I want to ask -- In all seriousness,
I mean, there is a question of when you get up to those
numbers, when it's 15, 16, now it's, you know, 21 people,
and you don't have much of a national base.
You know, why did you decide to do this?
-The reason I decided to do it is I think we're at risk
of being the first generation of Americans
to leave less opportunity, not more,
to the people coming after us.
That's how I feel about our generation.
We've had 40 years
when 90% of the American people haven't seen a pay raise.
We have no economic mobility in this country at all anymore.
And I think we really have to restore integrity
to this government of ours.
This is an exercise in self-government.
It's not someone else's government.
And the Freedom Caucus and Ted Cruz and now Donald Trump
have done a good job of separating, you know,
this government from the American people.
[ Cheers and applause ]
And it -- it --
You know, it may be, and I think it is, in many ways corrupt
and bankrupt and obsolete,
all of which are invitations for us to fix it.
You can't just leave it alone. This is how we make decisions.
Other countries around the world
who are not inconvenienced by our form of democracy,
like China, don't have to wait for us to get our act together.
So, you know, you think about the six months we spent
screwing around with Donald Trump
and the wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for.
During that period of time,
China landed somebody on the dark side of the moon.
They're building 3,000 miles of fiber-optic cable
connecting Latin America with Africa, with China.
And we've spent $5 trillion since 2001
on tax cuts for rich people
and $5.6 trillion in the Middle East.
That's $11 or $12 or $13 trillion
that we could have invested in America,
invested in the American people
to drive our economy for everybody,
and we might as well have lit it on fire, is my position,
and I think we need to change it.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Do you have -- You know, as people sort of say, you know,
I think to some degree, it's like,
oh, Cory Booker, you know, he's making his main issue gun control.
You know, Bernie's medicare for all.
Klobuchar seems to be, you know, infrastructure.
Kamala, you know, teacher pay.
Is there a Michael Bennet issue
right now that you're hanging on?
-Well, I actually do think that
this restoring economic growth reaches everybody in America.
It really is the job that we have to do,
because the democracy will not survive
with this level of income inequality.
It won't. We know that from history.
And our income inequality today
is the highest it's been in 100 years.
The lack of economic mobility I described earlier.
So I think there are many things we need to do. That's one.
We've got to deal with climate change.
We've got to deal with immigration.
We've got to deal with infrastructure.
As somebody who was a former school superintendent,
we need to do a hell of a lot better job than we're doing
educating people in this country at every single level.
[ Cheers and applause ] And so -- And finally
what I'd say about this is we have to govern ourselves again.
We have to learn how to do it. That's not just a Trump problem.
We were screwed up before he got there.
When I asked people who voted for Donald Trump in my state,
"Why did you vote for him?"
almost always they say, "We wanted to blow the place up."
And so I say to them, "Congratulations.
You achieved what you wanted to do,
but what are we going to do now?"
And, you know, when I think about how much wasted time
there's been in the Senate the 10 years that I've been there,
the waste of opportunity for the next generation of Americans
and the generation after that --
When this country was founded, it was not founded
on the expectation that we would agree with each other.
It was founded on the expectation
that we would disagree with each other.
That was the whole point of living in a republic...
or now what we call a democracy.
And we've got to get back to a place where we're disagreeing
but using that disagreement
to fashion more durable and more imaginative solutions
than any king or tyrant could ever think of themselves.
And that's going to require a lot more out of us as citizens
and a much higher expectation
of what our elected leadership should look like in D.C.
-You mentioned imaginative solutions.
I do want to bring it back to Colorado before we go.
Is it true that magic mushrooms
are going to be legal in Colorado?
-Yeah. I don't know what ha--
I think that our voters just voted to --
Yeah, in Denver to do that, and I don't know.
I think they might have thought
that we were out of marijuana all of a sudden.
-Yeah. Or they're worried they're gonna be.
-And, by the way, we're not out of marijuana in Colorado.
-Well, that's what it says on the state flag now, right?
-Exactly. -Thanks so much for being here.
-Thanks for having me. -Best of luck.
-Senator Michael Bennet, everybody.