Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, as we continue our conversation at the intersection of faith and public life.

I would say if you can’t get an invitation to the White House, bring the White House to you, and the White House is sitting before us today. We’ve done just exactly that in welcoming today Melody Barnes, who spends her days at that building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where so much of American history goes on.

In case you haven’t heard, there are few things on the agenda in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a few small things like a recession, and health care reform and environmental issues, and education, and immigration, and civil rights, and poverty and housing, and a few others: all a to-do list for Melody Barnes to be working on. I can’t believe you can take time out to come talk to us today.

President Obama’s chief domestic policy advisor and director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, Melody helps create and focus the administration’s approach to those issues and many more. Prior to coming to the White House, Melody was executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress where she started their faith and policy programs, something I want to talk a bit about and before that she was chief counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, among a number of other legislative appointments. Melody, it is wonderful to have you here today.

Melody Barnes: It’s a pleasure to be here. And typically on a Sunday morning, I’m in church, and sometimes I have to do morning talk shows, so it’s wonderful to be able to blend the two together. So thank you for inviting me. (laughter)

Lloyd: We’re trying to provide that twofer here week by week…

Well, the headlines this morning, as we open up the newspapers, were filled with something that’s been very high on the domestic agenda of President Obama. Just for starters I want to touch on a couple of the headlines of the week but then get back into your long-term career and what you’ve been thinking about. But just a quick word here in this sacred space, where the life of prayer for the well-being of all people has been so much of what we think about: a quick word on why the health care reform piece of work has been so dominant and so at the top of the president’s agenda, and why you’re spending so much time on it.

Barnes: Sure, and obviously this has been, and the president has talked about the fact that this is his number one domestic policy agenda, getting health reform done. And that comes from, I think, a couple of different places. One, we recognize that to be an issue that confronts people as they sit around their kitchen tables every day. It’s something that worries people as they watch their health care costs go up, they right now are feeling immense fiscal and economic insecurity, that these are the issues that grind away at people and undermine their ability to provide security and safety for their families and we know we have to address that for those reasons. But also because of its importance to people as we’re thinking about our national economy and we’re thinking about the fiscal security of the United States of America.

So all of those are reasons that this is important to the president but also because, and he has said this, it is a deeply moral issue. How can we, given the opportunities that exist in the United States of America, live comfortably in a society where so many people are suffering and feeling such insecurity—both those who have health care insurance right now as well as those who don’t.

We simply can’t live with that. It’s wrong. And I think it’s borne out by the fact that a couple of months ago, the president did telephone call and extended himself to faith leaders to have a conversation about health care reform. And we do these calls sometimes and there may be eight hundred people, or there may be a thousand people, 1500 people in a call.

There were 140,000 people on this phone call. This is something that people recognize has to happen. I know when I traveled around the country during the campaign, it was the number one question that people asked me about, and people would come up to me and I could see the fear and the hope in their eyes, and they would tell me their stories.

And I met a woman who had cancer in her voice box , and she talked about going and receiving treatment, but then not being able to complete the payments but needing further treatment, and what that meant to her. Another woman who talked to me about losing her job and losing her health care and she now has a job and has that kind of security, but she’s worried about that for other people.

Another woman who was discharged from, I think it was the Air Force, because of medical disabilities, and she would go out everyday and work and talk to people because she believe that this was the root to making sure that we can have health care reform for this country; and then she would have to rest during the week because of the immense pain she was in because of her own disabilities.

So we recognize that this is an issue that permeates everyone’s life, both on a kitchen-table level as well as on a national level, and it’s a deeply moral issue and that’s why it’s so important.

Lloyd: And so it is really been at the top, certainly, of the domestic agenda. You all have to set a lot of things at least, temporarily aside. Are you a part of that adjudicating process or that focusing process? Because all these issues must come to you on their way to the president.

Barnes: Absolutely. One of the things that I learned walking into the White House door—and I worked in the House of the Representatives and as you said in the Senate, where I’ve worked for people, like Senator Kennedy, who are very, very ambitious and had a clear sense of goals on how we were going to get things done.

But the White House just puts that on an altogether different level because, as you said, we have a landscape of issues that we have to confront every day. And you can walk in the door knowing what you want to accomplish and never quite get to that because of what comes in the door that you didn’t expect.

So we work on several levels, and certainly I work with my colleagues, the head of the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, legislative affairs, our Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and others, to try and work through issues and make decisions and then we get to a point where the decision is so complex, so critical, there may be a difference of opinions among advisors that we then have to tee it up for the president.

Lloyd: And then in the middle of this very intense push of the past week, the rest of the world didn’t stop so that you could do this. There happened to be a lot of things going on including the tragedy at Fort Hood in Texas, having to do with the army psychiatrist who is Muslim, and they’re still teasing out the motives, but certainly his feelings about the war and his own life as a Muslim in this country seem to have been at play in that. Is that something you weigh into as well? Because it seems to touch on some of the ways faith is being lived out and the way faith gets involved in our public life, in our military life, and the kinds of society we’re trying to create. Has that percolated up as well last week for you?

Barnes: This is an issue that all of us are concerned about. First of all it was such a profound tragedy, the loss of life and the injury that occurred there and obviously, someone who is very, very deeply disturbed. So we feel that on a very human and very personal level.

At the same time in my office, we have the Office of Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships, and the president maintained that office and slightly reformed that office from past administrations, because we believe that it’s important to reach out to the faith community, to work with the diverse community, and to connect on the issues that are so prevalent in public life.

I think in the weeks and days ahead, we will certainly reaching out to Americans of all faith as we address, and as we look at and better understand what happened in Fort Hood. The president and the first lady will be traveling there as we better understand what happened there, so that we can address these issues and make sure that something like this is much less likely to ever happen again.

Lloyd: You’ve worked in much of your public life, right at this intersection of faith and policy. Certainly, for the six years or so, you were at the Center for American Progress, you helped found something called “The Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative.” Tell us about how and why you began putting faith and public policy together, and why that’s been such a major part of your whole career?

Barnes: Sure. As I mentioned I worked both in the House and in the Senate for many years, and one of the things that I started to see was what I thought was the false debate about the role of, or the connection between, the progressive community and the faith community.

And I saw faith being used I think sometimes as a sword and as a shield to shape public policy and public debate, and many times with progressives feelings as though they were pushed back on their heels.

And that was just really inconsistent with the way that I grew up. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I grew up in the Baptist Church, and certainly that prophetic faith voice had always been very important to me, and the issues of social justice very heavily intertwined with my own faith experience, and in my own experience as someone who considers herself to be a progressive.

So watching that when I left the Senate and I went to the Center for American Progress, I remember one day all the senior fellows were seated around a table and John Podesta, who’s the head of the center, said to all of us, “What do you want to work on?”

And I said I would really love to help start a conversation, a broader public conversation—sitting at an organization that is a policy organization and not religiously affiliated—about the role of religion in the progressive community and to reassert the fact that being progressive doesn’t mean that you are anti-religious.

In fact, historically, you can see the great movements in American history where religion and progressivism was so heavily intertwined. And I think the debate that we’re having what was taking place then was ahistorical, and not factual, and clouding the policy conversation in inappropriate way. So that what’s led me to start that initiative and bring faith leaders and non-faith leaders to the center, and what eventually led to the creation of a new organization that’s now spun out and actively part of these national debates.

Lloyd: I wonder if there is actually a structural difference we could describe between the ways faith and public life are lived out, say, when the current Democrat is president, and the way it was lived out say, in the last administration? Because a lot of hue and cry over the last few years was there’s too much mixing of faith and politics, that we’re a secular society by large, we need to keep the faith out of it and just stick to the common good.

Now you’ve come in and you’ve spent and important part of your life blending those two back together. Do you see the blending is happening in a way that’s structurally different from the way it was before, in a way that avoids some of the pitfalls that seem to have been in place before? Or is it just a matter that when one party is in power it mixes it’s faith with its current politics, and when another party is in power it mixes his faith with his own politics?

Barnes: Well, a couple of things. I think when we talk about that blending, for us—and the president has talked about it, I’ve talked about it over the last several years—that we approach all of these on the foundation of the fact that we live in a constitutional democracy. And this conversation in the public square has to happen within those parameters. So it means that when people of faith come to the public square we can be—I’ll speak for myself—religiously motivated. My concerns about people without health care can be religiously motivated, but when I step into the public square I have to make an argument, and I have to convince people of my position not based on religious beliefs but because of their importance to the common good, because… for good policy reasons.

But at the same time I believe it’s important to have those voices in the public square because we do live in a big tent, and it’s important to bring everyone in American society—and certainly so many people in American culture believe that religion is an important part of their life—to bring them into the conversation but again to do it based on those parameters.

I also think it’s important because as you know, and I’m sure there are many people in the audience who lived this, people of faith are so active on the ground in providing services and working with people as they deal with their troubles and concerns of their day-to-day lives. So there’s an expertise that exists in the community that’s relevant to a larger policy conversation. You know, as I’ve worked on immigration issues over the years, or health care issues, we were talking about people who are working with immigrants and refugees, people who are providing critical services to people as they’re struggling with their health care concerns, that’s important to know as we are having a broader policy conversation.

Lloyd: And so when, for example, the president reaches out on one of these phone calls or the… I’m forgetting the name of it, but the Joshua Dubois’s organization, faith-based neighborhood organization, is that inviting the churches to be a part of generating the political will on the ground? Is it seeking counsel in the shaping on where to go? What are you asking of the faith community in those times?

Barnes: Right, and there’s so many wonderful organizations that are doing great work both on the state and on the national level in fact this morning, I received an email from a person at an organization called PICO, and they have been at the heart of this health care debate. So it’s providing information to people… I know over the last several months as we’ve been having this debate around health care, as we’re talking about immigration and other issues, it’s really complex. So making sure that people have access to information about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, as they in turn go out and they work in their communities to build support for these issues.

Lloyd: Let’s step back a minute and hear a little bit about how you got to where you are, especially in your coming to this place of being such a major former of domestic policy with the president, but also bringing with it this very profound sense of faith. Could you tell us just a little bit about your background, and particularly your faith formation along the way, and how it is that you have been so clear about wanted to carry that through in your professional life?

Barnes: Sure. Well, as I mentioned, I grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and faith was certainly an important part of my youth and growing up, and it was important to my parents. I have a small Bible that my parents gave to me on the day that I was christened, so that was June 21st, 1964. I’m doing this a little bit by memory; I haven’t looked at that page in awhile, but the inscription that they wrote and signed to me that day was something to the effect, “To our beloved daughter Melody on the day of her dedication to Christ, and may she, by the life she leads, be a beautiful Melody.” And that charge—

Lloyd: It’s beautiful, by the way.

Barnes: And that charge—and again, really I’m not making this up, I haven’t looked at that very recently but obviously it’s something that is a part of, I think, the fabric of who I am or I hope it is. So that’s always been at the core for me.

How do you lead your life in a way that is consistent with the principles and the values embodied in my religious experience? I think, as a child, we went to church and that was part of my life and part of my community; but becoming a young adult, I took it on in a different way. It wasn’t just that the family goes to church.

It becomes your choice and your question. And again my experience led me to continue that faith journey. And moving to Washington and becoming an active member of a church here ultimately, I changed my denomination to the United Church of Christ and became very, very heavily involved in my church experience in that church because I believe in the social justice mission there; because I believe that that adds another dimension to what I’m doing; because I believe that I’m charged and motivated to go into the community because of those experiences that I’ve had, because of the beliefs that I had and to try and, by the life I lead, be the person that my parents commended and hope that I would be on that day of my dedication to Christ.

Lloyd: It must be hard to stay and keep in touch with that given the day by day, moment by moment, given the intensity of the life you’re living. Are you able to find ways to hold on to that core faith dimension of your life even while you’re dealing with ten different issues in one day?

Barnes: It’s most important then, I think.

It is that place of peace for me. It is that place when everything is phonetic and crazy and there’re lots of difficult decisions to be made, and sometimes it feels like there are no good options; there are lots of bad ones; you have to choose the best among them, to go back to that place of quiet and for me you know, it’s that gut, that instinct you know, based on experience, based on all the work I’ve done, based on all the information, all the facts, but what is that… what is your instinct, mixed with your judgment, mixed with all that information, tell you is the right course to take. And for me, that’s heavily intertwined with the values, moral judgment and the things that I’ve learned throughout my youth and growing up in places like this.

Lloyd: Give us just a little window into a day in the life of a White House senior official. Does it start early?

Barnes: Yeah, it starts very very early. We usually… By about nine or nine-thirty, I’ve had about three sometimes four meetings, so I’m usually thinking about lunch and sometimes I’m thinking I’m really hungry and I looked at the time it’s nine-thirty. But my day is really quite diverse.

We always start consistently with those meetings so that we all, as a senior staff, understand what the president’s agenda is, how it may have changed. So that we know what the big issues are that may confront us during the day. So that we’re thinking about what our messages will be for that day that we’re trying to push out. From there I’m also meeting with the senior staff on the Domestic Policy Council, and then we have lots and lots and lots of meetings and we were constantly, we talk a little bit about this process on how we get deliver information to the president, so we’re constantly working together to work through difficult issues, to provide the paper that he may need.

But I’ll give you an example. In this past seven-day window, I was in Detroit on Wednesday and I was talking to the not-for-profit and philanthropic sectors there, but also talking with local leaders about the state of the city and their work with the philanthropic community to try and rebuild Detroit. I had a meeting with the Domestic Policy Council on Friday, which the cabinet secretaries and administrators and directors that sit on the Domestic Policy Council, and we talked about some of the big issues that are facing the council, and also teed up some new issues and things that we want to work on as we go into 2010. I’m obviously here today…

This evening I want to fly out to New York and I’ll be speaking at a conference that’s sponsored by an organization working with Geoff Canada, whom many of you may have heard of, who’s started the Harlem Children’s Zone, for a big initiative that’s important to the president. We put it in our budget for this past year, focusing on “promise neighborhoods”; how can we wrap together education and health care and other benefits and services in communities in a very holistic and comprehensive way so that we can address the problems and the needs of children to get a better education, their parents to have a better access to opportunities and more success for families as we think about them holistically, so I’ll be doing that. And then going in to Boston to talk at Boston College of Law, and then flying back home.

In the middle of that we have briefings with the president on the economy, on the domestic policy agenda. And that is not in a typical week, so it’s a mixture of things. But I have to say I like lots of balls in the air in that way. That’s what keeps it interesting. I like getting out in the community and talking to people and finding out what they’re thinking, what they’re doing. That gives us new ideas, how can we better connect them to what we’re doing, how can we reshape the way the federal government is working, so that we are more responsive to states and local communities? Because the president had said, we have to do our job well and effectively, but the government can’t do it all. We also have to be a good partner to the business sector, to the philanthropic sector, to states and locals.

Lloyd: What do you make of the claim that it’s all too much, trying to do too many things at once, need to calm down and back off and do things a little bit more deliberately.

Barnes: I think if the president felt he were able to chose to do one thing, that certainly would be a lot easier. But it also is not reflective of our reality. When you think back, we walked into office on January 20th with multiple wars, with an economy that was on a brink of disaster. I can tell you some of the things that we saw and were discussed in some of our briefings were just unbelievable.

So we walked in with that, with major industries that were in decline, and we had to take all of these on and address what was happening in front of us at that moment and to try and stop the hemorrhaging, but at the same time you have to dig down into the root.

For those of you who are gardeners—I love gardening—you can pull the weed out, or you can just pull the leaves off; the weed’s going to grow back. You have to dig down and get off the root, and that means that we have to address the issues of health care, we have to make sure that our education system for our children is innovative, that the necessary reforms are there, that the right level of accountability is there and we’re doing that in a smart way.

We have to address the energy issues that are confronting our country as we think about being a global partner, not only for the environmental reasons but because this is such an important economic issue for this country. We can decide that we’re either going to be in the rear guard or we’re going to be on the forefront and create new jobs. So all of these issues tie together and are part of this new foundation that the president has talked about, that we have to create, for our country if we’re going to be successful going forward in the 21st century.

Lloyd: Well, it’s a dizzying list of challenges you all are facing all at once. Sometimes I wonder if… I’m glad to say you enjoy keeping so many balls in the air; but it does seem to be just massive in complexity and at the same time dealing with a nation that has been rattled and is anxious and looking for some signs of security and places they can put their feet down and feel like things aren’t going to hold, but you sense fragmentation and looking for other options in election returns, in polls, trying to lead a coherent way forward when there are so many groups of people being affected in such troubling ways that are so worried and anxious these days. It must be enormously difficult.

One question from me is, is there a place in left for the religious community to have a role, that is, in trying to see people’s anxiety, to acknowledge it but try to deepen their sense that they’re part of something that is at work? But then the issue becomes, the religious community is often so divided, divided politically, but more diverse in terms of different kinds of faiths. Is there a way to marshal them and asking them with your faith hat on? Is there a way to tap into the commitment behind religion which is, develop a sense of trust and hopefulness, and sense of community and public good, but at the same time in a time when there’s so many frightening issues and so much diversity in the religious community itself?

Barnes: I absolutely believe so. And I think this is why so many people engaged during the time of the campaign—and there was such excitement and a sense of empowerment from people.

We are more alike than we are different; and the things that we share as a broad national community, the issues of concern… We may approach those issues from different ways. We may think that getting there requires different set of things. But I think there are some common goals and a sense of common purpose and a common good that brings us together.

And I think the religious community is part of a broad community that can help have a conversation with the American people about those commonalities, and at the same time, as you say, inspire that sense of hope.

But I think there’s also that sense of empowerment that is very very important. And this is one of the things, and this is something that we talked about from my office—we have an office in social innovation and civic participation that talks about national service, and talks about community solutions. We’ve talked about the important role that the faith community plays on the ground in working with people.

We can tackle these big national challenges together. There is a way that we can work together. We’re trying to provide some of the skeleton for that for people to put meat on those bones and work together in local communities to address these big national challenges. So I absolutely believe that the faith community has an important role to play there.

I also think—and you talked about some of the nervousness and it’s certainly something people talk about during the campaign. And how is he going to bring us together? Is he tough enough to bring us together? Is he tough enough to slug away on these tough issues? And one of the things that I believe that is so central to this president and I see it everyday is he’s very disciplined, he’s very clear, he brings a commitment and a set of values to all of the issues that we confront and we move forward.

We know where we want to go and we move forward step by step by step. Some of the issues will be difficult. Many of them are difficult. Some of the choices are difficult, but we know that we have to make progress in order to achieve those goals.

I was on a swimming team when I was much younger. And I remember there was a race, and I felt myself falling behind and all of a sudden I shifted what I was doing to try and catch up, I came in last. And I talked to my coach after the race, and my coach said, you changed your stroke in the middle of the race. You have to keep pace and use your own stroke. And I think that’s what we’re doing. We taken the information, we try to…

We are constantly adapting and thinking about what the facts are on the ground. But there’s a sense of clarity for how we need to proceed and take on these big challenges, and I think ultimately that core sense of commitment and consistency, hopefully will also help people feel a sense of security around the steps that we’ve taken.

Lloyd: We want to give people in the audience a chance to ask questions, so if you would like to, raise your hand, fill out a card with a question, and by all means, people from the website are free to send in their questions, and they can be part of the conversation as well.

Before we get to that, one more nice easy question for you.

Barnes: Oh, I know what this means. (laughs)

Lloyd: Health care, one way or another, is probably moving towards some conclusion, at least from this moment in the next month or the next couple of months. My question is, of the probably dozen of issues sitting on your desk anyway, are there two or three that you think are going to come to the surface as the really critical ones over the next couple of years, one to two years, that you passionately care about and maybe the president as well in moving forward?

Barnes: Sure. One of the things the president has talked about [is] jobs, jobs, jobs. Obviously, even as we see some signs that the economy you know, with the GDP rate bounced up a week or two weeks ago, we’re also seeing unemployment rise, continue to rise.

And when we came into office, the president said, this is going to be very, very difficult. And we put this out there, recognizing that job creation is often a lagging indicator even as an economy starts to come back.

Job creation is going to be at the forefront for us going into the next year. We’re already working on several issues, I mean ideas, that are on the table. My office will be very heavily involved in that, and particularly thinking about job training. How do we make sure that people are prepared for the kinds of jobs that are going… that are out there now and that are going to come in line, on line in the years to come? So that will be something that’s at the forefront for us.

Education is critical. We’ve already been moving a piece of legislation—we’ve moved it through the House, it’s now in the Senate—that focuses on early education. I’m not talking about kindergarten, I’m talking about early childcare, pre-K, the very first years of a child’s life all the way through the other side, the bookend of community college and four-year higher education for students. So we’re working on that.

Going into next year we’ll be focusing on K through 12 reform and re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which many people know as “No Child Left Behind” now. So that will be very very important to the work we do.

And the president has also talked about his commitment to immigration reform, and addressing this issue that has vexed us for the past several years, and getting that balance right and moving that forward. Every indication we see is that the American people are desperate for us to do something about this. They recognize this as a problem, so we want to work on moving that forward.

Lloyd: Enough to keep you busy.

Barnes: Oh yeah, we’ll keep us out of trouble.

Lloyd: Question, Deryl?

Deryl Davis: We’ve got several questions that we’ll be starting with this morning, and I ask you in the audience, if you would, continue to pass your questions forward. This person asks or suggests that civil discourse is an essential domestic issue in the public square and the question is: What can be done to encourage more civil discourse?

Barnes: I absolutely agree with that. If we can’t have a level of discourse that allows for an exchange of ideas and hopefully then, all of us learning something from one another so that we get to the ultimate, to the best possible set of choices or the best possible idea, then I think as a community, we are suffering from it.

I believe that this president certainly sends that message from the way that he talks, in the way that he engages. And we’ve seen several examples of that in recent months; but I think the way that he tries is to set an example for the country and encourages us to go out of the community.

Let’s have the tough debate but let’s do it in a manner that is civil and thoughtful, as opposed to one where we’re not really listening to one another, but we’re just throwing bricks at one another.

So I think we can set an example. We can continue to reach out and to try to be thoughtful on a bipartisan level. That’s something that we will consistently try and do even as the media and popular culture may look at us and kind of arch an eyebrow and love to tell the story about how it isn’t happening. We consistently will come back and talk about ways that it will. And I think also going to communities and places where we are not always expected to show up, and to take those conversations about difficult issues into those communities, into those settings, so people get used to looking one another in the eye—which I think tends to calm things down—and having an actual conversation.

Davis: We have several questions here getting to a similar point about the tragedies this week at Fort Hood, Texas. And the central question being asked is, do religious communities have a specific role in helping us respond to this tragedy and work through it somehow? Obviously there are a lot of, different kinds of provocative elements to what’s happened.

Barnes: Right. We are all gaining more information as the days unfold. And having the facts and having that information is essential to having any kind of debate and trying to discern what it is that we should do next. But I think certainly, even just by the question being asked itself, it’s a positive sign about the fact that people want to keep the temperature down, not jump to any conclusions, understand the difficulties and what people were grappling with there, and what this particular person was allegedly grappling with there.

But I think sending the message that we are a single community and that religious people of all faiths, sending that message forward and, as we gain more information, determining constructive ways that we can not only work in the Fort Hood community, but we can work on all of our bases—this is something that the First Lady articulated as being very important to her—but also work in our communities to make sure that we are having the kind of civil discourse that’s so important.

Davis: Also, there are a couple of questions that ask about the relationship between faith, social justice, and health care, as well as environment, if religion has a specific role to play in some of these specifically social justice issues, health disparities, environmental degradation.

Barnes: I think historically we were talking about how I came to this work and why I care so much about this. Historically you’ve seen the important role that the religious community has played at moments just like this. So I absolutely believe, for some of the reasons that we were discussing—because of the expertise that exists in the religious community, because religious communities are often on the ground and able to touch individuals in a way that other government officials and other organizations cannot—I absolutely believe that there’s an important role to play for the reasons that we were talking about.

Lloyd: It’s always been, in the black church especially, the seamless connection between living the faith and the social justice dimension of it. At least that’s been my impression and experience that, because so much of the story builds out of some slaves in Egypt who were set free one day, it’s been a movement about freedom ever since, and social ever since. So if we look for the great voice, probably, in our society for social justice along the way, it’s probably the black church.

Barnes: Yeah absolutely. There’s a wonderful book written called Stone of Hope by Dave Chappell—which always sets some to laughing, like, no, not the comedian. This is a historian.

And he talks about and has documented the important role that the church played in the civil rights movement and how, even though the civil rights movement was a blending of lots of different communities, without the church and without the African American church and that leadership, the movement would have been very very different and, by his assertion—his research—not as successful. And I think because churches and synagogues and mosques and other religious institutions have always been central gathering places for people, places where people motivated by their religious beliefs are having these very difficult conversations. but also organizing and coming together. And because, as I said before, that prophetic voice you know, it is a voice that has, over time, spoken truth to power. And I think played a very essential role, not only in the civil rights movement, but you look at the child labor you know, the labor movement and issues of child welfare, in the immigration, the calls for assistance for immigrants in the immigration movement you know, it’s all throughout our history. So I think it’s definitely been essential.

Davis: This questioner asks: How do we deal with religious groups whose approach to other religious perceptions is exclusive rather than inclusive? How do we engage them?

Barnes: Well, one of the things that we’ve done is, we’ve reached out to everyone. We want to have a conversation and I think again this goes back to civil discourse you know, reaching out and having those difficult conversations.

There’s something about looking people in the eye and sitting down with them that I think is quite critical. At the same time I think it’s important to articulate where we’re coming from. That’s part of the work that we were doing when I started faith and public life at the Center for American Progress, talking about the values, talking about the leadership and what the leadership had been doing in various communities, but also articulating a broad range of issues that are of concern, and why. But again doing that in the parameters of this constitutional democracy, making the best case for why this is important for the religious community. It comes from a place of religious motivation but why this is important to broader society and showing the diversity of faith as voices that exist in the religious community.

Davis: This questioner is taking us back to health care reform, and referring to journalist Bill Moyers last summer who evidently spoke about the imperative of making a case for health care reform based on moral conscience, making a moral appeal. How successful has that been, and is there a real moral appeal to be made?

Barnes: Something the president has certainly talked about, and I know religious leaders have talked about, the rationale for, the need for health care reform from that perspective. And I think it is a facet of the breadth of reasons that we need to get health care reform done. We’ve talked about the economic imperative around it, but we’ve also talked about the moral imperative that calls us to move forward. And different reasons, different rationales will motivate different people. But I think recognizing all of those reasons in toto has definitely helped to move this conversation forward, leading to those 140,000 people that I talked about who wanted to engage with the president when this was just a call for the faith community .

Davis: A couple of different questioners here ask about job creation and pragmatic approaches to job creation. Now, it’s a huge issue, but is something you might speak to there.

Barnes: Right. It is a huge issue. And that’s why when the president talks about our work around energy, you know there is certainly a component to it that goes to what we’re doing to our environment. There’s a piece of this that has to deal with issues of national security, but there’s also a component of this that is important to job creation. We’re talking about energy economy. There are jobs at all levels that can come online, that have already started to come online, if we do the right thing as a public policy matter.

One of the things that we recognize right now, when you look at a country like China, they are going gangbusters recognizing the benefit of moving at a fast pace on an energy economy. If we are going to be competitive globally, we have to do the same. That’s why we’ve been working so hard at the same time doing education [and] at the same time we’re doing health care, to try in moving energy bill forward. That will certainly be the substance of conversation that takes place in Copenhagen at the beginning of December. We recognize that that’s an important part of our job creation platform. And there are very specific things that we are thinking about that we can do in the greener energy space, things that we can do to try and create more stability and to incentivize small business owners and other business owners to not only… as they starts to grow, not only buy more equipment and do the things that will stimulate the economy, but also to hire more people, I mean to feel greater security as they’re trying to hire more people.

And it’s also something that we think about quite a bit as we think about education platform and our education portfolio, because we recognize, in order to compete, we have to make sure that people have the necessary skills. Something that we did earlier this year which focused very specifically on community colleges as the place where people you know, can go to upgrade their skills, to get necessary certifications so that they’re ready to take on those new jobs. We’re really thinking about this in a very multi-faceted way, and very soon we’ll be talking in greater specificity about some of the things that we want to put in place.

Davis: We’d be remiss if we don’t acknowledge the 3 or 4 questions who asked, how is your golf game?

Barnes: My golf game is alive and well. I had a great time playing with the president. As I said to someone recently you know, he said you couldn’t have been surprised by the attention that that received, and I said actually I was. We got out of the van and we were heading home and I turned around and there were all these cameras there and my husband who is here this morning said, if I have to watch you on CNN carrying that golf bag one more time… but it was a lot of fun.

I think that people were so engaged around that conversation, one because they’re curious about who this president is and learning more about him, but also because it’s a larger… there’s a larger conversation taking place about the workplace. Women are, more and more, not only breadwinners in their families, for their families, but they are rising to more senior ranks in the workforce. They are the CEOs, they are the heads of agencies, as many of the wonderful women are in this administration. People are wondering about the interaction between men and women, as we have to talk about and think about what the new normal is. So I think it’s a wonderful thing. I think it’s a great conversation to have. I think the fascination with this golf game leads to that and issues of women and sports.

And a lot of people have also said to me, so do you really play golf? Like yeah, I didn’t go out and buy a bag and then sit it in the car while they went and played golf. So it’s been an interesting couple of weeks.

Davis: There are also a couple of questions getting at the idea that politics is such a high-stakes game, if we were to use that term, and that oftentimes politicians are in an environment where politicians have to make a lot of promises that can’t always be fulfilled. How do we change that sort of situation?

Barnes: I think for starters that we have to be honest about what it is that we are trying to achieve and what we believe that we can do. I mean, the president constantly says you know, a) bring me the tough issues and we’re going to make some difficult decisions, but b), I’m going to go out and talk to the American people and be honest with them about what we are confronting.

And I don’t think he’s ever said, this economic thing, we’re going to fix it like that and it’s going to be easy. We’ve talked about what the difficulties are as we try to move forward. So I think, having been honest with people, being honest when there’s been a mistake made, being honest about what the challenges are, and being consistent and engaging in that dialogue, are all very important parts of helping the American people trust in the people who are leading them.

But I also think—and the president has been consistent about this—that we want the American people to be actively engaged in this solution, and in the process of coming to those solutions and addressing those challenges, so that we’re doing this together and we’re doing this with all sectors. This is all hands on deck moment and that working together and that exchange of information also means that we are constantly in communication with one another; and greater trust grows from that as well.

Sam Dean: I’m going to jump in and ask you one more brief question looking for a brief answer. You’re one year, more or less, into a four-year term with so many huge issues in front of you, if you were to step back and say, over these next three years, or as this term wraps up, is there some big goal you would say you would hope for that you, or the administration will achieve for America? Apart from this specifics, is there something that you hope can happen in this four years that will leave America a stronger, healthier, maybe even more faithful place?

Barnes: In addition to greater security for people than on the day that we walked into office, I think it goes onto something that we were just talking about. I think people feeling more engaged, being more a part of their government, recognizing that government is for me, I can make a difference, I can make a change. My policy leaders have to listen to me because I am actively involved, and people seeing the benefit of being actively involved. It goes to the civil discourse question that we were talking about. I think if we can accomplish that, if people believe that they are part of the government, then we will have accomplished something that is a lasting legacy and will benefit the country for decades and decades to come.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation. I hope you all will come back week when w