Power ought to be shared, though it often isn’t.

If you really wanna look at who should have power in our country, first of all it ought to be a bunch of people who recognize that they don’t own it. They have it temporarily, and they exercise it for someone else. I mean a democracy only functions well that way. Everybody who is elected to government really runs the show. They make the decisions, but they do it in a fiduciary capacity for the folks who send them up here. You know the old “Mr. Smith Comes to Washington” ideal. If it really ran that way, that would be . . . that would obviously be perfect. If the president and his Cabinet were all dedicated to doing great things for this country, and if the Congress were full of people who always believed that the best and most important role they played was to exercise power on behalf of the folks that they represented, that’s what Washington ought to be. And it ought to be a place of transparency, of open discussion of ideas, and sharing of information, and great debates over ideas. We’re not there. We may have once been there, but we’re not there today. You know again, power ought to be shared in a democracy broadly and in a way that everyone feels like they’re part of whatever answers we come up with here. Recorded on: 9/11/07