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GARY EICHTEN: Online at minnesotapublicradio.org. We have some haze in the Twin Cities, 45 degrees for a temperature reading and weather service still forecasting a very, very pleasant high of 55 to 60 this afternoon. Tonight, there's a chance for some light rain with an overnight low of 35 degrees. And then tomorrow, really another nice day, not quite as warm as today but still very pleasant. Partly cloudy with a high of 50 degrees tomorrow.

A little cooler weather on Thursday with a high of 40 to 45. But Friday bounces back up to 50 degrees, so a pretty nice weather in the next little while. Today again, it should clear off by this afternoon. The haze should lift, and we can look for a high today of 55 to 60 degrees. Get out the suntan lotion. Be prepared.

KORVA COLEMAN: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Korva Coleman. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says lawmakers are going to try to get money back from global insurance company AIG. The firm has gotten billions of dollars of bailout money from the federal government. It's also paid millions of dollars to executives for bonuses. President Obama is calling on Congress to pass his budget request.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- This budget does not attempt to solve every problem or address every issue. Because of the massive deficit we inherited and the enormous costs of this financial crisis, we have made some tough choices that will cut our deficit in half by the end of my first term and reduce it by $2 trillion over the next decade.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

KORVA COLEMAN: Mr Obama's budget is more than $3.5 trillion. Republicans say it's too expensive. The president says lawmakers who oppose the budget should quickly offer constructive alternatives. He warns just saying no is not an acceptable economic policy.

The government says housing construction rose in February by in nearly every part of the country. NPR's Paul Brown reports.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Much of the February increase was in apartment construction, which tends to be more volatile than overall housing construction. Economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight says more important that February's housing starts are the numbers of permits for future construction, up by 3%, and in particular, permits for single family homes.

- That number jumped 11%, which is a surprise and improvement. And it's too early to tell whether it's the beginning of a trend, but it certainly is good news.

- Still, Newport characterized the overall February numbers as awful, saying they're simply an improvement over the worst construction figures in 60 years. Paul Brown, NPR News, Washington.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

KORVA COLEMAN: A former member of a 1970s radical group has been released from a California prison. Sara Jane Olson was paroled to Minnesota against the wishes of that state's governor, Steve Julian of member station KPCC reports.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty recently asked California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to order Olson to serve parole in California. The Los Angeles Police Officers' Union, which called Olson a domestic terrorist, made the same request, but Governor Schwarzenegger backed out of the process, allowing the state corrections department to choose. It chose Minnesota, where Olson raised a family.

In 2001, Olson pleaded guilty to planting a bomb, which never went off, under a Los Angeles Police car in 1975. She was then a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Known then as Kathleen Soliah, she also took part in a deadly bank robbery in Sacramento. She served seven years, half her sentence. Olson is now 62 years old. For NPR News, I'm Steve Julian in Los Angeles.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

KORVA COLEMAN: On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrials are up 77 points at 7294. The NASDAQ is up 27 points. It's at 1431. This is NPR.

- Support for news comes from GM developing green technologies like hybrids, electric cars, and hydrogen fuel cells. Details at gm.com/solutions.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: And good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Gary Eichten. Minnesota has a long, proud tradition of producing national leaders, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Harold Stassen.

Last night, the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement at Saint John's University invited two more of Minnesota's finest senior statesmen, national leaders to discuss their experiences in public life and offer some perspective on politics today.

Walter Mondale was there. He was the 42nd vice president of the United States, serving under then-President Jimmy Carter. He served, Mr. Mondale did, as a Minnesota US Senator. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 1984, and he was a US ambassador to Japan.

Meanwhile, Republican Dave Durenberger served in the US Senate for 16 years, where, among other things, he chaired the Select Committee on Intelligence and came to be known as Senator Health for his expertise on health care policy. He currently chairs the National Institute of Health Policy at Saint Thomas.

I was invited to moderate last night's event, which was held at the College of Saint Benedict, when the power went out at Saint John's, where it was originally scheduled to be held. Former Vice President Walter Mondale began by discussing whether the hope and optimism surrounding President Obama's election was misplaced.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- When Obama was elected, the nation was completely excited, thrilled, moved by a profound historic victory and by his leadership. And I think that's still the case. But now he is being tested by some really incredible challenges.

And all my lifetime, I've never seen a president confronted by as many fundamental, profound challenges in all at the same time as is President Obama. Washington is a town that's built for inertia. It is the slow walker's dream.

[LAUGHTER]

And we've got these compelling problems. We've got the slow procedures on the Hill. We've got a government that is virtually unpopulated yet.

Geithner at Treasury, the only confirmed official in the entire department. And that's true over much of the government. We're just getting started.

And so I think there's bound to be frustration. There is bound to be a gap between the excitement and the thrill of electing this remarkable new leader and all that it means, on the one hand, and the task of getting down and working the way you have to get big things done in Washington.

We have to be mature as Americans. It's not just thrills. These are tough, controversial, deep issues often challenging the system itself. We have a divided Senate with rules that make it difficult to get anything done without picking up members of the other party and I think still a divided nation in ways with some nasty disputes that have not been fully resolved.

And I think our system reflects that. So I'd say, let's have some patience and keep at it and get it done because America has always faced problems by using these institutions. And sooner or later, America has always gotten it done. And I'm optimistic that we'll do it this time. But it's going to be tough. It's going to take time.

[PLAYBACK ENDS]

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durenberger, do you think all that optimism and hope was misplaced?

DAVID DURENBERGER: No, not at all. And I was probably one who didn't sense that Obama had a chance. Probably a lot of other people who were in that boat. But I can still remember the first time that I got a little choked up listening to him speak, and that actually happened.

And I think it was early in January, after one of those surprise victories that may have been Iowa or something like that, just the way in which he spoke out to me. And then on February 5, it was the next time. And after that, I started calling older friends, some former senators included, around the country who are Republicans, and I said, what do you think of this guy?

And they said, well, it's a funny thing. I listened to him after that primary on February 5, and I got kind of choked up. So since I'm not a Democrat and I didn't get involved in Clinton versus whatever it is, I could afford the luxury of just being an American watching an incredible primary on the Democratic side.

Even we had a weird one. John McCain was not supposed to be the Republican. He is about as un-Republican as any of those candidates. So it was a year in which people were speaking in very, very different languages.

And so that may be why the rhetoric in this sense, as we characterize it, was so appealing. I have no doubt now but what the person behind the rhetoric is real, that he is the right person for the times, that the only problem we're going to face is the Congress isn't ready. The rest of our representatives are not ready for this kind of leadership. At the times that we overlapped in our service in the Senate, so I'm not going to try to attribute anything I say to what Fritz might have observed.

But there is this appearance from the outside that the Congress and the president are always like this. It's the separation of powers and a bunch of things like that. I found, in my service-- and I served in the Senate when there were four different presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans. And I found that when the problems got most complex or they got most challenging because of the decisions that had to be made were not necessarily-- didn't poll well with the public, that the Congress became very dependent on the president, very dependent on presidential leadership.

The Congress, of necessity, particularly the House, has to look two years ahead. There's another election. And the Senate has supposed luxury of looking six years ahead. But you don't know how dependent we have become in that body on public opinion.

And so what the president does in times when we're really challenged is he helps to set a course. He takes the first bullet all the time before it ever gets to one of us as members of the Congressional body. He takes the first bullet. And that's what this president is doing right now.

And it's a wonderful time as Americans to watch this process, but it's frustrating when whether they're Democrats or Republicans to hear the first reaction to some idea, the president has to say oh, we'll never-- I will never be able to do that or the charities will go ballistic or we can't do this or we can't do that.

Having said that, it's also unusual to have a member of the Senate, not since 1960, I guess, elected president of the United States. This guy knows how they're going to behave. And I think that in the end is going to make a big difference for all of us.

GARY EICHTEN: So we have a Republican here, a Democrat. How do folks in different parties cooperate with each other, compromise without selling out the basic principles that you believe in?

DAVID DURENBERGER: Well, it simply goes to why did you go there in the first place? I got there in an era in which-- the first letter I got congratulating me for being on the Finance Committee, which is the great powerful Finance Committee on which you also serve. The first letter I got was from Russell Long, who was a lifelong Democrat from Louisiana.

And what it did was trace this long relationship since 1803 between Minnesota. You probably got one of those too between letter between Minnesota and Wisconsin or Minnesota and Louisiana. And it occurred to me that I was either getting one of these letters that said, if you butter my bread, I'll butter yours or he it was-- the message was while we have constituents to represent in our electorate, we have the national interest waiting for our decisions. And that was always what happened in the finance committee, at least until recently.

It was the place in which the national interest on really tough, expensive issues was the way in which we made decisions. So if you focused on the-- everybody brings their belief system. What should the role of government be and all that sort of thing.

But if you're focusing on this larger, what am I here for? Or what did I get my degree over here with little one horse, two horse political science department compared to what it is today, what was I motivated? What was I taught about the role of public service?

It wasn't the goal. And get my way all the time or to have my ideology reflect my vote. So it isn't compromise. I mean, I don't know how many times I worked with the so-called most liberal Senator Teddy Kennedy, but I always knew how far I could take Teddy and how far my principal said I could go.

And so we didn't always agree, but he'd rather work with me because I had a defined set of principles in which I believed and that reflected a constituency that was much broader than Minnesota or myself. And I think there was a time when most people I think when most people who went there, that was their characteristic.

Today, it's harder to see that. And we can talk later about why, as a Republican it's become harder. So it isn't it really isn't compromising. It is. It is defining the common interest that you both have regardless of how far to the left or the right you may have come from.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Mondale, I want to put the same question to you, but in a slightly different context, because you were involved in some really heavy lifting on the Civil Rights legislation where it seemed, to the outsider anyway, that the lines were pretty clear that there wasn't a lot of room for cooperation or was there?

WALTER MONDALE: No, I think the history says the opposite. We passed a civil rights legislation only because we had a lot of Republicans who support us. They were called Lincoln Republicans and they actually believed it. And we had about-- and we had 22 Democrats who voted against all civil rights legislation and would never vote with us on any of it.

So we had to-- Humphrey used to say, America only gets big things done when the minority cooperates. And when we went after those, every one of them had bipartisan support. Every one of them had to pass with 18 or 20 Republicans or wouldn't have passed.

And we undid over 200 years of slavery and racism separately they got really nasty national situation and we did it because people worked together. So I think that's the history of good things that can happen when people work together. The president did get his stimulus bill. He got it because three senators from the Republican Party were listening to the principles that David was talking about and sat down and shaped the bill.

It wasn't exactly what Obama wanted. But that's the thing about the Senate. You need 60 votes to get a vote on the measure if they filibuster, which means you have to compromise to get it done. And the history of the Senate has been that's the place where the nation's differences start getting rounded off and we learn how to get together because it's the only way you can get the bill passed.

Its a function for which the Senate does not receive a lot of thanks, but I think it's essential. I think we're going to get most or all of these measures passed in one form or another, but it will be changed. But it will get done because there's enough people-- and I hope an increasing number of people-- in the Congress who understand that their principle.

If they pursue their political life by just sheer partisanship with no sense of what the importance of the issue is and how they can-- they're going to lose because I think the public sees very clearly now that we need a broader sense of public service.

GARY EICHTEN: Gentlemen, I said at the beginning and I meant it sincerely that you two are truly two of the finest public servants we have and ever have had. I'm wondering, why is it when you add Eugene McCarthy to this list and Hubert Humphrey, Harold Stassen-- he was a great national leader-- what the heck is going on here in Minnesota or what used to go on in Minnesota? That accounts for so many top flight national leaders coming from a rather inconsequential state in the big scheme of things. Mr. Mondale?

WALTER MONDALE: I was going to pass that land.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, we are not an inconsequential state.

[APPLAUSE]

I think we had what I called a high tide, a national consensus in America for a while. And I see some people out in the audience who are with me during those days. And I think the public decided that we had to do something about civil rights. We couldn't continue on that way.

A lot of the people that were being discriminated against had served in World War II and risked their lives for the country. How could you then say they had to go home and get behind a barrier and have limited lives? And I think even Southern senators, by and large, although they didn't vote that way, knew that this is something that had to happen.

And while we were doing that, we also removed discrimination against women. And look at what's happened in America since that law was passed, all the basic legislation for Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, student assistance, all the environmental legislation, we had a period there when we could get it done.

And I think it was-- there was a bipartisan belief that that's the things we needed to do. But I think we had a period of activism and then the public wanted to slow it down a little bit. We were going too fast. We made some mistakes and then it's tapered off. And I think we're getting ready for another high tide here.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durenberger?

DAVID DURENBERGER: Yeah, let me phrase it this way because so many people would tell me while he was still living that I hardly ever agree with Paul Wellstone, but I'm likely to vote for him because at least I know he knows where he stands. And that's Minnesota. I think that's Minnesota.

As we can see with whether you're more conservative or more liberal or whatever the case may be, the payoff with most Minnesotans or certainly a majority of Minnesotans, both parties comes with whether or not you're representing their best interests, whether in particular agree with that or not.

And do you do that consistently? Can you always be found standing in a certain place? And that I think is what is-- will be over time? When we look back on various of the people, that old law that will be the most distinguishing feature of Minnesota leadership.

And that's now the challenge, of course, for us in Minnesota is that population shifts. The population of the nation is shifting to the South. We are disadvantaged for a lot of reasons, a lot of Northern states.

And there are people that are taking advantage of that probably in both of our parties so that the person who is an independent the person who is conservative independent or Liberal Independent, whatever you may want to call it in traditional terms, is not valued in a current environment because that's been replaced by some other set of so-called values, often called the base of the party, if you will.

And you've got to have a checklist. Now, unless you check off all five of these boxes, there's no way you're going to get on the ballot as whatever it may be. And that has weakened-- in my view, that is what has weakened the really strong tradition of national policy leadership by Minnesotans.

GARY EICHTEN: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you, Senator Durenberger, as the resident health care expert, and you really are, I mean, all kidding aside, President Obama says he wants to have a health care package put together and passed by the end of the year. Is that possible after, what? 60 years of presidents talking about such a thing and not a whole lot happening?

DAVID DURENBERGER: Yeah, and to be brief about it, I think a lot of it depends on him because his ability is to get all of us much more involved than we have been in the past. And that is the key. The second thing is, what do you mean by legislation passed?

I mean, there's no way in God's green Earth Anybody in the Congress today-- I mean, the Congress as an entity or the Congress. Plus, the president-- can come up with a piece of legislation by August one or December 1. It's going to solve all of our problems.

So yes, there will be legislation passed. There will be a clearer identification of the problem than we have today. There will be commitments made, but we are not going to change the system overnight by our or by the passage of one piece of legislation.

This is going to happen over his term. And the key will be, does he stay committed to getting the job done, to the goals that he has set up there like we're going to cut the cost by $2,500 per family, some of those kinds of things? He stays committed to that, and he's going to have a whole lot of people committed to him.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Mondale, having served in both the executive and legislative branches, do you see a shift back to more congressional Congress playing a bigger role in policy-making than the executive? The Bush administration, I think it's fair to say, made a real effort to try to beef up the executive power.

SEAM

WALTER MONDALE: I think that's fair.

[LAUGHING]

The constitutional system is one of shared power. Their nightmare was that one branch would dominate the other. And as they said in The Federalist Papers, the idea here is to pit ambition against ambition, to have the executive branch pushing, to have the Congress push, and then to have the courts.

And so there will always be tension between the executive and the legislative branches. And sometimes, the power moves a little bit one way or another way. And I think during the onset of the Iraqi war, power really moved toward the executive branch.

And Bush and the others were really pressing that to the point that I was very concerned about it. But I think it's starting to equalize again. You need a strong president.

You need presidential leadership. You need them to shape and help suggest the outlines. You need them to shape a budget. It's not necessarily what the Congress will accept. But it starts the game.

And of course, you need a very strong Congress that has good leadership, that shapes good legislation, that is responsible, and tries to work things out that the nation must have worked out. And so what I'm hoping for is a balance of equally engaged departments that works the way the founders intended. And I think you'll find that that's how it's going to work out, although it's a little early yet. And we'll see.

What do you think, Senator Durenberger? You were saying earlier you thought it's important to the Congress to have a president to lead and actually to take the first bullet, I think is the way you put it. Do you see the shift, the power shift back toward the Congress? Or will we remain with a pretty strong executive? President Obama has come out with a pretty sweeping program, touching on virtually every element of American life.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Well, let's start with the fact that we've never been through anything like we're going through in our lifetimes. There isn't a person in this room that has really lived, at least as an adult, through the kind of times we're living through now. I mean, we don't know how many people are affected by it. We don't know how seriously they're affected by it. But we know that everybody is, in fact, affected by this to some degree.

America will never be the same again. The economy will never be the same again. Our lives will change. Institutions like this are going to have to change, believe it or not.

The health care system is going to have to change. Housing policy will have to change. We'll need a national energy policy if we want to have a national security policy. I mean, a whole lot of things have been just sort of like kicking the can down the road for a long period of time until this happened.

And so you can't get out of this one by congressional action. That is just not going to happen. But the future will be shaped by the kind of partnership that the president and the Congress are going to develop. And that will be tested through this very difficult period of time.

But in the end, since we only have one president at a time, the president is going to really shape the next phase or the evolution of this economy and of this country. And it's at that point that you start digging deeper into the qualities that brought these people to the Senate in the first place and to the leadership and things like that. And when you start getting into the health care issue, it's going to be bipartisan. No matter what some of the ideologues may say, it has to be bipartisan.

You get into education reform. You have a president, a Democratic president, who's willing to take on the teachers union and talk about choice and education. Thank God. So that's going to change.

And I just think it's going to take us some period of time of stopping to watch. Don't stop watching the stock market every day and watching your retirement savings or your whatever it is, depending on that's my age.

SPEAKER 1: Are there retirement savings, Senator Durenberger?

[LAUGHING]

DAVID DURENBERGER: So that's why I-- we have not probably seen the best of either institution, the presidency, or the Congress yet. But by the end of this year, I think we will begin to see it much better than we have today.

SPEAKER: Question from a student for you, Mr. Mondale. As a long time advocate of international cooperation, what can the current administration do to foster or to restore the image of the United States abroad?

WALTER MONDALE: That's a very good question. And I think that it's right at the top of Obama's agenda. For some years we've been-- this is a tough word, but almost contemptuous of international opinion, which is surprising. Because when our nation was founded, we said we were going to be a new kind of nation with a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

But for a while, it's as though we were it. And we could push the world around. We would have alliances. But they would be of the willing, those who would join us.

And I think the self-respect, being treated as equals and partners, is an indispensable element of any effective foreign policy. And it's always been a bipartisan concept, Republicans and Democrats, until this last go around. And there's damage done in the world.

If you look at the Pew polls and so on, at one point, something like 85% of opinion was against us. Even in our friendly nations, in democracies, people were getting elected by running against the United States. And so we have to get back or forward to the traditional idea of respectful relationships with as much of the world as possible.

When Obama said, we will shake your hand if your fist isn't clenched, I think that's a good metaphor for how we should-- a lot of these countries-- I don't say it's going to be easy.

So you say we can't get an Israeli-Palestine peace. That may be true. But I'd like to see America trying to get an Israeli-Palestine peace. You say we can't or we can't get along with the Iranians. They've got this miserable background and radicals. Well, let's try and see what we can do.

We got along with the Soviet Union. And we at least negotiated with them. We negotiated with China. We've negotiated with a lot of people that don't fit our ideas of what the world should be.

And I think in this dangerous world, the United States has to seek new friendships, new relationships, more respect. And I think that the way Obama has begun by sending Dick Holbrooke and these other top people to work on the toughest problems-- and many of them are really tough and really dangerous-- hold some hope that this new attitude will gain support around the world.

We sure better get at it. Senator Durenberger, how do you see this? I remember President Bush, right before he was leaving office, said that he was asked a question about this, basically the same question. He said, no, America's standing in the world is fine. The only people who are upset with us are a few of the elites and people who are otherwise against us under any circumstance and that America has never been stronger in the world, never been more respected in the world. What's your take on this?

DAVID DURENBERGER: I'd rather not comment on that because--

[LAUGHING]

-- I don't know whether you're making it up or if he really said it. But--

[LAUGHING]

--I

SPEAKER: I just report things.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Yeah. I think it's fair to say that, when the history of this period is written, it's not all that one sided. Frankly, I think 9/11 threw him for a loop. And that threw all the cards over in the national security apparatus and the Department of Defense and the unnamed vice president and the unnamed secretary of defense and things like that.

And the relational side with the Foreign Relations, the Department of State, a lot of economic relations, a lot of other things that we were making a lot of progress on got lost. And its leaders, starting with Colin Powell and ending with Condoleezza Rice, both of them trying to expand the role, the influence, the better American side of foreign relations, which comes through our embassies, through various liaisons, and so forth-- and I think both of them, as secretaries of state-- history will write that they tried their professional and personal best against this other establishment, however they're characterized.

But I characterize them as the national security establishment, which used the 11th of September of 2001 as an excuse for doing a whole lot of things that they wanted somebody to do a long time before this. And then they got stuck with no oversight by the Republican Congress and no real check and balance and then putting down journalism, that sort of thing.

I mean, the checks that should have been there through the-- we never finished the job in Afghanistan before we went to go after to clean up the job that George Bush the 41st didn't get done in Iraq, sort of stuff. That, I think, has marred a whole lot of other good people, good efforts inside the Bush administration.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durenberger, here's an audience question for you. What was it that Obama said in that post-primary speech that choked you up?

DAVID DURENBERGER: It's the way in which he presented, not just, well, everybody can campaign on Washington has to change and all the rest of that sort of thing. It's the way in which he spoke about, we have to change. We, not just Americans or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He was all of us.

And if you've ever served, as the two of us have served in the wee chamber, so to speak, where you bring yourself as well as your constituency and so forth, you know that the world we've been living in wasn't going to last. At the rate we were spending money we didn't have, and lack of accountability, lack of responsibility, a whole lot of it, this just wasn't going to last. The nothing down forever to pay and then securitized debt, all dah-da-da-da.

It wasn't going to last. And we knew it. A lot of us knew it. And it was that that we, I think, that more than anything else, was appealing to me in the way in which he presented his cause for president.

GARY EICHTEN: People who are in politics, public servants, are not always respected by the people they're representing. And somebody suggested that I ask you, gentlemen, what is it that you got out of serving a public service? Given all the slings and arrows you suffer, what good in your-- personally came from serving? Mr. Mondale?

WALTER MONDALE: I bet I got the same answer David has. I love public life. Man, oh, man. I never left public life willingly.

[LAUGHTER]

Public helped me out the door. But you can be in the issues. You can change lives. You can listen to people that otherwise wouldn't be heard. You've got real power in the Senate, at least that's where we were. And the people you meet, the people you work with, the people that become engaged in reform and in improving life, and in the trying to make a more decent society, it's wonderful to be around people like that. And so, I'm really grateful that somehow I got into public life. And I bet you are too, David.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Right. And I'll just use a story to illustrate one part of what you said. It was the time when Jim Jeffords, who was a colleague of mine in the Senate, decided that he was going to switch from being a Republican to being an independent. And that was at a time that through the whole Senate, from the Republicans to the Democrats, in I think 2002 or something like that.

And I just happened to be in Washington the day that took place. And I went to his office, and I asked if I could see Jim, and she, within 10 seconds, I was in to see Jim. And I said, boy, that was quick. How'd that happen? And he said, there isn't another Republican in this country that'll speak to me.

[LAUGHTER]

They made a move, his desk, the whole schmuck. He was like, boom. So I said, Jim, let me tell you that I could never have done what you did. I've always respected you as being a man of independence. But I read that you were unhappy because the Bush administration put Judd Gregg on your tail in the committee and wouldn't let you really run the committee, and stuff like that. This is inside baseball stuff.

Or I read that they weren't supporting some education bill that you favored, and so forth. And I'm here to tell you just one thing, because I've now been out at that point for eight years, and I'm here to tell you that you can do all the education, you can do all the healthcare, you can pass all the bills you want, that's not what people are going to remember.

What everybody will remember is the one relationship that was built between them and you over a member of their family who was in the military and was injured and couldn't have their injury taken care of, or somebody whose passport you got for them at the last second, or just that.

And then not a week goes by, and I'll bet you in both of our lives, but what somebody doesn't come up and introduce themselves and say, I've waited X number of years to be able to meet you and tell you thank you for something you did. You brought my-- you connected me with an orphan in Romania, or you helped get us out of Romania. I think this is what you were saying too. That's the one connection you cannot have in any other place in this country.

GARY EICHTEN: Mr. Mondale, what did you want to be when you were growing up?

[LAUGHTER]

Besides, you were a hotshot halfback, weren't you?

WALTER MONDALE: I was.

[LAUGHTER]

Oh, you got to explain what a halfback is now.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Yeah. What is it? Yeah.

WALTER MONDALE: Oh. I grew up in-- my dad was a minister. We grew up in small towns. You've all been in them. Elmore, Heron Lake, Salon. And I guess I didn't know what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a football player for a while. Then I went to Macalester, and I went out for the first scrimmage, and I turned around and took up debate.

[LAUGHTER]

Then I got hooked in with Hubert Humphrey, and then with Gene McCarthy, who got elected, when I was at Macalester, to Congress. And it never stopped. I just stayed in that the rest of my adult career.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durenberger, the young Senator Durenberger, pre-Senator Durenberger, what did you want to be?

DAVID DURENBERGER: Well, this is true when I was young. And I it's now true on reflection. I think I always wanted to be a priest. The politics came to me much, I guess, much later and more by association. In my case, it was with Harold LeVander, when he was governor and I was his law partner, and he asked me to be his chief of staff. And it was just like, this is how the things fall in place. And when I was asked to be a statewide candidate, I wanted to be a governor because I'd never been to the Senate. What's a senator? I didn't even know. I mean.

So Hubert passed, and Muriel decided she didn't want to run for re-election. And Rudy Boschwitz said, hey, Dave, why don't you run for the Senate? And I said, you've got to be kidding, and ended up 43 points behind Don Frazier. And then Don Frazier never made it through the primary. And the guy that beat him, Bob Short, knew that if he were lucky enough to win that primary, he wasn't going to beat me, even though I was like--

And it turned out the next morning, every one of your old friends came trooping over to my campaign office and said, where do we sign up? And so how can you-- you can't design that into your life. You can't design that into a plan, or anything like that. It's just the way that the Lord decides he's going to use you.

GARY EICHTEN: A question a little closer to home here, having to do with the state of Minnesota. As you gentlemen well know, some of the measurements whereby the states are compared indicate Minnesota has slipped a fair amount in the last while. Does that mean that Minnesota has actually slipped, that it's lost its edge? Or is this just a statistical anomaly?

WALTER MONDALE: I think that we are losing some altitude. I don't think it's a crisis yet, but all the measurements of the quality of our schools, other measurements that judge how well a state is doing, I think we're still a wonderful state. But I think we've allowed the public side to slip. Our schools are not as good as they were. Many of them are not as good as they must be, as has been said by many.

Now is the time when our schools have to be better than ever, because the world that young Minnesotans are going to join is much more demanding than ever before. The economy demands it, and so on. And some of this has to be done in our private lives, in our business life, and so on.

But some of it also needs to be done together through government to make our educational system work, to make transportation work, to have a handsome and healthy environment, all the things that go into a decent life, to make it possible for young Minnesotans to go on to college without bankrupting the parents. There's a lot of things here that we used to do, in my opinion, better than we're doing it now.

And I think one of the reasons is that we allowed this idea that government always does things poorly. That if you have a choice, to do it in the private sector is always better than to use government. Almost anything government does stumbled.

I remember sitting on the platform at the inaugural ceremonies that swore in President Reagan, and he said, government is the problem. And I think for a good 20 years or more, Americans increasingly believed that was the case. And we've begin to back away from things that we-- I think, have to be done, if it's going to be done, by government. We have to make government work well.

But I think it's not an ideological distinction about where government is needed. I think it's a practical distinction. Lincoln once said, government helps us do what must be done, what we cannot do as well or at all by ourselves. In other words, it's a practical thing. If something needs to be done and it's not being done adequately and government is the only way that you can get it done, then use government and make certain that it works well.

And I think that-- if I said this here 15 years ago, a lot of people would say there's an old socialist talking up there. But I think now we know that part of America's answer has to be the responsible and careful use of government.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durenberger.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Yeah, I'll add two dimensions to that. One, if you look at the realities, and I think both of us have watched them over the period of our lifetimes, the other thing that's seriously slipped in Minnesota is our business leadership and our economic power. Try to find the major companies in Minnesota who are run by people who are born and raised in Minnesota or even living in Minnesota.

The latest is the big red umbrella, which is started floating out of St. Paul a few years ago and ended up in New York and things like that. But we, both of us, benefited from the involvement of the leadership of this business community in this state, not just in the Twin Cities, but the entire state, in improving the performance of government and playing a role in caring part of the load.

The second one is even more important. It is a role of government, and it's the federalism argument. The South's getting by with murder. The South is-- takes in twice as much money as the northern states do by-- in proportion to the-- in the amount of taxes that gets spent in this part of the country.

And if you look-- at just take the insurance coverage, you just take low-income insurance coverage. Minnesota raises taxes on all of us, on all of our doctors, on all of our hospitals so that we can get as close to full the insured coverage as we possibly can, we tax ourselves. Arizona does not. Texas does not. You can walk right across the Southern United States, and you will find 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30% uninsured in those states.

Now, there's an obligation of the national government to provide the resources that we need as a nation so that all Americans, regardless of where they live, have access to health care. But that means some trade-offs at the federal level. And my favorite is always the highway bill. We spend $0.18 on the gas tax to Washington, DC, so Jim Oberstar can decide where to build highways and things like that. And then, if one of our bridges goes down, we don't know whether to hold Jim responsible or to hold Pawlenty responsible, or whatever.

So my point being, since, I think, before Reagan, we always had presidents who worked with governors to try to figure out what is an appropriate relationship between the states and the national government. Since 1982, nobody's bothered sorting that one out.

GARY EICHTEN: How about America have-- our best days behind the nation? Is this, like, for example, the 21st century, the century of China's century? That's a commonly heard theory.

WALTER MONDALE: I think America has a great future, but we have a challenged future. There are other countries that are growing and taking the place at the table of the big powers. China, that you mentioned, is one of them. Throughout Asia, nations are gaining economic momentum. But we are still, I believe, the indispensable nation.

We are the largest, most prosperous, democratic, educationally advanced, stable, powerful nation in the world. So I think we've got a great future, but we've got to be careful to make certain that America provides the kind of responsible, thoughtful, respectful leadership that can make the difference.

GARY EICHTEN: Senator Durrenberger.

DAVID DURENBERGER: Whether you put it in the terms of best days are ahead or behind, here's the reality, and this is the dimension Fritz illustrated with Japan as well. We are by far the largest country in the world, particularly one with a representative democracy that does not have a common gene pool. Just think about that for a while. I mean, the Japanese have one gene pool, and you want to reinvent something in hard times, there's only one way to do it. It's whatever happens to be the Japanese way of doing it.

We have 1,000 flowers blossoming at all times, and there's more coming into this country all the time from all over this world. I mean, we are a nation of immigrants, and we're a nation of immigrants, and we're a nation of immigrants. We keep being a nation of immigrants. And everybody comes with their ideas. And they come with their hopes and dreams. And they come with their entrepreneurship and their family, this.

And they got all kinds of things to offer us as a nation. So we can't run out of gas in this country. It is impossible. And that's why, I think, this-- even the suggestion that the best days and all the rest, that sort of thing, that's why I always think the best days are going to be ahead, because that is the nature of this country.

WALTER MONDALE: Can I add one thing? Just building on David's point. Although we've often stumbled at it. And we've got some black pages in our history book, America has opened its doors to its fellow citizens. And we've ended the gender dispute that used to tear America apart.

We don't say we've ended it, but we've made enormous progress on the racial separation that we used to have. We have a president of the United States that represents that. You go down to St. Paul, and you see monks and all sorts of people in the legislature, on the school boards.

America has, when it's at its best, the ability to rise above racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions and see the common possibilities in humanity that each of us bears. I think that's what our faith talks to us about. But a lot of countries stumble and fall apart because they allow suspicion and hatred about others to tear them apart. That hasn't happened in America. And I think we have a bright future, as long as we put that right up front as our most important principle.

GARY EICHTEN: Gentlemen, we don't have a lot of time left. But I wanted to ask each of you. You both served in the Senate. What makes a great senator?

[LAUGHTER]

WALTER MONDALE: There he is.

[LAUGHTER]

GARY EICHTEN: They're pointing at each other, for those of you listening on the radio. Senator Durenberger, you want to go first?

DAVID DURENBERGER: It places like this. I mean, to be frank about it. I mean, each of us is the product of our environment, and that's a combination of the family. It's the community in which you were raised, and it's the people that educated you from there. It's really the environment that produces people. John Fritz was on the way up, that I got there two months early, and there was no session in the Senate. And so I went around to meet people. And so, I went over to, say, meet Scoop Jackson. And Scoop Jackson told me about how he represented the same kind of people I did, but they were smarter. I mean, they were--

[LAUGHTER]

They were all Scandinavians of one kind or another, but they kept going. They didn't stop in Minnesota. They just kept going to Washington State. But he wanted to talk about values and about the values that he learned from the people that he represented.

And I think in the end, if you want to see the difference between the weak ones and the strong ones, it's those who carry a lifetime of experience, I mean, into the Senate. And my buddy Al Simpson used to say, if you don't know what you're doing by the time you get to the Senate, you ain't going to learn it here. So that's probably what I would characterize as.

GARY EICHTEN: Walter Mondale?

WALTER MONDALE: Well, I agree with that. I would add one other element to what is required of a good senator, and that is the spirit of compromise. When I got to the Senate, I thought, in America in terms of everything I learned in Minnesota. But after a while, you realize there's other states and other people with other traditions and other histories and other needs, and that you had to listen as well as talk. You had to try to internalize that, try to understand the other person's problems before you could deal effectively with your own problems.

And I think the Senate at its best, over 200 and some years, and it's had some worst years, has been the institution above all that sort of held America together because people had to compromise. They had to bend even though they didn't want to bend. Except for the Civil War, when it broke down. We took on industrialization.

We took on the big changes that have occurred in America, all the changes in the ethnic makeup of America, all the civil rights legislation, all of those things that have happened has occurred in a Senate that sort of tussled and struggled and listened and compromised and checked and moved and so on. And the senators that won't play that game, you need to be strong, but you also need to try to make it work some way by reaching across differences and finding common ground. I think that's the Senate at its best.

GARY EICHTEN: Back to the presidency, where we began, and President Obama, specifically, the columnist David Brooks said back in January, about the time of the inauguration, that by next January, a year into his presidency, Barack Obama will either be a great president or a broken president, talking about all the challenges that he faces. You agree with that assessment? Does he have about a year to do it or not?

DAVID DURENBERGER: I think David Brooks had a bad night before he wrote that.

[LAUGHTER]

There's a third alternative. He'll have a tough four years, but he'll do very well.

WALTER MONDALE: That's a good way to put it. I agree with you.

GARY EICHTEN: Former US Senator Dave Durenberger and former Vice President Walter Mondale, the two senior statesmen, were the featured guests last night at the College of Saint Benedict in an event sponsored by the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement, based at St. John's University.

Walter Mondale, of course, was the 42nd Vice President of the United States. He also represented Minnesota in the US Senate. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for president in 1984, and he served as US ambassador to Japan. Republican Dave Durenberger served in the US Senate for 16 years, where he was the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence and was the go-to guy on health care policy. He's currently a senior health policy fellow at the University of St. Thomas.

I personally would like to thank the McCarthy Center for allowing me to moderate last night's discussion. And we should note, not surprisingly, the big audience gave Vice President Mondale and Senator Durenberger a standing ovation at the end of last night's event. This will be archived on our website minnesotapublicradio.org. Hope you can join us for midday tomorrow. I'm Gary Eichten.

Support for this program comes from the Women's Foundation of Minnesota, a community foundation growing equality for women and girls through philanthropy, grant-making, research, and advocacy. When women and girls move forward, the world moves with them. wfmn.org.

SPEAKER 2: Programming is supported by Minnesota Public Radio's educational sponsors, together educating and enlightening listeners and students for generations. One of the sponsors we'd like to thank is the College of St. Benedict.

GARY EICHTEN: This is Minnesota Public Radio news, 91.1 KNRW St. Paul, Minneapolis. We're streaming online at minnesotapublicradio.org. We have a cloudy sky up to 46 degrees now. And the Weather Service is still sticking with its earlier forecast. Possible high today of 55 to 60 degrees. Tonight, some light rain is possible in the Twin Cities, with an overnight low of 35 degrees. Tomorrow, cooler than today, but still pretty mild. Partly cloudy with a high temperature of 50 degrees.

Thursday, 40 to 45. And then on Friday, first day of spring, it warms back up to 50 degrees with a partly cloudy sky. So we should kick off spring on a nice note. Weekend forecast, by the way, talks about maybe a little rain Saturday and Sunday, with a high temperature both days of 50 to 55 degrees. Again, 55 to 60 today for a high with a partly cloudy sky.