Michael Bennet vs. Phil Weiser for Colorado Governor and Standing up for All of [5:05-10:11]

questions. It must be frustrating to be in Congress, to be in the Senate right now with majorities that just won't do their job. I think about how all the founders of any party must be rolling in their grace that idea that one branch of government just wouldn't do their job with the natural friction that's supposed to be there regardless of party. What's it like living through that? It's a terrible moment. I mean, partly it's a terrible moment because the national Republican party in the Senate has become kind of a cult of personality. I mean, I wouldn't have said that to you eight years ago. I mean, there were an endless list almost of Republicans that I worked with here that were acted as people that were acting in the interest of their state and the interest of the country. And who, by the way, thought that Donald Trump wasn't even Republican in those days, much less, you know, somebody that should be in high office. And now that President Trump has won two elections. There are a lot of people here who actually feel like he's done the right thing and he's set a standard. And they're willing to benefit from the political cleptocracy that he and his family represent. And then on the Democratic side, I mean, as painful as it is for me to say this, I think the Democratic Party in Washington doesn't even understand that we were repudiated in the last election or why we were repudiated in the last election. And I think that leads us to pursue a set of choices that I think are not always the best when you're thinking about how to win an enduring majority in this country, in the Senate and obviously ultimately win the White House. We've got to do a lot better, I think, than we're doing from here. So you have a fascinating background. You've done a lot, whether it's with the legal system, whether it's an education that I know John's going to ask about. But I think one part of your background that is well-suited for a governorship is your work with the City of Denver, with your fellow Senator, former governor, John Hickenlooper. Tell us about that time, getting to work with your friend that you had helped get elected. It was great. I mean, John was a small business owner. He was owned a brewery in Denver and he set out to run for mayor and he had seven people or so who were better known than he was ahead of him. And he ultimately knocked each one off and became an incredibly successful mayor. Denver at that time had serious fiscal challenges and it had serious economic challenges. We were not growing our economy. We were not attractive, I don't think, to business at the time. And that showed up in the fiscal challenges that we were facing. And actually after the work with John, as you mentioned, I went to be superintendent of schools and again had to wrestle a really brutal financial picture into place to be able to go from being the lowest paying salaries for teachers when I took over to leading the metro area in around Denver. That required a lot of hard choices that are going to be in front of me if I am elected governor because Colorado is in really tough fiscal shape right now. Well, Senator John McColle here on the movement of public education if elected, how would you go about lifting up the public schools around Denver to get you competitive so those kids can't afford to stay to live in Denver? I think there are two big challenges. One is getting our teachers paid what they ought to be paid. That's been a challenge, you know, for decades because we're still running a system of paying teachers that was designed when we had a labor market that discriminated against women and said to women you can have two professional choices. One's being a nurse, one's being a teacher, we discriminate against women then and we paid teachers a ridiculously low wage then and we're still doing it. It's the legacy of that old system. We've got to find a way to deal with that. And then second question, I think it's such so critical. Our kids have got to be prepared when they're leaving high school to earn a living wage. Not just the minimum wage and frankly all over America, all over Colorado, kids aren't graduating with the skills to earn a living wage and that affects their earning power for their entire lives. I want kids to be propelled out of our high schools into the middle class just like the industrialized countries around the world were competing with but there's not a state in America can say that that is what they've accomplished for our kids and I hope that Colorado