EP. 14 — CONVERSATIONS: NICK PENNIMAN

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp and this is Swamp Stories, brought to you by Issue One. From time to time moving forward, we're going to break from our normal narrative format and have an extended conversation about issues that really matter. This is episode 14, a conversation with Issue One Founder and CEO, Nick Penniman.

Weston Wamp: Well, Nick, it makes all the sense in the world that if we're going to begin every once in a while having a fireside chat or more of an extended conversation on Swamp Stories, that the first one would be the founder and CEO of Issue One. Thanks for doing this.

Nick Penniman: Thank you.

Weston Wamp: Now, to get started, like one of the reasons that I came to work with Issue One and was interested in the movement and the idea of cross partisan political reform is because of you. I thought you were an articulate, inspiring person and one of the reasons I wanted to start this kind of extended conversation chapter of Swamp Stories with you was so the people who've heard bits and pieces about reform could hear the guy who breathed life into... there were several people responsible and you can talk about that as you tell the story, but just tell us a little bit about your background because you come from a cool journalism family and you've been on an interesting road.

Nick Penniman: Yeah, my background is I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I was born in Springfield, Illinois but grew up in St. Louis and went to college. Was a philosophy major. My dad, by the way, was a newspaper guy. Was a general manager of the Post-Dispatch and then the publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after that. I went to college, was a philosophy major and got out and immediately entered journalism myself. I was initially a newspaper editor in Massachusetts and then became an editor at The American Prospect magazine and then worked for a number of years with Bill Moyers, the somewhat famous PBS broadcaster, and then became publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine. Started a big investigative reporting unit for Huffington Post.

Along the way as a journalist working on long-form journalism, magazine style journalism, deep dive investigative reporting in Washington, it just became more and more clear to me over the course of that piece of my career that good information, journalism, and facts mattered less in the policymaking process and influence and connections mattered more. I found that to be very disturbing that even some of the best investigative journalism and the best enterprising journalism seemed to... it just was like it was no longer having an impact on the policymaking process whereas the folks who populate K Street, who bundle the campaign cash have much more of an impact, and the threat to a democracy and that kind of situation is extraordinary. Not only in terms of its effect on policymaking, but also its effect on the public's perception of whether or not we, the people are governing or not.

Weston Wamp: Was there ever a time in your life where you were very political? Where you had a candidate whose bumper sticker and yard sign were your thing and you championed their cause. I mean there's a lot we call it... sort of the downside of this is tribalism these days. We probably take it too far, but were you ever political in that way?

Nick Penniman: No. Now, I think I'm more of a systems person than I am a people person, so to speak. Meaning that I don't necessarily get inspired by a single person as much as I get inspired by the idea of the system itself and what needs to change. I mean, I voted Republican when I was younger and then I mainly vote Democrat now but I don't... I haven't been terribly inspired by either party in a long time because I feel as if there are enormous problems that this country faces that neither party has the guts to really articulate clearly or to tackle at scale.

We can just take one issue that I know lights you up significantly that neither party wants to touch, which is the national debt. It's not the most important problem facing the country but it is certainly in the top five problems facing the country right now. It could just totally dwarf and shut down door for our economy and shut down our government's ability to do anything in the future unless we tackle it and neither party for various political reasons that relate to the basis of the party, the various constituencies that make up both parties, neither party is capable of talking honestly about the debt right now, or taking any serious steps to do anything about it because it's tough. It's stuff that politicians don't want to do.

That's just an example of the fact that I just feel like I would never call myself a party person.

Weston Wamp: I grew up on the campaign trail and so the notion that you follow the money to figure out where the bodies are buried and how politics works resonates with me because I learned it as a kid. You wrote a book a few years ago with Wendell Potter and it's interesting that you bring up the debt and it's one of, I think several big issues that is unaddressed by both parties, because to your point, it's hard. There actually are a lot of issues where the blood ends up being on the hands of... maybe not equally, but there's certainly plenty of blame to pass around.

I thought you did a masterful job in your book telling the stories of how even though the perception and probably rightfully so in the last 20 years is that Republicans have maneuvered creatively to take advantage of loopholes in our laws, et cetera, but both parties have an addiction to money don't they?

Nick Penniman: Yeah. I think what I learned writing the book is that the problem was even worse than I knew. I had been in and around it as a reporter for quite a while covering money in politics and the influence industry. It is shot through every minute of every day in Washington, the influence industry. Literally, when you think about... like if you have a kid and you think about what they are presented with in a food cafeteria, that is being affected by the influence industry in Washington. It's being affected by lobbyists who make six and 700 and $800,000 a year and line K Street in Washington, D.C.

It's as granular as that, but then it's also as macro as what we saw with the financial crisis when both parties were beholden to Wall Street and Wall Street cash and Wall Street lobbyists. Both parties had essentially colluded in deregulating Wall Street over the course of 15 years. That deregulation led to the reckless... recklessness, sorry, that then led to the crash and that it almost brought the global economy down. It's everything as big as global economic forces in finance and everything is small as whether or not your kid is going to be able to eat a healthy lunch.

Weston Wamp: It's funny you frame it that way. I have a friend who's probably much like you. He was maybe more of an activist as a young person. He was the high school young republican president and he's morphed into probably more of a moderate democrat and he'll sometimes give me a hard time about the work that we do and he knows that I'm still... I don't know that I'm a proud Republican at this point but I'm certainly conservative. He'll make these comments about how he thinks only Republicans are bought off by corporate America and I'm like, all you need to do is take a quick trip to OpenSecrets and you'll see that... again, it's not that like either party or both parties share equally in the blame on all these issues, but the corporate PACs they give to everybody.

Nick Penniman: No, of course.

Weston Wamp: It's funny of all people and maybe one of the most unlikely people to step forward to talk about it, Matt Gaetz from Florida when he went in the minority, made this announcement earlier this year at CPAC that he wasn't going to take PAC money anymore because he realized going into the minority that it wasn't the majority or the minority that runs Capitol Hill but it was the lobbyists.

Nick Penniman: Yeah. Listen, I'll never forget this conversation I had when I first moved to Washington in 2001 with The American Prospect magazine where I was an editor. I was just happenstance. I was at this event and I ended up having a bunch of drinks late one night with a lobbyist from Patton Boggs, which is one of the most powerful lobbying firms in Washington. I don't know, we were just talking about kind of everything under the sun and then at one point I started talking about what he does and how he does it and I said... I looked at him in the eye and he had had too many drinks and I said, "So you must have to really straddle the fence between Democrats and Republicans." And I'll never forget this kind of drunken cackle that he led out and he looked me back in the eye and he said, "I don't straddle the fence. I go right through it."

I mean, that's the way it works in Washington and yeah, they will get... The lobbying firms will throw money at whoever they think they need to throw money at to open the doors and get the job done and that's Democrat and Republican both.

Weston Wamp: Let's shift gears to where we are in this moment halfway through 2020. If a pandemic and what we all knew was going to be a tumultuous selection cycle wasn't enough all across the country and suburbs of Washington in Chattanooga, Tennessee where I live, we're confronting the reality that racial inequality is a real thing in America and a lot of times white guys like me and you don't know what we don't know or know the right things to say.

I think increasingly we want, even if we accidentally err in expressing our desire to talk about these things meaningfully, we want to engage and I think one of the things you and I have talked about before is that we... I think all sober people across the political spectrum want to see laws change. I don't think it's terribly clear exactly what they are but I think we want to share with people that while we certainly don't think political reform is some kind of a cure for inequality or certainly not racism. It is a small part of shoring up I think the fact that certain people's voices disproportionately are heard more than others.

Nick Penniman: Yeah, and I would say a couple things. One, I mean, yes, this conversation is much more front and center than it ever has been, but it's been going on obviously in this country literally since the founding about racial equality and too often over the course of the history of the country we've taken the wrong turn over and over again even when we knew what the right turn was to take on it. Thank God that we're kind of living in what will probably likely be called the second great surge of the civil rights movement in America and it's an overdue conversation in a way, and it's a powerful conversation and a lot's happening fast.

I mean, the Redskins here in Washington are finally changing their name and schools like the Woodrow Wilson School within Princeton is being renamed and statues of Confederate generals are being taken down and moved. There's a whole lot occurring really, really quickly and it's incredibly exciting. I do think that there is a clear agenda around BLM, which is around policing and that's another remarkable thing that's occurring. Every major city in America is having powerful transformational conversations around how to change policing in this country, so that's great, and yes, I also think and hope that the mainstream conversation will eventually kind of turn its gaze towards political reform, because if you look at money and politics, gerrymandering and voting in all three of those ways, those issues disproportionately affect people of color.

On money and politics there's what's called a wealth primary that's very hard for people of color to pass unless they have access to great wealth. Just to literally raise enough money or imagine raising enough money to be able to run competitively when House races are three to $5 million and Senate races are 10 to 20 these days, and then you've got gerrymandering in which people of color have been carved out of districts or carved into districts in a way that oftentimes kind of disenfranchises them, and then obviously on voting I feel like almost anyone who kind of reads newspapers in America knows something about the history of voting rights in this country and how many laws have been passed and then thank God taken down that have tried to destroy the franchise of voting for people of color in this country but there's still a lot of work to be done there too.

Yeah, I mean when we talk about politics and power in America, you got to talk about who has access to the conversation, who has access to the process. Ultimately when you ask those questions, it comes down to these structural things of money and politics, gerrymandering and voting and unless we deal with those, unless we fix those, I don't think that there's a way for us to ever achieve equality in this country in a meaningful way.

Weston Wamp: Yeah, I haven't thought of it candidly in the couple years that I've been working with Issue One. I haven't thought of it as a racial issue, but I'll tell you just having grown up around politics, my allure to all this, and I think I've shared this with most of the team. My allure to it is that, I think on our best day are incrementally iteratively trying to give more of a voice to people who don't have a voice and even though I grew up the son of a eight term member of Congress on my mom's side of the family, I was the first person to graduate from college and I was always interested in kind of the dichotomy of the fact that I think we were sort of a novelty to the other half of our family, that we were political.

But there were just regular hardworking people and none of whom had gone to a four year college but worked hard and took care of their families and knew and just accepted that they had no political influence whatsoever, and so it always... just made me sensitive to, and to keep in mind the vision for the country was that all of us are equal and that we all have dignity and that might be very idealistic and I would own if it is idealistic, but I just sensed growing up around politics and then running myself that there's a class of people who have almost all the influence.

Nick Penniman: Yeah, and that's where we are united as a country. We are united in our critique of the fact that we believe that the political process has become an exclusive process that is controlled only by those who can buy access to it. If you look at the polling on money and politics, it's exactly that and the one that always strikes me is a tracking poll that's been done since the 1950s and it asks... Over and over again, year after year, it's asked a very simple question, which is, do you believe that the government is controlled by the many on behalf of the common good or by the few on behalf of special or narrow interests? That's almost the exact wording of it.

In 1950, the answer to that was 70% believe that the government was being controlled roughly on behalf of everyone for the common good, and today it's about 10% who believe that. This is what Trump picked up on by the way, and talked about drain the swamp and the forgotten men and women of America won't be forgotten anymore and all that kind of stuff. It's what Nader picked up on, Ralph Nader picked up on back in the late '90s when he ran. This has been bubbling around for a while. Bernie Sanders, right? Like this has been bubbling around for a while. This notion that the government's bought and sold. That it's coin operated has been around for a while and the problem is that the political class in Washington has very little incentive to fix it.

What it's going to require is that the 90% of us who believe that that's the case, who believe that we have to reform our system of government and take back control, to take back the power and privilege of self-government and extend it to everyone not just a certain class or race of people. We've got to come together and we've got to create a movement that is cross partisan and multiracial to do exactly that, but it's going to take us all coming together and acting ourselves upon the system to be able to create the change that we need at this point.

Weston Wamp: We'll be right back.

Weston Wamp: All right, let's get back to it. I mentioned a lot of my passion around the work that we do being connected to kind of how I perceive the founder's vision for the country and how we've strayed from it. I mean, to be fair, the founder's vision in the last few weeks has maybe been as controversial as it's been at any... certainly any time of mine or your lifetime, I think you could argue. I thought, on July 4th I heard these two things just to give you... this gives kind of a wild picture of where American political discourse is.

Some people wanted to blow up Mount Rushmore. I mean, there were some people legitimately kind of questioning should we remove the slave holding founding fathers who were on it? And there was a Senate candidate who was an appointee of this president in Tennessee who suggested that we should put Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore. And I thought, my God, our discourse is... we are in two very different places here.

I've always loved the way that you talk about our founding. How do we find a balance between acknowledging the sins of our founders, but not seeding this pride I think that we should have that before 1776, most of the world lived in oppression and that the founding is flawed as it was there and as flawed as it remains today, has set in motion a proliferation of democracy, didn't it?

Nick Penniman: Yeah, and I think that the conversation that we're having about the founders and the founding of course is really important. It's not necessarily new. We've known this for a while, the kind of darker history and the history of the hypocrisy of the founders, because they didn't know better and we need to hold them accountable for that. They didn't know better. They were conversations occurring at the very beginning about whether or not abolition should be a part of the founding of the country. John Adams, Abigail Adams were promoters of that idea.

Some were even promoters of the idea like Thomas Paine, that suffrage for women too should be a part of it. That it shouldn't just be men of all colors who should be able to govern but also women. It's not like those ideas were absent, right? They were in the air. Now, they weren't thick in the air but they were in the air and the founders chose not to go there and they should be held accountable for that, but also we need to do is, we can't throw the baby out with the bath water. The baby is that the world back in the 1770s was living under various forms of monarchy and oppression and the fact that a group of people in this country came together lit up by the enlightenment and the thinkers and the philosophers of the enlightenment and decided to create a country based on an idealistic vision of what humanity could be and how we should organize ourselves together is an extraordinary and profound moment in the history of humankind.

That type of thing had never existed before. I mean, yes, the Greeks, the ancient Greeks going back to Aristotle and Plato and Pericles had experimented with democracy but not in the way that was given birth to in 1776 envisioned it. This was like, this was really the breakthrough concept and the breakthrough moment. In a way what we did is we laid down tracks that couldn't be torn up and those tracks were, all people are created equal. Freedom, justice, equality, and liberty. As an American when we look... or as Americans, when we are judging ourselves and figuring out whether or not we're on the right path or the wrong path, the thing that we look back to is that creed, that great creed of liberty, justice, equality.

That's how we judge ourselves as a society. There is no other country in the world that judges itself accordingly. If you're French, you have all kinds of other ways of judging whether or not you're French. Germans, Chinese they have different ways of judging whether or not they're kind of truly on the right path. Our creed is one that inherently involves the liberation of the human spirit and the right to self-government. Now, obviously we got a lot wrong along the way.

Again, we took the wrong turn when the fork came in the road to either free all people or not. We took the wrong turn over and over and over again, but the positive piece is that we also set in motion this extraordinary experiment that then gave rise to abolition, gave rise to women's suffrage in 1920, gave rise to the civil rights movement in the '50s and '60s, and is giving rise to what we're seeing in the streets today and that's the beautiful thing that we all need to appreciate I think.

Weston Wamp: Well, and I think it's sturdy enough to take all of our reforms and everything that we all in our emotion and passion can throw at it. I guess my fear is that we get to a place where... and I think that polling even shows that the generation that's coming up behind me, I think is beginning to doubt sort of the goodness or at least... I don't know. I always thought the sort of exceptional aspect of America is that we never thought we were finished product. We never felt like we had arrived.

Nick Penniman: Exactly.

Weston Wamp: It does pain me to think that there may be some young people who don't realize that's what we all have shared stock in, is that it's not that America is perfect, but it's that it's our job to make her so, right?

Nick Penniman: It's an experiment that is ongoing. Even the founders recognized that. I think Jefferson nearing his death when he and John Adams were pen pals. They kind of hated each other early in life and then were the best of friends later in life, died on the same day by the way, on July 4th. They died on the same day without any clue the other one was dying, but when they were pen pals later in life, I think it was Jefferson who wrote to Adams and said that there would have to be multiple revolutions in America to keep the experiment going and that sometimes those might even have to be bloody revolutions again.

Yeah, they knew that there would... that in a way it's almost like a nomad or a wanderer who believes that the moment they stop moving, they die spiritually. We're very much like that as a country. I think that as you just said, like the moment we stop pushing, the moment we stop being self-critical and kicking ourselves for not doing as well as we could, that's when we stop being America.

Weston Wamp: I think about America, and a lot of my pride has always been in the reality that historians that I've read gave me this perspective that in 1776 what we did is created... we took a world where basically everybody lived under rulers and kings and we set in motion what we've referred to here as an experiment that has now led to democracy in some form or fashion being the rule not the exception, but it's evident to the naked eye at this point that there are a lot of parts of the world where democracy is not in its best day and I've heard you describe this phenomenon as a democracy recession. Explain what you mean.

Nick Penniman: Yeah. Actually half the world's population does not live in any kind of a democracy at all right now, and then half live in democracies but those democracies run the spectrum. Some are high functioning democracies and some are kind of less functioning. They're more like the facade of democracy. We've got to remember that democracy is still not the default. Democracy is not won by any means. The democracy recession is not my term. It's actually from Freedom House, which was created in the wake of World War II to track on a kind of scale to what extent countries around the world of the 130 something countries in the world, to track on a scale of where they were between authoritarianism and democracy.

As of this year, we have now entered our 15th year of a democracy recession. What that means is that more countries on earth have slid towards authoritarianism than democracy for the last 15 years. We've actually seen a shrinking or retraction of democracy and if you look at... that might not seem extraordinary for people who are in their 20s, but I remember when I was 15 years old, I walked through Checkpoint Charlie which separated East Berlin and West Berlin and at the time East Berlin was still actually under Russian control. It was still not officially a part of Germany, and then of course the wall came down a couple of years after that, the Berlin wall.

What we saw in the wake of that was this enormous expansion of democracy to countries like Poland and then Hungary and others that were a part of the Soviet Bloc and were freeing themselves from that, and for a good deal of time in the early 2000s all the way up until a couple of years ago, it actually seemed like democracy was going to continue to expand in Central and Eastern Europe and maybe move down to Turkey, right? And all that. Well, what's happening all of a sudden, and this just happened in Poland last week when they reelected their authoritarian president is we're seeing those countries that had become functional democracies in Europe now slide away from that. They are entering into authoritarian periods which could last for a very long time and that scares the hell out of me because it basically means that we're right back to where we started.

I mean you'd think that... God you'd think that once someone has, once a group of people have democracy, that they won't give it up, right? That somehow therefore it becomes set in stone but the fact is, is that people are giving it up all over the place. What it comes down to is that this period in human history will surely be looked back on in 40 or 50 or 60 years as a titanic struggle between those who believe in democracy and those who believe in authoritarianism and whether or not democracy wins has everything to do with what we do here in America.

If we can't make our light shine brighter, if we can't fix our democracy here, then those who struggle for democracy abroad and struggle to keep the light on in their democracy, they're going to lose inspiration and hope.

Weston Wamp: It's interesting. I think the virus, the pandemic has all of a sudden given us this shared experience, the facts as we know them and they seem to change every day. The facts are not Republican or Democrat or conservative or liberal, but it's interesting. It's almost... it's felt a bit like an experiment to me because I do think we tend right now to be very tribal. It's interesting because sure enough, it took us only a couple of weeks to politicize a pandemic and begin virtue signaling whether we're wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, or whether we thought all this is a flu or no, this is going to kill half the country and... That politicalization of everything. I don't know. I tap out sometimes because I'm very political. I grew up in a political family, but the politicalization of everything is not the way this is supposed to work, right?

I mean, I always try to avoid the hyperbole about how divided the country is because we fought a civil war 160 years ago. We've faced down giants but right now there's something petty almost about the way that we just sort of quickly find a way to rationalize and justify opposing each other.

Nick Penniman: Yeah, I agree. I think it goes back to a couple of things. Number one, it goes back to just the profound frustration in this country, especially within the middle class about the lack of mobility, economic mobility and just the breakdown of the American dream, the notion that people just no longer... the bulk of people in this country no longer believe that their children's lives will be better than their lives. I mean, you're a dad, I'm a dad. I don't feel that way about my kids right now and I don't know if you do or not, but imagine if we did feel that way, how horrible that feels. What a horrible feeling that is if every time you look at your kid and you think their life is going to be worse than mine when they grow up.

That's a big piece of it, profound frustration. Another piece of it is that we have entered an era of tribal media so that people can live inside their own little information bubbles. They watch Fox News and they read Breitbart or they watch MSNBC and they read Vox or The Nation. Part of the problem is, is that there's no exposure to any other viewpoints outside of those bubbles, and if there is any reference to them inside of those bubbles, it's normally a total vilification of the other side, and oftentimes it's simplistic vilification of the other side. Yeah. We have this profound driver of economic despair or dissatisfaction the kind of, people believe is demise American dream and then you've got this hyperpolarized media that is feeding into all this.

It's really, really difficult for us to have this kind of common conversation as Americans today and we got to get back to it at some point, because like the mask thing is just ridiculous. There's no reason why just wearing a simple mask in the middle of pandemic... it should be just something that everyone clearly does without any dispute. It shouldn't be so hard.

Weston Wamp: Yeah. It's not that hard. Equally ridiculous and more in our lane, because I wanted to ask you about Issue One broadening our focus this year to talk about some voting issues, but equally ridiculous is the way that absentee ballots, just the idea that in the name of a pandemic, we would expand access to absentee ballot. That's somehow become partisan, is particularly ridiculous from my vantage point. I live two miles as a bird flies from Georgia where you have no excuse absentee balloting. It's a Republican state. My best friends in Chattanooga moved here from Wisconsin. Well, the same deal there. There's no question that Republicans in Wisconsin, they go hey, you have the right to request an absentee ballot. It's no big deal, and then the president and others have acted like somehow you're going to create this mass corruption issue if you just let people stay home and stay safe and vote.

Nick Penniman: It's crazy. It's crazy. Again, like there's no way even two, three years ago, certainly 20 years ago, if you had said to anyone in either political party in Washington or in the press, would absentee voting be politicized and be seen as a partisan thing and would there be a massive fight? They'd say, no. It's ridiculous. This is the most benign thing they could imagine, right? And least totally benign. I mean, it's benign and it's trustworthy. We've been voting absentees since the Civil War. Our soldiers vote absentee. It's crazy that all of a sudden it's some inflamed political issue.

On this one you do actually have to lay that right at the feet or the thumb tips of the president himself who on Twitter continues to claim that it's some corrupt form of voting even though he votes absentee, and he admits that he votes absentee middle on Sean Hannity two weeks ago. That he votes absentee and he praised absentee for himself but then he doesn't want to extend that method of voting to the rest of Americans. It's crazy that we're even at this point, but this is what this president does.

He is a can of gasoline that's being poured over lines of matches constantly. Unfortunately somewhat unavoidably now we're having to... at Issue One we're having to make the argument that this is a safe, sane, and nonpartisan way of voting. Unbelievably. We never thought we'd have to make this argument, but we are making this argument.

Weston Wamp: As we wrap up, let's go straight to November 2020. We did an episode on this podcast talking about ways that the election will look different. I was telling people, everybody in the South is freaked out about college football season and I was telling them a few months ago just get ready. There's something a little more important happening this fall. I for example, I've talked to my secretary of state about the fact that he doesn't think election results will be ready to go in the same timeframe the night of election day as usual. How do we begin to prepare for what very well may be an unknown outcome for a few days or just the myriad of different things that might go down differently?

Nick Penniman: Yeah. I mean, I think that we Americans are probably more patient than the media is. In a way it's going to be... The media has got to figure this out for themselves because as you know there's pressure in the newsrooms especially in broadcast to be the first to call each state and put it in a column in the Electoral College column. John King standing up there with Wolf Blitzer imagine, right? While they feel under pressure to call it before NBC does or before Fox News does or something like that. The pressure in the media is going to be huge to want to try to call these things.

The public just needs to realize... Frankly, the press needs to realize it first and foremost, but the public needs to realize too that it might take a couple of days. It could take a week. It could take actually two weeks in some of these swing states where it might come down to five or 6,000 or 7,000 votes and that's just the way it's going to be this year. Yeah, I think everyone's got to chill out. You got to go into election night knowing that it's probably not the elections night, that it's the beginning of a week-long process of a week-long unveiling of who the next president's going to be and we're just going to have patience with it accordingly.

Weston Wamp: Last question. I've been excited to ask you this one for a few days. There is a lot to be cynical about. I probably spend too much time on Twitter where the country seems particularly bleak, but what are you hopeful about right now? Not based on... not a contingency of who might win this or that, but what are you hopeful about even in this chaotic moment in our country's history?

Nick Penniman: Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that we're seeing people in the streets, we're seeing powerful important conversations occurring in the media about how to fix the partisanship and the polarization. This is a very vivid time in this country right now. We actually... All of that ferment, all of that struggle and strife is the thing that gives me hope. If it were quiet, if there were like tumbleweeds blowing across the black and white screen of the prairie, I would be scared to death right now, because that basically means we're just going to go over the waterfall. The lights are just going to go out, but the fact that we see these rebellions against these things occurring is the very thing that gives me hope and as we were saying earlier, that's what we do as Americans.

We kick ourselves because we haven't got it right and we're going to try harder and we're going to kick ourselves again and again until we get it right. That's what we're involved in right now and that's the right way to be.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of Swamp Stories we're going to take a look at why it is that it's sometimes so difficult to bring Republicans into political reform. Despite the fact that conservatives across the country support these issues, including an interview with a young Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and other prominent conservative reform leaders. You won't want to miss this episode.

Thanks for listening to Swamp Stories, presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better? Rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host, Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, producers Evan Ottenfeld and Sydney Richards, and editor Parker Tant from ParkerPodcasting.com. Swamp Stories was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas, and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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