Brown served as news anchor of CNN’s flagship show, NewsNight, from 2001 to 2005, covering stories from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to the 2004 presidential elections and the Iraq War.  He won the coveted Edward R. Murrow Award for his 9/11 coverage, broadcasting from a rooftop in lower Manhattan. He was a founding anchor for ABC’s World News Now, the network’s overnight newscast, and later was the anchor of World News Tonight Saturday as well as a correspondent for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

He is faculty member at both ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Barrett Honors College.

Christopher Callahan, Dean, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University:
The Goldwater Lecture Series has become one of the Valley’s most anticipated events of the year. It is a great honor for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Arizona State University to be part of this year’s Goldwater Lecture Series. We’d like to thank Rebecca, Diane McCarthy, Susan Irwin, and the rest of the Arizona Historical Foundation leadership for inviting us to join in this year’s series. Today, we are in the middle of an extraordinary political era. The 2008 election is the most wide-open and the most unpredictable presidential election in recent memory. And the role of the news media in coverage of this election also is historic. The news landscape is changing dramatically. Revolutionary technologic advances are giving journalists the ability to reach Americans in ways that could not be envisioned even a decade ago. But those advances have been accompanied by dramatic shifts in the economics of news media companies and, far too often, shifting newsroom values. Tonight, we are most fortunate to have with us someone uniquely qualified to put into perspective these dramatic changes in the news media and the relationship between the press and the political process. Aaron Brown is quite simply one of the finest journalists of our time. Mr. Brown’s remarkable 30 year career is defined by a brand new journalism that is as insightful as it is straightforward; as compelling as it is compassionate. Mr. Brown was a popular news anchor in Seattle before bursting on the national scene, joining ABC news where he worked closely with his mentor, the late Peter Jennings, and anchored the overnight ABC World News Now. From 2001 to 2005 Mr. Brown was the lead anchor of CNN, reporting on some of the most important stories of our generation. His coverage of the September 11th attacks on our country was both powerful and courageous. His work has been honored with a DuPont Award, three Emmys, and the Edward R. Murrow award. Today, Mr. Brown is a fellow Valley resident and we are very proud to say, the very first Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University, where he started teaching full-time earlier this month. It is a great honor to welcome this evening’s Goldwater lecture speaker, Mr. Aaron Brown.

Aaron Brown:
Thank you Boss. If I had known I was that good Chris, I’d have asked for a raise. Aaron Brown: Um…Thank you all. I want to talk briefly, if I may, about the University. I am incredibly grateful to Chris, to the administration of the University, to my colleagues at the Cronkite School, faculty and staff, and to my 20, or 19 tolerant and patient young students for their incredible support as I try to navigate a new and very different chapter of my life. It’s an odd situation to find yourself a college professor having never been a college student. And so when they say to me things like ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’ I can only say ‘yeah, what’s your point?’ The University and Chris in particular, and I think Chris and I first met two years ago and kind of had an idea that maybe we could make something happen, the University has been incredibly supportive in every way that counts, in kind of flexibility ‘cause I live a kind of weird and odd schedule sometimes of boppin’ around the country talking to groups and this and that. And supporting my idea of what, um, the kind of class I wanted to teach and giving me by far the greatest graduate assistant God ever put on the planet to make sure that we get it done. So I am extraordinarily grateful to the University and particularly proud to be associated with the Cronkite School. This school is an incredibly exciting place at an incredibly exciting time. It is a place of vision and it’s an honor to help shape the next generation of young reporters and the occasional PR person who passes through my life. So thank them. Thank all of you for inviting me here today, though in truth I can’t imagine why anyone would invite me to make a political talk given that everything I said about politics in the last year has proven to be exactly, 100% wrong.

Aaron Brown:
I ran into someone actually earlier who was at the talk I gave last spring at the Harvard Club here in town where I pronounced John McCain dead man walking. A short time later I told a group in Tucson that while I was pretty uncomfortable with the notion, it seemed to me that Mayor Guiliani would be virually impossible to stop. I said before a group in Florida last summer that I wasn’t sure Obama had legs. I’m told he has 12,000 bodies across town tonight and he certainly has legs. I told that same group I thought it very likely John Edwards would sneak up on the field. You name it, I’ve missed it. And I would feel really bad about it and more than slightly embarrassed if I didn’t have so much company. The fact is we’ve all missed it. We’ve all missed it for a lot of reasons, some of which I’d like to talk about today, but what I probably should do is just say I’m sorry, thank you, sit down, and shut up, but I brought this shirt out from the cleaners and I want to make sure I get my money’s worth on it. Let me start with the Republicans. This is defensive; I hate being defensive, but I’m going to talk about Republicans for a bit and it’s a bit harsh and one of the problems in American life today, to me, is that we tend to see everything through a partisan lens. And it’s important even as I can feel your inclination and I feel the watchful eyes of Senator Goldwater behind me, that you try—give me your best effort on this—not to see this through partisan eyes. I don’t have partisan eyes. I’m an observer of things political and otherwise, but I’m not an especially political person. So these are observations and some of which you may agree with and some of which you may not. I would just say that nothing I will say about the Republican candidates could possibly compare to what conservative intellectuals and the conservative press has been saying about the conservative of the Republican field.

Aaron Brown:
When I said that John McCain was dead man walking, the John McCain I was talking about was dead man walking. The problem was that that John McCain is not this John McCain. It turned out that there was a John McCain inside John McCain who wanted to be president so much, so badly, that he would become a totally different person than he was. And people, voters are very intuitive in that way. They get authenticity. And so when the guy who was Mr. Straightalker became Mr. I Want to Be President So Bad I’ll Hug Anybody, people walked away from him; they ran away from him. The kind of seminal moment in this is he throws his arm around Jerry Falwell and plays, well I don’t want to say kissee-facie, but political kissee-facie with the same guy and the same groups that he had called agents of intolerance a few years before. So he just, in the electorate’s mind, I’m convinced, became just one more candidate kissing up to those groups that you have to kiss up to if you want to be a Republican nominee for the presidency, which weren’t the people who loved him. By the time we get to New Hampshire when he has experienced death politically, he has morphed back into the John McCain that we, and in this case I actually do mean we in the media sense, that we of the media love. The accessible John McCain, the kind of loose cannon John McCain, the John McCain who exists slightly at least with one foot outside the conventional Republican mainstream. That’s also the John McCain that independent voters and moderate Republicans, both moderate Republicans that are left, valued so much. And that’s the John McCain who won in New Hampshire and resurrected his political life. Now, you know, we got a long way to go but Senator McCain, should he finish this thing off and get the nomination is gonna be a formidable candidate probably. But I’m so far out of the prediction game right now I don’t even want to try. Which brings us now to Mayor Guiliani.

Aaron Brown:
This is as truthful as I can be about this. To say I’m not a fan of the Mayor is an understatement. When he was Mayor, particularly in the last couple of years of his administration, I wrote several pieces for ABC news that were, some might say critical, I thought keenly observant. It’s an amazing thing—I don’t want to be glib, too glib on this, I’d like to be a little glib on this, actually, but the truth about Mayor Guiliani is the more you know him, the less you like him. Last March Mayor Guiliani had a 58% approval rating among all Americans—Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, independents, liberals—58%. He had a 14% disapproval rating. Mickey Mouse has a 17% disapproval rating. It, 14%, I’m not sure what we now characterize as sort of realistic full employment—3%, something like that—that’s what 14% disapproval is in politics. It’s basically as good as life gets. He was America’s mayor and I’ll give him that. I mean in those, in those terrible, terrible days after 9/11 he absolutely found his voice and was very important in helping the city withstand the shock and recover from it and I don’t deny him that. Today, well today he has more trouble than just high negatives, but today his positives stand, his negatives stand at 40%, his positives at just 29%. It is the most stunning collapse of a candidate I’ve ever seen and quite well-deserved I would add. Why?

Aaron Brown:
How I missed this—the other mistakes I get, you know—they just, kind of weird stuff happened. This one I knew. Ultimately for president we elect someone that we like. Mayor Guiliani fails the likeability test. With the exception of Richard Nixon in my lifetime, and the ’68 -’72 elections took place in a very weird and complicated time in American life, with that exception, the more likeable candidate regardless of party has won every election in my lifetime. We may—we don’t need to like the mayor. If we’re voting for dog catcher we can live with someone we don’t like if we think he’s or she’s good. But the president who might be in our living room everyday who represents us everywhere needs to be likable. The more we learned about Rudy, the weirder we thought he was. I have a friend who is a Republican political operative who is unaffiliated with any campaign, much to his chagrin, and he said to me some time back, he said ‘Rudy will never win. He’s just too weird.’ And I think he was right. I mean this is a guy who had police security provided for his wife when she was in California the same weekend he had police security for his girlfriend out in the Hamptons. A guy who informed his wife that he was getting di—he would seek a divorce in a press conference before he told her. A guy who’s adult children do not speak to him. I don’t know but it makes me a little uncomfortable, you know? And I, I can’t prove this but I want to believe that this is true, ok? That the country also got a little bit uncomfortable at how Mayor Guiliani seemed to be trading on 9-11.

Aaron Brown:
It…it…it…everybody’s got to make a living, ok, and he went out and basically on the heels of his role in 9-11 made about 50 million dollars. I mean he did just fine by it ok. But there’s something—there’s a made up word that I use a lot that describes a certain feeling ‘cause it sounds like it. There’s something ooshie about it. It just—it’s ooshie. It just doesn’t feel right. Um and I think, you know Joe Biden said of—it was maybe the best line of the campaign, said that Guiliani, every Guiliani sentence is a subject, a verb, and 9-11. And, and that’s true. And he was. And I think people were somewhat, grew somewhat offended by it. And then just throw in the hubris of the way they ran the campaign and you had a guy who collapsed and deserved it. Now I just, I should stop here because I’m approaching the piling on stage, but I can’t walk away without talking about Mitt Romney. This guy’s unbelievable. I mean, he’s perfect. First of all he’s better looking, in a presidential way, than Michael Douglas was in that movie with Annette Bening, ok? You know how hard it is to be better looking than Michael Douglas in make-up? You know he’s got these beautiful, strapping, young sons. He’s got an attractive wife. He made a gazillion dollars. He has a pretty good back story in what he did, um, in the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. The guy is too good to be true. And you know what they say about if it’s too good to be true. In all honesty, even if you’re inclined to vote for him, and have at it okay, I mean no problem from me, you got to acknowledge he’s jumped through a ton of hoops to get to where he is today. I don’t know if that guy was a conservative faking to be a moderate when he ran for the senate and the governorship in Massachusetts, or if he’s a moderate faking that he’s a conservative because that’s the only way he could get the Republican nomination.

Aaron Brown:
He’s one or the other, ok. He can’t be both but somehow, you know, there’s not a major issue and there’s a lot of minor ones that he’s, he’s flopped on. Not one, not, not the, the ones that get talked about all the time—abortion, gay rights. I mean he’s flopped on immigration. He’s flopped on taxes. He’s flopped on health care. He’s flopped on the environment. You name it, he’s flopped on it. It’s remarkable. He must be exhausted. And yet he still looks beautiful. So you know, that says something. Um, anyway, I, I suspect that that painful episode is almost over. Um, here’s the larger problem, I think, for Republicans at this moment. And none of which is to say they won’t win the election. Democrats never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Um, for more than a generation, he’s gonna smile when I say this, ok. Wherever he is, he’s gonna smile. For more than a generation, Republicans and the American conservative movement has been the source of most of the interesting political ideas in the country. You agree with some, disagree with some; doesn’t matter, not the point. The point is they were interesting ideas on a whole range of issues from employment and ah…even the environment and sometimes on healthcare. They were a fountain of ideas. And those ideas, for more than a generation, had driven the political debate. They ran out. Their whole campaign, it has seemed to me, has been about yesterday. Bob Dole famously said once to an audience in what, not one of Senator Dole’s better moments, when he sort of saw the writing on the wall and he was kind of aware that his own party, no matter how long he had supported it, and how hard he had worked for it, Senator Dole once said plaintively, ‘you want me to be another Reagan? I can be that.’ You know?

Aaron Brown:
Well, no actually I don’t want you to be another Reagan. I want you to be whatever tomorrow is. I don’t want my President to be yesterday. I’m not looking for FDR, ok, I’m not looking for Bill Clinton, and I’m not looking for Ronald Reagan. I’m looking for tomorrow. But yet the Republicans have, in this campaign, run almost exclusively on yesterday. And at no time would that make me comfortable. At this time, I find it quite sad. The Democrats, on the other hand, I think have done better. I don’t mean to say to you that I think their policies are better. Some may be; some may not be. You know, you will be an individual judge of that. What I am saying is that their ideas have been more interesting. And no matter who the nominee is, whether its Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, it will be the democratic ideas that will drive the debate in the election because as best I can tell, there are no republican ideas out there.

Aaron Brown:
This is not good, whether you’re Democrat or Republican. Ultimately, campaigns should be—they’re not—they should be contests over ideas, but both sides have to bring ideas to the table. And I don’t think they have. Now electability is another question. I’m not sure—I’m not sure of a lot, but I’m certainly not sure that Senator Clinton is electable. I don’t know. Um, you know we’re talking about Rudy’s negatives and, and the thing about Senator Clinton is there are people who just really don’t like her. And it’s visceral. It’s almost Nixonian in the, in—to my way of thinking it’s disproportionate to anything she’s ever done. I mean even if, even if you disagree with her, she’s hardly been, you know, the witch of the west, you just have policy disagreements with her. But in any case I’m not sure that she can get over that threshold. So I’m not sure she can win. I do, however, believe that Senator Obama can win. Um, and I do believe that should he somehow manage to get the nomination, um, we are gonna see, all of us together, and participate in, all of us together, the single most interesting election of our lifetime. For a variety of reasons, but I want to just name one. Um, for the first time in American history, the African American community will look up and see a plausible winning candidate. They’ve never had that before. They’ve had protest candidates or marginal candidates. They’ve had candidates of what I call the grievance generation. Um, admirable people, honestly, for what they did in the ‘60s, um, but grew increasingly irrelevant over time and, but here is a candidate of the African American opportunity generation with a plausible chance to win and I believe that you will see a turnout of—African Americans are not a particularly good voting group—you will see a turnout of African American voters that will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and in a number of places it will be a game changer.

Aaron Brown:
In places like North Carolina. And places will all of a sudden come into play. South Carolina will come into play. Louisiana, which is always…’cause you, you never know who’s counting the votes in Louisiana, um, will absolutely come into play. Um, I was telling someone earlier tonight I was struck—I did a speech last night, or yesterday morning, it was such a long day yesterday. My students said to me today, ‘boy you’re cranky.’ I said ‘you spend 14 hours going Boston—Atlanta—Phoenix and see how, you know, you’re feeling. So sit down and be quiet.’ Um, I don’t know that this is gonna happen. You know, Senator Obama’s got a long way to go, um, to win this thing, but I do believe that should he get the nomination, he has a better than 50% chance to win and here’s why I think this, ok, and I, again my track record, ok. I don’t need you to shake your heads to remind me. I understand it. I talked to this insurance group in Boston yesterday. This is the quintessential white male, buttoned-down Republican audience. I was stunned at how many of those people said to me, even if you, if you put in the factor that when race is on the table some people just don’t tell the truth ok, how many said to me that if it was a McCain-Obama race, they thought they’d vote for Obama because they want to vote for tomorrow and not yesterday. And if that were to happen, if that particular wall were to be shaken in America, if our most difficult issue, the most difficult issue we face as a country—race—if that were to come down in a campaign that wouldn’t really be about race, setting aside your personal politics, that would be an extraordinary moment.

Aaron Brown:
So while I think the, the Democrats have been more forward-looking, have been more talking about tomorrow, the Republicans were down in south Florida last week saying literally, ‘I’m Fidel Castro’s worst nightmare.’ Let me clue you in on something: organ failure is Fidel Castro’s worst nightmare. The guy hasn’t been seen in public in a year. We’re not, you know…he’s like…he’s becoming…its like guys are doing like the death pool. I’ve—you know reporters are notoriously callous, ok, so we had a death pool going on Suharto to see who could pick the day when he actually died. Franco—but this is where we’re going with Castro. I mean it’s not like he’s, he’s lying in bed, kidneys and liver failing, plotting the invasion of Miami. But there they were, down there saying I’m Castro’s worst nightmare because in the say anything to win campaign that they’ve been running, they’ve figured gotta get those…now our policy, just as an aside—my opinion—towards Cuba is stunningly dumb, ok. It’s based on two things: the electoral vote in Florida and the electoral vote in New Jersey. You have farmers in Nebraska and Kansas who are begging to sell grain and fruit products to Cuba. Begging to. You have the American tourist industry; you have these cruise ships that they’re like just off the coast of Havana waiting for Castro to die so they can move in because it’d be a great tourist market and cruise ship are ideally suited to move into a market where there are no hotels, you know. Um, so I mean the policy itself makes no sense but that doesn’t stop a yesterday-driven candidate from pandering. And since the word pandering has come up, and perhaps I’m the one who brought it up, let’s talk about Governor Romney in Michigan for just a second.

Aaron Brown:
Governor Romney says Detroit is the saddest of American cities. It really is, I mean, you look around the city that you all live in and this beautiful, shiny, new, dynamic, exploding Valley that is our home and Detroit is exactly the opposite. I mean, it couldn’t be less alive. And to people in that situation, Governor Romney says ‘I’m gonna bring those auto jobs back.’ No you’re not. You’re not. ‘And here’s how I’m gonna bring them back.’ I love this. ‘I’m gonna rescind the one piece of bipartisan legislation that has passed in the last eight years’, pretty much. The energy bill that included a fairly modest increase in the requirement of cars, the miles per gallon that cars get. Democrats and Republicans supported it. It passed. It’s not especially onerous. It certainly doesn’t solve the problem, but it’s helpful. So the Romney answer is to encourage Detroit to continue to produce SUVs that get 12 miles per gallon that Americans are going to buy so they can spend gas money at a hundred dollars a barrel. Are you joking? And you tell me that these guys are looking at tomorrow? But there’s something else going on that I think is more important and in many ways more fundamental. Voters have changed. We have changed. All of us. The country, and I travel around it a lot, is in a very unsettled mood. Sometimes I think the cause of this is as big as 9-11, and the implications of 9-11 finally settling in. And sometimes I think it is as small as having a service call answered by a guy named Joe in India. Aaron Brown: But the combination or the reasons, whatever it happens to be, has left us with a sense that we are less in control of our national destiny. We seem perplexed by the way the world sees us. Unsure of what our place in the world means. Eight years ago when we last had this sort of open election, we were a confident people. Yeah the internet bubble was bursting and the economy was a little bit shaky, but on balance, employment was good, the economy seem strong, crime was under control, welfare had been reformed and we were at peace. But in this day and age, eight years is a very long time and in those eight years the world has changed around us. And as a people, and in our politics, it seems to me we are struggling to come to terms with it. We seem to seem, to sense the change without really understanding it. How did it happen? I read this the other day. How did it happen that the United States of America now has more people dealing Black Jack than working on lathes in machine shops? 82,000. We have three times as many security guards in America as we have machinists. How did this happen. Now people may not know these numbers precisely, but they get the sense that this world has shifted around them in a way that has unsettled their life and will, or at least has the potential to unsettle the lives of their children and their grandchildren for a long time to come. And while the Democrats may not have the answer for this, and I’m not standing here, believe me, saying that they have the answers for this, they have done a better job in the last few years, of thinking about it.

Aaron Brown:
They have been looking forward and the Republicans have been telling us Castro is a nightmare. China and Europe have done a far better job of adapting to this extraordinary global change than we have. And that to me is a failure of political leadership, Democrat and Republican joined at the hip by their enablers in the media. We tend in the country to kind of pooh-pooh the Europeans. The European Union has become an enormously important and strong economic force. While we had been preoccupied with two wars a long way away, they had been forging economic partnerships in the second world, some cases the third world, but largely in the second world, that have made them an economic powerhouse. We don’t even need to deal with China. The Chinese are doing the same thing. Their not just sitting in China. They are operating around the world while we have cut back on the number of…of people in the peace corps, of foreign diplomats. The Chinese and the Europeans have been sending more and more people out into the world to make contacts in those parts of the world are gonna supply labor and will supply markets. And that is a failure of leadership. And at the risk of biting the hand that fed me quite well for a long time, when I talk about their enablers in the media, it is cable TV that too often, not always, but too often has become a poster child for irrelevant journalism.

Aaron Brown:
Cable penchant for mud wrestling, opinion-driven programs, together with the parties, the political parties penchant for caring more about winning the next news cycle than solving the collective problems of the nation have left us with American politics for dummies. Media has been more than willing to join with the parties in labeling the country. We are red or we are blue, when in fact on almost any issue I can think of, we are not red and we are not blue. We are very much purple. Of course there are states that are a little more red than others. And of course there are places that are a little more purple than others, but look at the change that’s just going on in the state we live in. When we see that Arizona is no longer a simple political state to understand. It’s not just one thing, or just another thing. This is what the country has always been. The country has always on balance, been a very moderate place.

Aaron Brown:
Let me give you an example of what I think of as media irrelevance and how the political parties have both encouraged and benefited from it. This is one issue. You could do this with a lot. Let’s take abortion for a second. Now I went on the radio in 1967. I was a kid—it’s like, I was eighteen years old. It was a great time to go on the radio doing talk shows because at eighteen you don’t know what you don’t know, and therefore, you know everything. I go on the radio doing talk shows now and all I say is ‘well thank you, I need to think about that for a while. That’s kind of an interesting point.’ But I’m…but then, ok. We talked about—one of the things we talked about is abortion. I’m convinced nothing is changed. If you listen to media coverage of a difficult issue, you would assume that the country is one of two things. It is pro-life or it is pro-choice. In fact, that is not what the country is at all. The country, by and large, does not see abortion as murder and the country, by and large, does not believe that abortion is nothing. It’s something. It’s complicated. It’s nuanced. It’s not Ann Coulter on one side and Michael Moore on the other. But if you watch opinion-driven cable TV that’s what everything is. Everything is reduced to Michael Moore or someone like him on one side and Ann Coulter, and I would say someone like her, but frankly there just isn’t anyone quite that despicable.

Aaron Brown:
This is a…I’ll tell you…um, these, these poor people are taping this. They’re trying to keep this to 28 minutes. I don’t know what day they’re thinking. Um, when I was doing the program, I had an idea for what I wanted the program to be, obviously in every way, and one of the things we said is we weren’t gonna become a shout-a-thon. Um, I…my father was a shouter and I think its bothered me ever since and I—it took me a long time to get one of those jobs and its, its just not what I wanted it to be. So the, um, phrase that we coined for that, not going in that direction is we said we were going to be an Ann Coulter free zone. And we didn’t mean Ann Coulter in specific by, you get…we, we just wanted not to have that kind of nonsense on the program. And Ms. Coulter heard about this and she was, um, in the green room doing Larry one night, and by the way, that was the youngest guest Larry had ever had on the program. Apparently, somehow Barbara Eden was tied up. Um, and she said ‘well I hear your boycotting me.’ And I said, ‘well, yeah. Yeah, that’s true.’

Aaron Brown:
And she said ‘well that proves you don’t like conservatives.’ And I said ‘no, actually all that proves is I don’t like you.’ Um, I…to me, you know, two people who are actually professional screamers, I mean that’s all these people do is they kind of bop from, you know, CNN to MSNBC to Fox to CNN to MSNBC, and they just keep going around and round. It’s the same faces saying the same thing and it’s really not healthy. It’s entertaining as all get out, but it’s not healthy. So, you know, I want to let you in on something if you haven’t figured it out. I mean, with all deference to Bill and Lou and Sean and Keith, and all of whom are first-rate communicators and to, two out of four are kind of friends, there is no shortage of opinion in the country, ok. It’s not like people are lining up at the opinion store because they’re afraid we’re gonna run out. We’re up to our ears in opinion. What there’s a shortage of is facts. We live in a time when we can’t agree on the most basic facts. If you can’t agree on the facts, how do you solve the problem? Opinions are easy compared to reporting. Reporting is expensive. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes people checking to make sure that what you’re reporting as fact is in fact a fact.

Aaron Brown:
Opinions are cheap. You pay the talent a bunch of dough, he goes out there or she goes out there, says whatever it is he or she says, and you got yourself entertaining television. So, it’s economically, and it gets an audience. Scratch the truth, do I watch it. It’s not that you’re not complicit in all of this, by the way, I was just being nice by not mentioning that earlier. But facts are complicated. They don’t always line up with our hearts. And we live in a time when we can’t agree on them, and that’s a problem. Just, again, take an issue. It is a fact that the American health care system, as wonderful as it is for people of means, is failing people. Everyone in the field knows this. People on the insurance side of the business know it. People in the medical community, medical delivery side know it. You all know it. We all know it, ok.

Aaron Brown:
There was a guy in the audience yesterday in Boston. This is unbe—This is almost literally unbelievable. Um, he said, we were talking about how much people were paying for health insurance for their family. He said his health insurance bill was 31,000 dollars. I said ‘what do you have, Michael DeBakey living in your house? You know, massaging your heart every morning when you wake?’ But people are spe—and we know it’s failing. And it’s not like we learned it was failing people yesterday. We’ve known it for a while. That is a fact. It is a fact that Americans per capita spend twice as much on healthcare as any other western country and get no better outcomes. If we got better outcomes and we were spending that much more money, I’m there. I’m not looking to die. You know, I want my doctor to see me. But we’re not getting better outcomes, we’re just spending more. That is a fact. It is a fact that there is no national collection of data on what treatments work and what treatments don’t. So every time you go to the doctor, that doctor starts from scratch. And depending on your insurance coverage, they may start you with—you got a bad back, they may start you with a couple of Tylenol with Codeine until you finally are in such pain that they do what they really oughta done in the first place because they know it works, is give you an MRI, locate the…the disk that’s protruding or ruptured, give you a steroid epidural, and two weeks later you’re feeling swell.

Aaron Brown:
But we don’t collect data. You know, health insurance is a two-prong problem. There’s the problem of getting health insurance to people who can’t afford it and there’s the problem of health care costs rising at an extraordinary rate. Democrats are pretty good on getting the health care to people side of the equation and not very good, my opinion, on the cost side. Senator McCain, not very good on the health insurance side, but really interesting on the cost side. Why don’t we do them both? Why don’t we try and solve the big problem. You know I was a kid when President Kennedy said ‘let’s go to the moon.’ Go to the moon? Why don’t we just make sure people can go to a doctor? But the first thing we have to agree on is that people have a right in American life to health insurance and health care. Not the emergency room, not unaffordably, not in such a way that bankrupts people. Somehow it makes sense for people your age, ok. We don’t want you going bankrupt so we gave you Medicare. But it doesn’t make—that was a guess, you’re probably like sixty two so it may have been alright. But people your age, we actually don’t care that much whether you can afford it, you go broke, you lose your house, too damn bad for you.

Aaron Brown:
Now all of us, it’s easy to blame them. It’s easy to blame Keith and Lou and Bill and, you know, Greta, and Roger Aronson, Rupert Murdoch, and all those people, but we are not blameless. We collectively have been far too willing to be entertained rather than informed, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise because part of changing where we are requires that we look inward and not just outward. This isn’t the old Soviet Union. This is a democracy and we really do in the end get the government that we deserve. This election may change a lot of this. I underscore may because the powers that have created this nasty partisanship which has lead to this unproductive gridlock are not just going to slink away in embarrassment, though they should. The parties won’t change unless you demand it. Media won’t change unless you stop watching the junk. Politicians won’t change until they have to be more concerned with solving problems than raising money for the next campaign. But maybe, maybe we really are on the edge of some great change. In my travels in the last six months I have found a country far less interested in party labels, a party simply fed up that those in politics and those in the media seem obsessed with our differences. As I’ve traveled the country I have found people who are not at all interested in some political purity test. They are interested in a solutions test. As I’ve traveled the country I have found fellow citizens who know health care is a problem; who know the environment is troubled. They know the global economy has changed and is going to change the way we live. They know it. They know we would struggle without immigrant labor. They understand it’s not a bumper sticker issue.

Aaron Brown:
They know we’ve fallen behind much of the world. We have fallen behind much of the world in education, and they know it. They know a state of perpetual war is not the answer. They understand that it is not healthy for Americans around the world to be viewed as torturers regardless of legal definition. They know the country’s image has been hurt. They know they can’t make TVs as cheaply as the Chinese and they know something is amiss when their service call is answered by a guy in India. They know it. We know it. You know this. And the country may well be ready to reward those who don’t seem to be authentic, but actually are authentic. And if that happens, if that happens despite the nature of the parties these days, and despite the power of the opinion gods on TV, we will have taken the first step toward a great and rich future. Thank you.