the entire county consisted of less than 100 registered Republicans.  I don’t know who those other brave souls were before that time.  Today it’s…still a heavily Democratic county, but there certainly are a lot more than 94 or 95…Republicans in the state.

Kolbe:
After the Eisenhower election, I got a real taste of politics during the time of the [inaudible] McCarthy hearings and the…and the debate over Senator Joe McCarthy and that spirited…caused a lot of spirited debate in our own family about whether Joe McCarthy had…was right or whether he was wrong or not.  Hi.  How are you?  How are you?  My finest…then I watched all the political…conventions…and watched those and participated in the elections by keeping tabs on every…vote that was being cast and how states were going at night there so my family could say, you know, what’s the electoral count and I would have the electoral count.  This was long before they were doing this on television, but I would keep the electoral count up, there. 

Kolbe:
My first – another very early memory that I have that I think is worth sharing with you is 1952 when Barry Goldwater ran for the Senate for the first time.  And this was the first politician I really ever met.  He came to our area, to the Elgin Community Club.  Elgin had…was famous for having, every election, having a debate or a…a forum where every candidate for every single office could participate.  You’ve all been to some of those things through the years here.  And it was an endless array of candidates starting at the top, going down to the constable…at the…at the bottom and each could speak for two or three or five minutes and Barry Goldwater came and I remember my father introducing me to him and, of course, my father said, well, he’s not going to win.  He’s running against the majority leader, but…of the Senate here, but he’s a good person and we certainly are going to be supporting him, so I was a Barry Goldwater fan from the time of 1952.

Kolbe:
Well, of course, Barry Goldwater did win and a few years later, I decided that I was interested in politics myself.  I think what gave me my first real decision point about doing something about it was reading an article of the page experience…in Washington and I decided I was going to become a page and so I started firing off letters and telegrams every January when session began…uh…to both Senators and to my Congressman.  I didn’t…wasn’t worried whether it was a Republican or a Democrat that appointed me…to this and I said, you know, I want to be considered for an opening as a page and I would get a polite answer back saying sorry, there’s no such openings.  But then in 1958, …January of 1958, suddenly a position came open and Barry Goldwater snagged that opening and off I went to Washington, D.C.  Given the…recent scandals dealing with the pages, it is remarkable to think of how different the program was in those days.  There was no supervision.  There was no dormitory.  There was no place for these 15-year-olds to live.  You arrived in the city and you found your own place to live.  At the age of 15, I found my own apartment with a couple of other pages, and lived on my own.  There was nobody to tell you to go to school.  Nobody to tell you to go to work.  You just showed up.  If you didn’t…If you didn’t, eventually your sponsor would find out and you’d probably be sent home, but that was the only time that there would be any kind of discipline in the program.  So it’s, again, a very different kind of a world…that we live in…today. 

Kolbe:
But in Barry Goldwater’s office, not only did we have Judy Eisenhower there, we had such greats as Dean Birch and Edna Kerver, who I remember very well and gave me my kind of first experience of working in a political…political setting. The Senate in those days was a place where we actually did…they did filibusters.  Not the virtual filibusters of today where somebody threatens it and that becomes a filibuster and they never actually spend any time on the floor.  They actually did filibusters.  In fact, I remember during my second year there, we had a filibuster on one of the very first of the Civil Rights pieces of legislation and this filibuster lasted for 28 consecutive days, non-stop, 24 hours a day for 28 days.  So the pages were put on assignments of 12 hours on and 12 hours off.  Now, when I was in Vietnam during the war, we got used to 12 on and 12 off assignments, but in today’s world a 15-year-old working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 28 days, I think probably OSHA would have stepped in there or the Department of Labor would have stepped in and had a thing to sat about that today, but that’s again, one of the things that’s certainly very different about things…today.

Kolbe:
As far as the people that were in the Senate, we had – it was really an extraordinary period of great leaders that served in the Senate at that time that I was privileged to be there as a page from 1958 to 1960.  Not only did we have our very own Carl Hayden as Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, but Lyndon Johnson was the majority leader of the United States Senate.  And on the other side was the inimitable Everett McKinley Dirkson, the minority leader who was truly one of the great orators of all time.  Straight out of the 19th Century…famous still for his orations about…the marigold, which was his flower that he raised and every year he would promote the marigold as the national flower.  We still haven’t been successful in achieving that. Famous for his various kinds of…of orations.  It was wonderful just to listen to his mellifluous voice. 

Kolbe:
And of course, in the background was John Kennedy who was clearly running for President of the United States at that time as was Lyndon Johnson, so the two of them, watching the interactions between them was most interesting.  And Richard Nixon, Vice President of the United States in a day when the Vice President actually came and presided occasionally over the Senate of the United States and spent some time in the cloak room and on the floor of the United States Senate, so you had this opportunity to watch these three Presidential candidates jockeying for position and watching the interactions of these politics and then, there was the rising star of Barry Goldwater who had just…achieved national attention by winning a very tough election…in 1958 for re-election, his first re-election, against the undying enmity of labor unions who wanted to very badly to defeat him. 

Kolbe:
And so after I graduated in 1960 from the page school, I went directly to Chicago, Illinois where the Republican Convention was being held at the end of June and we called it the Children’s Crusade where we helped to put Barry Goldwater on the map…in 1960.  We decided we were going to nominate him for Vice President.  I always remember that Walter Cronkite saying on television that…that during that convention, if the heart of the convention were allowed to be heard here, it would be Barry Goldwater who would be nominated.  Of course, it wasn’t, it was Henry Cabot Lodge.  But it was The Conscious of a Conservative, the book that had come out, and it was in…it was the beginning of the change in the Republican party going back from the Eisenhower wing to the conservative, what had been the Taft wing and now again, the conservative wing of the party.  So, Barry Goldwater was really responsible for that and it was all young people who did this…a group of us who were…I was still in high school, but – or just graduated from high school, but college students who actually accomplished all of this.  And it was a very, very, very exciting moment for us.

Kolbe:
Very quickly ‘cause I want to come back to Arizona politics and to my role in that, just to fill in the blanks there, I went to school at Northwestern University…graduated from there and…and also from Stanford University with an MBA.  Spent 3 years in the United States Navy, including a year in Vietnam on those boats that I used to have to describe to people and tell them what they were, but thanks to the 19…2004 presidential campaign, swift boats, everybody knows what swift boats are. 

Kolbe:
And indeed, John Kerry was one of my boat officers in my unit and so maybe there’ll be some questions about that.  I have some – there’s some…definitely some interesting stories about…John Kerry as a…in Viet…in Vietnam.  I spent three years in Illinois working for the then Governor…of Illinois and returned as I knew I intended to do and wanted to do, permanently, to Arizona in 1973…to go into business here and ultimately into politics.  We all remember 1974, Watergate…not all, but many here, remember 1974 and the Watergate debacle.  And it was a year in which Republicans were wiped out and that was the moment I decided I am going to get into this election, into this process because I – we didn’t put up good candidates, we didn’t fight hard…and I said I think there’s an opportunity for us to do something and so, in 1976 I ran for the Arizona State Legislature.  Now, I’m a big believer that you make a lot of your breaks in life and in…in politics.  But I’m also a big believer, and I’ve told this to many young people who have asked my advice about going into politics, there’s a huge element of luck in politics.  A huge element of being at the right place at the right time.  And that was the case…for me, having…living in a district…a legislative district where there was an opening and an opportunity, a generally Republican district that had swung in the Watergate years to a Democrat and I could see that this was an opening to recapture… this…this seat.  So there’s a great deal, I think, of…of that kind of luck that’s involved in all of that. 

Kolbe:
My legislative years, I was successful in that.  And by the way, except for that one election in 1982…so I’ve been 30 years, 15 elections and 15 general elections, 15 primaries, so 30 elections, 29 victories and one loss, not too bad…a record in all of that.  But a right time to…to make…hang up the shingle on that kind of a record, I think, and to have retired this last year.  The Arizona Legislature also, like the Congress, was a very different place.  In fact, I think the Arizona Legislature has changed far more in the years, intervening years from 1976 to today than the Congress had.  That was the time – that was the years before term limits.  I’ll come back to describing that in a minute and what I…my…what I think the impact of term limits has been, but we had leaders that stayed around then.  We had leaders like Burton Barr.  We had leaders like Alfredo Gutierrez, on the Democratic side.  Leaders of substance.  Leaders who worked together, leaders who worked for the State of Arizona…and were not playing a game of musical chairs as to where their next assignment was going to be…where they were next going to be – what office they were going to be running for.  Which, with term limits, is exactly what happens today.  Everybody’s immediately from the time their elected, is looking to see where they move next in the political arena, so you lose that institutional knowledge and institutional experience of that…that I think you had during that time.  

Kolbe:
I ran as I…as mentioned in 1982 for Governor…or for…for Congress.  It was new seat.  It was one created as a part, as a result of redistricting and the census in the year 1980 creating another seat and so southern Arizona, for the first time, was now divided into two seats.  And while I was in the Legislature, and this is before we had a commission doing it and we were responsible for drawing the districts, I ended up not having an awful lot of influence in the way the district got drawn.  And indeed, Congressman Mo Udall, …drew not only his own district, but drew the one next to his and I’ve always – though I have still a great friend of Bruce Wright, his chief of staff, …Bruce and I are dear friends, but I…Bruce knows that he pulled a fast one on us there and got the district drawn in a way that made it a Democratic district…as well.  So it was an uphill fight in 1982 and some of you may remember that that was not a particularly good year for Republicans.  A little bit like 2006.  It was not a good year for Republicans to be running for election.  Recession in place, Reagan was not popular.  There was the hint of changes of to Social Security that led to a very negative attack on Republicans.   And so, a lot of Republicans simply didn’t make it and I was one of those, though we came within 2000 votes of winning.

Kolbe:
So I knew right away that we had a chance of winning again, though everybody advised me, not everybody, but most of the people advised me you can’t beat an incumbent once he gets elected…and it’s not worth it, Jim, to take that on and ruin your political career.  Wait for something else that comes along.  But I felt certain that as close as we had come in a year when I had a primary, if I could avoid having a primary in 1984, that I…that I thought we could win and indeed we ran again in 1984…and we did win.  And it was called…the first race was called the con…the…contest of the Gentleman Jims.  The second race was a little more tougher, a little harder.  But I do remember one of the things and again, this is something that’s changed today.  We had, this was a congressional race.  We had six televised debates, fully televised debates during that 1984 campaign.  One or two of them by public television, but the rest by the channels, the regular network channels who…who did these debates because this was such an interesting contest between two kind of…of people who had something intellectually to say…and it was considered one of the tougher races, one of the more interesting races in the United States.  When was the last time you saw a congressional debate televised?  A full congressional debate televised?  You don’t see that kind of thing much anymore. 

Kolbe:
I’m gonna skip most of the time that I spent in Congress on the…in terms of all of what I did there because…I want to just talk about a couple of impressions.  But I had the opportunity to work on about three issues which I call my signature issues.  In addition to being…serving for 20 of the 22 years on the Appropriations Committee, or the infamous Appropriations Committee, I had the opportunity to serve…to…to work on three issues that I think are very important.  The first and perhaps the most lasting and the one I find myself now engaged in in my post congressional career is the issues of trade…and globalization.  And I am a firm believer, being a lase faire economic conservative, I believe in open markets and free enterprise and the ability of people to make choices about their…their own economic lives and part of that is being able to choose and buy the products you want and not having them limited by tariffs or quotas or regulations that keep products and services out of the country.  The second that I have worked on is Social Security entitlement reform.  And I believe that this whole issue of entitlement is the key issue that we face in the United States today and perhaps there’ll be some questions during that…about that as we go on here further.  And the third and most recent one is, of course, has been immigration reform.  One of the most volatile and most interesting…debates that I have participated in in Congress, but also one of the more fruitless…thus far, though I am hopeful that…that might change. 

Kolbe:
So how has…how has Congress…how has Congress changed during these times and how has politics changed in the United States and Arizona and I want to just conclude with a few thoughts about that.  We hear much about the fact that there is less civility in American politics today.  And I have to tell you I think that’s generally true.  I think it’s a reflection as much as…of anything, it’s a reflection of our society as a whole.  I think we…we have less respect in our society for authority figures.  Think about how teachers get treated or not respected and how we treat law enforcement or…officers.  There’s less respect for authority.  There’s less of…of a civil attitude that we have towards each other in a country that’s heavily populated where people are individuals, where they are busy with their own lives and don’t have time to interact as socially as much with others.  And the same is certainly true…as we see that in Congress. 

Kolbe:
There are other factors that play into this.  It’s often said and I’m sure that you’ve probably heard this that the death knell of civility in Congress was the invention of the jet plane.  Because with the invention of the…with jet travel, members of Congress could travel home to their districts on weekends, on every weekend.  And indeed, this…the folks at home expect the member of Congress home every single weekend to be in the district and so there’s less and less opportunities for there to be social interaction.  In the…in the old days when there were trains and…and the person from California went home to the district once a year, …they came to Washington and stayed and on weekends members and their families would get together and…and have barbecues in the backyard or do things…where they would socially interact with each other.  That just doesn’t occur today.  There’s almost no social interaction between members of Congress.  I cannot tell you the last time that I went out with another member of Congress just to have dinner, just to talk.  But it’s been more than five years.  I can tell you that, that I’ve ever – since I’ve ever done that kind of thing.  And that certainly wasn’t the case when Barry Goldwater was a Senator or even when I first came…to Congress where we did that kind of thing more frequently. 

Kolbe:
Fundraising has changed the whole thing.  It’s so…the fundraising takes so much time and so much of a requirement…uh…for…for time that it becomes a driving force of everybody.  The moment they leave the floor, they go over to the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee and they’re dialing for dollars because it’s an endless process of raising the kinds of money.  We’re looking now at a Presidential race that is probably going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 billion dollars that’s going to raised.  The winning candidate next year, in between the primaries and the general, will come close to spending a billion dollars this next year.  They’ve already all opted out of the…of …the public funding ……for campaigns, so the amounts of money that are required -- Think of that.  A billion dollars!  You’re talking about raising a million dollars a day, every single day, that you have to raise in order to be a serious Presidential candidate in this next year.  Congress is much less than that, but still a huge amount.  So finally, it’s…we are…find ourselves in this perpetual campaign cycle.  Look at how early the Presidential campaign has started this year.  I mean, it’s just astonishing.  Things that we would normally be talking about in January of the election year, we’re now talking about in January two years or almost two years before the election. 

Kolbe:
So finally, more locally.  How has all this changed in Arizona?  Well, I’ve already described what I think in the legislature is one of the worst things that the voters in Arizona ever did, confirming perhaps…Winston Churchill’s adage there and that is the passage of term limits.  It is one of those issues that has now kind of receded……as…as an issue.  We haven’t had term limits adopted in any state now in, I think, 6 or 8 years.  But it was, as you recall back in the 1990’s, one of the things that everybody was pushing for.  Term limits was somehow going to solve our problems.  It didn’t solve the problems.  It made matters worse in my opinion.  Because what we end up with is a legislature that has no…no kind of institutional memory.  The only ones that know anything about how to run the place are the lobbyists and the staff who are around there on a permanent basis.  And you miss that kind of leadership that we…that we have.

Kolbe:
What I think is important here in…in Arizona, how…however, and the thought I want to leave you with is that Arizona’s going through a fundamental change that I alluded to at the beginning and that is the urbanization of the state.  I call it the Californization of…of Arizona.  We are now a major…with the…of the urban area like Phoenix sprawling 60 miles across the Valley floor here, with freeways connecting all of this, we find that we don’t have the kinds of people that are here today in politics that once were.  I mean, where’s the Sandra Day O’Connor who grew up on a ranch?  Where’s the Jim Kolbe who grew up on a ranch?  Where’s the Mo Udall who grew up in St. Johns.  The people going into politics today come into it from an urban area and from an urban…setting.  We’re the fastest growing state.  We have the…one of the fastest growing Hispanic populations where we will find ourselves some time in the next two decades that Anglos are the minority in the state of Arizona.  And that fundamentally – as it is already the case now in California.  And that fundamentally changes the nature of the political game…in that…in that state.  The kinds of brands of politicians that you have run are very different.  The kinds of issues that people are concerned about are very different.  People are concerned about growth.  They’re concerned about transportation.  They’re concerned about water and perhaps above all, as well they should be, they’re concerned about education…for their…for their children.

Kolbe:
So the kind of Libertarian kinds of approaches that have characterized politics during the Barry Goldwater era and even during the Mo Udall and even up into the Jim Kolbe’s era are very different today.  We may yearn for the simple…simpler days of more personal retail politics when we saw our politicians up close and we saw them on a regular and very personal kind of basis, but that day is gone.  It’s gone irreversibly.  It’s gone forever.  We don’t live any longer in a small state.  We don’t live in a rural state.  We don’t live in a state that can be characterized as the Wild West.  We’re in a state that’s larger than the average state in the United States today than of the…of the 50 states and we live in a state that has big state problems, big state issues.  And requires solutions to those that are for a big state.  So the question, I think, that we have to address – and I hope that in the course of time we will…we will see this being addressed, is how are political parties and how are political candidates going to adapt to what I see as this new reality?  Stay tuned.  Thank you very much.

Kolbe:
You want me to do the questions?  Okay.  Jack says I should take the questions from up here.  So let me…take one.  I’ll start there and boy I have to do this to get through the lights here.  But…if we can…

Audience member:
You spoke of the issue of Social Security.

Kolbe:
Yeah.

Audience member:
Could you expand on that just slightly?

\Kolbe:
I’m glad we’re in the question period.  They can cut it off any time here because I can go…how many hours do you want?  No, no…I won’t go for hours.  Social Security is part of a…of a larger problem which is entitlement reform.  But the Social Security, in my opinion, Social Security is the easy part of the problem.  With Social Security, when you talk about entitlement, do we all know what we’re talking about when we say entitlements?  Entitlements are that part of the federal budget that are not appropriated every year.  What my Appropriations Committee does.  You like to think we appropriate all the money?  Wrong.  We appropriate less than half of the money that is spent every year by the federal government.  The Appropriations Committee controls less than half.  The majority of it is in what we call entitlement programs, the big five being Medicare health care for senior citizens, Social Security retirement for senior citizens, Medicaid health care for…for indigent people and that’s shared with the states, Veteran’s benefits, some health veteran’s benefits and farm subsidy programs.  Those are your big five entitlement programs.

Kolbe:
But the humongous ones are Medicare and Social Security, by far the largest part of that are Medicare and Social Security.  With Social Security, at least you know what the problem is, the numbers.  And what is the problem?  I say you know what the numbers are, it’s much easier.  Medicare, we don’t know what’s going to happen in health care.  We don’t know where the costs are going, we don’t know where the technology is going.  We don’t know…there’s just an awful lot about health care that…which is very labor intensive, that we can’t tell…but, Social Security is easy.  You know how many people are alive.  You can predict how long people are going to live.  We have a pretty good idea about demographics, how long people are living.  We know how many people are being born, how many are coming into the system, so you know how many people are going to be there to pay the taxes to support this Social Security system.  You know all those things and so it’s just a matter of making some decisions about the choices you want to make as to what you want to do about it. 

Kolbe:
But what is the basic problem with Medicare…with Social Security, and this is true of Medicare as well, the programs that support senior citizens?  The problem is, of course, that baby boomers are retiring.  They’re all starting to retire this year.  And next year, they’ll be retiring in large numbers.  And we are going to find ourselves as an aging population more and more people on Social Security drawing the benefits of Social Security and fewer people out there to support them with the taxes they’re paying for Social Security.  Now you think, well wait a minute, I paid into Social Security all my life…that’s my…no, wrong, wrong, wrong.  Social Security’s a tax.  It’s never an investment.  It’s never been an insurance program.  It’s a tax.  It’s a tax on working people to support people who are retired.  With the promise is that there will be somebody in the future, when the working person retires, there will be somebody following him as a working person, him or her, as a working person to pay those taxes.  Well, the problem is we have fewer and fewer of those people coming into the work force, smaller families coming into the work force, more people retiring……and how do you support that number?

Kolbe:
You’ve got to you’ve gotta – there’s only three things you can do with Social Security.  You can cut the benefits.  Very politically difficult to do for senior citizens.  I don’t think any politician is gonna vote…that is clearly falling on your sword.  You’re not gonna do that. The second thing you can do is you can raise the taxes.  Now that’s not terribly palatable to younger people who are already paying a lot of taxes, in income taxes, in states taxes, in property taxes and say, and by the way, we’re gonna raise your Social Security tax which is already 12.4% of their income is going into Social Security.  Not Medicare tax, in Social Security tax.  12.4% is going to that.  And in…and…it’s 6.2 from you and 6.2 from the employer, but don’t kid yourself.  The…you end up paying the employer’s part too eventually there, so 12.4% is going into that.  So you’re going to raise that tax there.  That’s pretty difficult. The third thing that you can do is increase the rate of return of the investment and if you have an investment, if you did – if you took part of those taxes and put it aside into a 401K for an individual to have where they could actually invest it, they could see it grow and get some kind of investment.  ‘Cause there’s no growth obviously, to Social Security, which is just a tax.  Transfer of cash payments from here, collected over here and transferred out over here.  So, you’d have an opportunity for people to actually have some investment, retirement investment grow.  That’s the catch…touchy thing.  That’s the catching thing. 

Kolbe:
But in my opinion, it has to be a combination of all three of those.  You…you carve out part of the taxes……to…for that 401K, but then you have to pay for that some way.  And you have to pay for it through some increase in taxes and I can describe for you what the bill that…the only bipartisan bill that’s ever been introduced on this by Congressman Stenholm and myself, what we would do in terms of where we jigger around the edges of raising taxes on the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax, a couple of other things like that, and then on the other side, some changes in the benefits.  Mostly all changes for the future.  But, these are the people that are going to have the benefit of the 401K.  There would be one change that you could make now that would go a hugely long way to solving the problem of Social Security. 

Kolbe:
You know what that is?  Believe it or not, your Social Security, and there are many in this room I see that are drawing Social Security, eligible to draw Social Security, should I say…a few of them anyhow, here.  Most look under 65 here, but those that are that know what I’m talking about…the…the cost of living adjustment every year, you think the cost of living adjustment would be calculated on the consumer price index, on the…on the increase in prices.  No, it’s not.  It’s calculated on the wage index, the increase in wages.  Well, you always want wages going up faster than prices, ‘cause that’s what more wealth is about.  If wages and incomes are going up faster, then you’re creating greater wealth.  So the Social Security is always tied to a higher index.  Going up faster than prices are going up there.  And if we made that one change, you would save literally trillions of dollars over the next 50 years…uh…to it.  That’s tough to do, but it’s something that badly needs to be done.  Yes? 

Audience member:
Last week…when we had J.D. here, a question was asked about what went wrong with the Republicans and that earmarks went from 1,500 to 15,000 and the lack of fiscal responsibility.  And he blamed it on two things, one the Appropriations Committee and the fact that the President…

Kolbe:
Uh, moi? 

Audience member:
…didn’t veto any bills. 

Kolbe:
The Appropriations Committee?

Audience member:
And the present fact that the President won’t veto those bills.

Kolbe:
Gosh that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody blame it on the Appropriations Committee. 
Now, …there’s some truth to the second part.  Now, not the first and I’ll come back to that.

Kolbe:
There’s some truth to the second part.  This President has been terrible about using fiscal discipline.  He should have just vetoed a couple of spending bills up front right at the beginning and said, No!  Take these things out or do this out and not necessarily the pork barrel stuff, but the spending is too high.  It’s above the amounts that he wanted and he should have just vetoed those bills and…but he never has vetoed legislation.  You know, as you know, he’s only cast one single veto in his entire six years in…in office.  As far as the Appropriations, now you have to understand I’m talking as an appropriator here, so perhaps a little bit defensive.

Kolbe:
But let me give you a slightly different perspective...on this.  A couple of things.  You’ve heard the numbers, how the number of earmarks has increased radically.  True.  The number of earmarks have increased radically.  Do you know why they’ve increased radically?  Because when we came into the majority, we required that all the earmarks be put into the bill or into the report.  They weren’t in there before.  What happened was the chairman of the subcommittee, good ole boy, probably from a southern Democratic state would call down to the secretary, it didn’t matter whether it was a Republican or Democrat, would call down to the Secretary of Transportation and say, “I got this nice little list that I want you to take care of here.”  Not…never been seen publicly.  Nobody’s ever seen it.  List of projects that are really important to us here.  Send it down, fax it down, send it down, no copies made of this thing.  And those then became the…the Transportation Secretary then looked at those and said, hmmm, if we want to get our budget next year, we’d better make sure we take care of Chairman X here on this. 

Kolbe:
So, I mean, there were earmarks, all these earmarks were there before, they just – you just didn’t know about them.  ‘Cause they didn’t put them out publicly.  Republicans made the mistake of deciding we’re gonna put all this out there.  We’re gonna make it all out front there and you now have to send your letters to the chairman.  We have forms we have to fill out justifying and I have to go through an actual justification of these things.  I’m not just saying actually have to, it’s…it’s good.  It’s a real justification and then we…I rate the projects that I decide to ask…request and put in.  I actually rate them in terms of what I think is the value of them, the importance of them.  Sometimes some of the political importance.  I put some in the urban areas, some in the rural areas.  I don’t think there’s anything wrong, necessarily, with that.

Kolbe:
So we do have a lot more…earmarks than we had before.  Uh…But we don’t -- actually we don’t have more earmarks, we have a lot more that’s known, that’s publicly known.  The second thing that’s happened is…is…c’mon, every member of Congress sends these letters.  I…I was chairman for the last 10 years of a subcommittee, two different subcommittees on appropriations.  I…I must get every year, not so many…much the last six years in foreign operations, a lot of people don’t have anything they want in foreign operations, but when I was chairman of Treasury Postal, which includes Customs and includes General Services Administration, courthouses, um…all of those kinds of things, I would get 300 letters from members, at least of the 435 members saying, please take care of this project.  This is my priority project. 

Kolbe:
So all these people are standing on the floor and it’s always been an understood thing that we don’t make those public.  Uh…Fine with me, let’s make all those letters public.  I’d love to put them out there.  Let everybody that’s up there railing against…against…uh…earmarks tell me about the things that they do.  Now there’s only a couple of people that, because they’ve made a career out of not asking for earmarks, that don’t actually send those letters.  Two of them are from Arizona.  One in the House, one in the Senate. I won’t even tell you who…where they are here, but who they are.  But I can tell you that those members will send their staffs to see me.  Or to see my staff saying, you know, I…we can’t do this in a letter, but would you mind taking care of this little thing here for us?  Here…so…you know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat to get around that…kind of thing. 

Kolbe:
The bottom line is the number of the earmarks and the dollar amount of the earmarks is still very small.  You could cut out all of the earmarks and it wouldn’t make a whit of difference in terms of the overall size of the budget.  The problem with our budget are entitlements which when I was a child, consumed about fifth – when I was a young person in college, consumed about 20% of our budget.  Then we brought Medicare on.  Now…then when I went to Congress, consumed about 40%.  Today it’s 60%.  In a…just…in a decade it will be more than 66%.  At the current rate of growth, Medicare will consume 100% of the federal budget by the year 2050, if we let it go with the way it’s going.  That means there won’t be one dollar for education, one dollar for national defense, for parks, for environment, for global warming, for law enforcement, for security, uh…for all the other things, health care grants, research grants, all the other things that the federal government does.  There won’t be one dime left for those kinds of things.  So, it’s a convenient way to avoid a really tough issue, talking about earmarks.  I don’t…I don’t think…come back and I’ll say one more thing about earmarks, but we’ve got to deal with this fundamental problem of the entitlements. 

Kolbe:
The last thing I would say about earmarks is earmarks is in the eye of the beholder.  What constitutes an earmark?  I ask this every time we get into this debate in conversation.  Would someone please define for me what you mean by an earmark?  If I take…if the President has a request in there for 40 million dollars for upgrades of the…uh…of the Aegis missile, for example, which happens to be done at Ratheon in Tucson, there, and the Navy comes to me and says, you know, it would be great if we get that up to 60 million dollars.  If I advocate for a 20 million dollar increase, is that an earmark?  Or is that just taking a program and…and increasing it?  Is the President of the United States the only one that is supposed to decide how the money gets spent?  If the President would like us to appropriate a budget that was 2 trillion, 100 million, billion dollars, 780 million dollars, 975 thousand, 632 dollars and 22 cents and say to the President of the United States and he’ll decide everything.

Kolbe:
But I think the Constitution of the United States doesn’t say that.  It says no money shall be spent except as appropriated by the Congress of the United States.  So it seems to me it’s an appropriate thing for the Congress to play a role in that.  And yes, does it mean that some of the money gets spread around?  Yes.  And I’m not sure that’s not also what the Founding Fathers intended.  That it doesn’t all go to the political power centers and leaving out all the other parts of the country all together.  So, I think that there is…let me just say, there’s another side to this argument.  Sorry for the long answer to that.  Yes?

Audience member:
Could you tell us a little more about pleasure boating in Vietnam? 

Kolbe:
Pleasure boating in Vietnam? Well, I really won’t go into any great detail about it except…uh…let me just say, I mean, I’d be happy to go into anything about myself there, I was on the swift boats.  I was not a boat officer myself because I went over as a lieutenant and the boat officers were all ensigns or lieutenant junior grades, so below me there, so I was the…operations officer for the whole division of boats.  John Kerry was assigned to another unit, but all the action was down in our area, the four core which stretched from the Mai Kong River, the Basoc River, all the way around through the tip and all the way around to the Cambodian coast, about 250 miles, 200 miles of shoreline that we were responsible for and that’s where all the action was ‘cause that’s where the Yumen Forest was.  That’s where all the…the bad guys were and the fighting was going on and that’s where all the attacks on our boats were taking place.

Kolbe:
And so we brought extra resources down, extra boats and extra boat officers and crews down to help man this fight.  The boats originally were supposed to be just coastal patrol, but Admiral Zumwalt decided these boats can be used in the rivers and they did get in the rivers, but they were sometimes not the best suited for the small rivers that we were operating in.  John Kerry was one of those boat officers that came down and he spent four months there…and I will…I will say that in a light hearted way, we all…joked about John Kerry because we knew of his political interests.  First of all, his initials were JFK.  He was from Massachusetts.  He was on a boat that was the closest thing to a…to a P.T. boat that you…from World War II that you could have in size and shape and…and…and mission and function there.  He clearly…he…he was the only person – these were the days before little handheld cameras and stuff, he was the only person who brought his own camera to film everything that he did while he was there and had a crewman filming him all the time while he was on these boats.  So we would laugh a little bit at night.  Usually around him…with him and joke with him about this, but John only lasted four months because he got three purple hearts, …he got three purple hearts. 

Kolbe:
And…the rule was if you had three purple hearts, you could request to be transferred home and he did and he left after only four months so he wasn’t there that long.  I think the resentment.  That didn’t cause – well, some people may have…may have not liked that particularly, …I don’t think anybody really resented him for that.  The resentment against John Kerry and the boat…and the boat crews came about after his return when he testified before Congress and said that we were all baby killers and murderers.  And I think the people that served there felt they had served with honor and that that was a…a false statement and it lingered and lasted all those years.  And thirty years later, well, yeah, 30 years later when the opportunity came in 2004, those boat officers got organized.  I didn’t play a part in that at all, I stayed out of it.  But they got organized and they were determined they were gonna let the world know what they thought of his service there in Vietnam. 

Audience member:
How about Arizona and California water?

Kolbe:
What about it?  We need more, but we need to get -- make sure California doesn’t get any more of that water over there.  I…I don’t…there isn’t a solution.  The water issues in the west are going to become increasingly more difficult, not only because of growth, but if indeed global warm…global warming is a fact of life and whatever we think of the cause of it, there’s no question there is a warming trend that’s going on in the…in the…on the globe today.  That global warming is going to cause much less snow packs in the Sierra Nevada and in the Rocky Mountains which means that the source of water for California, not just Northern California, but all the system they have to take that water to Southern California is going to be under increasing pressure.  They are experiencing a terrible year this year, very low snow packs this year.  The Rockies are once again, uh…some parts of it are good over on the eastern slopes, but in the west, not so great there.  So as these water…as these snow packs disappear, we’re going to find ourselves in an increasingly difficult situation.  We’re gonna have to learn to live with a lot less water.  We’re going to have to learn to recycle, to use water a lot more efficiently and I think frankly, ultimately it does impose some kind of limits on growth, ultimately.  I…I don’t know where that happens or how that happens, but I think that at some point, it has to impose some kind of limitations…on growth.  How long do you want me to go on here?  I’ll take a few more.

Audience member:
Two more questions.

Kolbe:
Okay.  Let me take…I’ll take about 3 or 4 more questions.  One, two, three, four. 

Kolbe:
Four, I’ll make them quick! 

Audience member:
Tell us about immigration?

Kolbe:
Oh…What about it?  What’s your question?

Audience member:
Uh…

Kolbe:
Just general? 

Audience member:
Yeah, what can we do about it? 

Kolbe:
How many think that…how many here think that all we need to do is enforce the current laws?  That if we just enforce the laws we have, the problem would be solved?  Not too many.  How many here – some…some do think that.  How many here think that you…we have to have…some kind of a program whether you call it guest worker whatever you want, some kind of a program that allows people to come across legally into the United States to work?  How many think there should be some means of legalizing the status of the 10, 11, 12 million people that are already in this country.  Not quite so many there.  But a large majority…this…this tracks fairly closely to where the American people are.  Very few people think that enforcement alone is going to solve it…that the fence is gonna do it.  The fence is a joke.  Build a 50 foot fence, I’ll sell you a 51 foot ladder. 

Kolbe:
You know…you’re not gonna solve it with a fence there or a wall of any sort and I’ve driven, ridden or walked every mile of that border from Yuma to New Mexico and I can tell you, you’re just not gonna build a fence in some of those places.  I mean, it goes straight up the sides of cliffs and mountains there.  It’s gonna be very difficult to do.  Not to mention how you’re gonna man it.  And monitor it.  I think the only solution to the immigration…the immigration problem is…there are several things that are causing this today.  I could go on and on with this issue for a long time, but there’s several things that are causing this today. 

Kolbe:
The main…the main thing that’s impinging on this…there’s two things, one is an economic one.  There is an economic drive for more people with more jobs.  We need people for jobs in this country.  We are reaching critical shortages in a number of areas, not just in low skilled.  We all have a – currently we have a shortage of close to 250,000 nurses in the United States.  That’s just the shortage that we have today.  You have to fill those some place.  Or you have to do with less…of it, of the kind of health care that we all expect and need.  And you can take area after area where that’s going to be…where that is the case and now you’re going to have retirement of…the baby boomers and it’s going to become worse and worse.  So you have an economic driver that is pushing this issue in a huge way here.  On the other side you have two forces working.  You have national security.  Since 9/11, people worried that somehow every one of those illegal immigrants might be a terrorist coming across the border.  Not true and not really a real factor, a real problem.  The terrorists that came in on 9/11 all came in with legal visas to the United States, either overstayed their visas or were here on legal visas…in the United States.  So we haven’t had any experience of one coming across the border from Mexico that has ever been identified as a terrorist…here. 

Kolbe:
But also working in that same factor is what I call a cultural problem.  It’s globalization.  It’s the worries that people have today about what’s happening in the world.  How the world is changing and their jobs are going to be outsourced to India.  How can we keep those jobs?  Stopping immigration isn’t going to stop somebody from…AOL from putting the…the phone center over in India…you’re not gonna be able to stop that kind of thing.  That is the reality of globalization which is taking place because of technology…in the world today.  The only solution to it and I’ll make this real quick, the only solution to telecommunications in my opinion, or to immigration in my opinion, is a comprehensive approach.  You have to deal with four things.  You have to deal with border security and we have a right to have a secure border and we have been increasing by more than 2000%, we’ve increased the number of border patrol agents just in this sector, the Tucson sector alone.  Huge increase in the numbers there…I’m sorry, 500%.  From 400 to 2000 border patrol agents today.  Um…So we need more security, more technology, better use of technology, sensors, helicopters, drones, those kinds of things that we can use to help secure our border. 

Kolbe:
Second, you have to have a guest…you have to have some kind of a logical guest worker program.  As long as there’s going to be jobs in this country, people are going to find a way to come here.  So let’s find a legal way to have them come in so we know who’s in this country and you need a…a guest worker program to do that.  We can go into the details of how that might work if you want to afterwards.  A third, you’ve got – that’s got to be coupled with employer security.  Employers have to know who they’re hiring.  That they’re hiring a legal person.  Right now they can’t know that.  They don’t know that and they…to put the burden on them is impossible because they’re not experts at counterfeit of documents.  But…but you have the technology today to have some kind of a document that has embedded in it biometric information, like a retina scan so that I go to get a job…uh…to the employer, the employer says great, show me your card.  I swipe the…dial Homeland Security, swipe the card.  Say now let me take the picture of your eye.  Click.  Homeland Security, just like a visa in 30 seconds says, yeah, that eye matches that card.  That person’s a legal person.  And everybody’s gonna have to carry that.  You can’t…’cause the employer can’t be told to decide whether to ask Jose, but not ask Joe the same kind of information, so everybody’s going to have to carry that.  That something a lot of Americans don’t like.  Third, you’ve got to deal…and fourth you’ve got to deal with this question of the 11, 12 million people that are in this country illegally.  They’re here…they’re…they’re here.  That’s the reality.

Kolbe:
So my view is, if you’re concerned about security, let’s find a way to incentivise them to come out of the woodwork and identify themselves, so we know who is here.  And again, guest worker, where they can qualify for the same kind of guest worker, but go to the back of the line in terms of qualifying for any kind of permanent residency in the country, go beyond, behind those people would be a way to let those people, to have them come out of the woodwork and so we would know who’s here.  Very quick answer to the…yeah? 

Audience member:
Congressman?  Obviously you exhibit great passion for the work you’ve done in Congress, in the world and in politics.  What do you look back upon as the greatest accomplishment that you [inaudible]?

Kolbe:
I can answer that one – from a legislative standpoint, it would be the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which I think has made a huge difference in the relationship between Canada, Mexico and the United States, particularly Mexico and the United States.  It made a huge economic impact on the State of Arizona…I would say – and…and made a huge impact politically in Mexico in terms of the reforms that have taken place in Mexico, but I think what I’m most proud of actually is the things that my office has done that I have little to do with in terms of helping people.  What I call constituent case work.  We have a…had a reputation of having the best constituent case work in the State of Arizona……we reached out to a lot of people, made the…you know, when you get a little note from somebody saying thank you for getting my grandfather’s medals from World War II.  He may be deceased now, but…it meant a lot to my family to have those there.  And you get those kinds of notes and you realize you’re making a difference in people’s lives and I think that’s really meant more than anything to me.  Let’s see, we had a question up…back here, or I know you had a question.  

Audience member:
I wanted to ask what your thoughts are on the upcoming Presidential election and the state of the national conscience in general.

Kolbe:
And the state of the national conscience? I was gonna be easy, when you were gonna ask me about the elections, but now the state of the national – I’m just gonna stick to the elections here.  Well, I think you’ve got – I think on both sides you’ve have a…three front runners and one dark horse.  The Democratic side it’s Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards and I think the dark horse is Al Gore, who I think will announce in the fall and I think has a very strong chance of being nominated. 

Kolbe:
But if I were putting my money, I would say it’s gonna be Hillary Clinton, right now, but……I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t bet on that one.  On the Republican side, I think the three leading candidates are clearly John McCain…you’ve got Rudy Giuliani and of course, you’ve got…Governor Romney…and I think a few months ago we would have said it’s John McCain’s to lose, but the war is eroding a lot of his support at this time.  Unless the things turn around with the war, John McCain’s gonna have…have some difficulties, there’s no question about that.  Uh…I’m a good strong support…friend and supporter of John McCain’s and will be supporting him in this election, but I think that’s a reality.  The dark horse there is Newt Gingrich.  And Newt Gingrich, like Al Gore will get into the race late.  He’s got a lot of support from the base of the Republicans.  He’s done a lot of work with Hillary on health care stuff.  He’s probably more knowledgeable on health care than anybody…in the country today.  Uh…He’s going to be……I think a force there.  I’m not quite so sure he’s going to get into the race.  I feel more confident that Al Gore is definitely gonna get into this race.  As for the conscience of the country, I don’t know.  I don’t know where we’re gonna go with it there.  The war will obviously determine a lot of it.  The last question?  Do we have one last question?  I thought I saw another hand or two up?  If not, I guess…did I see?  Yes?  There!  Sorry!  It’s too dark, I can’t see.

Audience member:
What do you think the prospects are in Iraq? 

Kolbe:
Darn!  Why didn’t I stop at the last question? I’m…I’m not real optimistic.  It’s hard to be optimistic for Iraq, but I don’t know what else we do except to try to persevere here.  I don’t see how you can just simply walk away.  We have to find some way.  I think the Iraqis have got to walk to the abyss and see what is in…confronting them…if -- when we leave, and see the kind of absolute civil war they will descend into and chaos that they will descend into before they are going to step back and say, we’ve got to get our act together, the groups here.  The Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites, we’ve got to get our act together and have a national government.  The problem is the government we elected, we thought we had some confidence in has turned out not to be a national government, it’s a Shiite government and they’re busy training their Shiite militias to kill Sunnis and so the Sunnis are busy training their own militia to kill Shiites.  The Kurds are fortunately up in the north and they’re saying, just stay out of our way here.  And they’re busy creating their own country up there.  And they’ll be happy for the day when they can raise a Kurdish national flag and be a different, a separate country, except that the Turks will invade the next day if they do that.

Kolbe:
So this is not an easy…solution to any of the problems that we have there.  I don’t see the real answer except that we’ve got – they’ve got to create a national government, a truly national coalition and with a military and police force that is professional and dedicated to the government of Iraq, not to a particular sectarian religious group.  It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?  That these two groups, Shiites and Sunni’s separated less than 50 years after Mohammed’s death over the who is gonna be the rightful successor…to Mohammed and they haven’t settled it here 2000 or a thousand, eight…four hundred years later.  They still haven’t settled this issue here.  Well, I guess we should know.  We know about a few of those things in Northern Ireland and a few other places where we’ve had our own sectarian violence among…among Christians as well, so I guess maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised.  But it is a terrible thing that is happening in Iraq and we need to…the answer is to have a national government and a truly national police force and militia and military capable of bringing security and people having confidence that they will bring the security, that they won’t support these local militias, their own sectarian militia.  Thank you very much.