All-American Presidential Forums on PBS" Moderated by Tavis Smiley

FORUM RESPONSES

Well, Tavis, I want to be president of the United States, not just president of the Republican Party. Frankly, I'm embarrassed. I'm embarrassed for our party and I'm embarrassed for those who did not come, because there's long been a divide in this country, and it doesn't get better when we don't show up.

Quite frankly, for a lot of people there's a perception that Black Americans don't vote for Republicans. I proved that wrong in Arkansas, with 48 percent of African Americans voting for me.

But I want to make sure that the people of this country recognize that we've come a long way, but we have a long way to go. And we don't get there if we don't sit down and work through issues that are still very deep in this country, when it comes to racial divide.

I'm honored to be here. I appreciate you having us. I wish all of the candidates had come. But tonight we hopefully will make up their time and make up their ground.

Well, I would say, first of all, that I would hope they would name President Eisenhower. Because he sent those troops and federalized the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, when it was a Democrat governor who stood at the schoolhouse door and said those young people couldn't come in.

And I would like to believe, if I were fortunate enough to be the president, that at the end of my tenure – hopefully, eight years, by the way, not just four – that housing opportunities would be better, that we made some real strides in the criminal justice system so that you don't have a different sentence for a 17-year-old kid caught with a lid of marijuana than you do some upper-middle-class white kid who gets caught with cocaine. He goes to rehab, and the Black kid goes to prison for 10 years.

We'd change that. We'd have a different system as it relates to such things as health care, because there is a disproportionate level of people in the African American community with hypertension, with stroke, with diabetes. And there needs to be a disproportionate level of funding to help them.

Those are the kind of things that could make a difference and end this divide that we have.

Cynthia, part of that is it is that there is still racism in this country, and the opportunities aren't the same. Some of it has to do with the fact that there are people who unfortunately still look at a person's face and their skin, and that's something that government can't change, but leadership certainly can speak to.

One of the things all of us need to be aware of is that there isn't an equal opportunity for every American yet. There just isn't. We could say there is, but it's not true.

And in some cases, it's because those who try to lift themselves up find that they get most importantly the heel of someone's boot on top of their head every time they try to raise their head.

And the reason answer is to make sure that there are not only educational opportunities that bring equality, employment opportunities that ensure that people have the same chances as anybody else.

I don't believe the average American resents that people want to come here. I've said oftentimes we ought to get on our knees every night and thank God that we still live in a country that people are trying to break into, not one they're trying to break out of.

But securing the border is something I think every one of us agree on. You've got to have a secure border because otherwise our borders are not only open to illegal immigrants, but to somebody bringing a suitcase with a dirty bomb.

But, more importantly, if we're going to deal with the supply, you touch it at the point of the demand. And until something is done to touch the people who are employing illegal immigrants because of the very reason that they've talked about on this stage, to create what amounts to another version of slave labor, then we're never going to stop the flow.

You're not going to get illegals to admit that they're here illegally, because they're desperate enough to do anything to feed their families.

What we have to do is to start putting the penalty on the people who are most benefiting from them, the employers who are using those laborers in order to keep from having to pay decent wages.

Well, first of all, we really don't have so much a crime problem in this country. We have a drug and alcohol problem. Eighty percent of the people who are in our prisons and jails are there for a drug or alcohol crime. They either were high or drunk when they committed the crime, or they committed the crime to get high or drunk.

And what has made a huge mistake is that we've incarcerated so many of the people who really need drug rehab more than they need long-term incarceration.

In our state, we established over 20 drug courts, that gave people an alternative course, rather than just putting them in prison, giving them the opportunity to get what they really needed, which is off the addiction.

We've got to quit locking up all the people that we're mad at and lock up the people that we're really afraid of, the people who are sexual predators and violent offenders.

But the nonsense of three strikes and you're out has created a system that is overrun with people, and the cost is choking us.

I would go for more drug courts and for a lot less incarceration of drug-addicted people.

Well, I may be a little different on this one. I believe that the people of D.C. should be able to vote for representation.

I think that's appropriate, for the simple reason of equality and justice. And if we need to amend the Constitution to make that possible, it should happen.

D.C. is not the same city it was when it was first created, and I think it just makes sense to not have a group of people – I don't care what color they are, I don't care how they vote – they ought to be able to vote, and their color and their political affiliation ought to have nothing to do with the equality that we should give them.

As far as identification – I have to show photo ID to get on an airplane in my home town. I think it's not asking too much to make sure that people who are voting are truly eligible voters.

But look, if it's a driver's license issue, we've gone to Motor Voter – let's have Photo Voter so, when you register to vote, they take your picture, put it on a card, and you simply are able to make sure that you're a registered voter.

That way it doesn't dilute the vote if a lot of people who aren't registered voters try to fraudulently vote.

The first problem with our current health care system is that it's upside down. It focuses on intervention. We wait until people are catastrophically ill, and then we spend enormous amounts of money trying to fix them. We need to be putting the money on the preventive side. Prevention is a lot less expensive than is intervention.

The second thing, there has to be ownership of the individual consumer. As long as the government, the employer, as long as the doctor is in charge of your health care, and you have no idea what it costs, and you have no idea what they're doing, and you don't control it, we're never going to get the system fixed.

And the third thing that has to happen is that we have portable medical records so that your health care records go with you. They don't stay with your doctor. You shouldn't have to ask permission to see the records of your own body. Those are your own records. They don't belong to anybody else.

And the policies that we can put in place have to start with individuals buying in, not only on insurance, but buying in on health, their own personal, to start with.

One of the tragedies is that our military veterans have kept their promises to us; we have not kept all of our promises to them.

Many of them have come back to be told to wait in line for their health care, to be told that mental health would be something that might be rationed out.

That's not acceptable. And, if I were president, I'd like to see us have a very plainly written, simple-to-understand veterans' bill of rights that would make sure that every single thing that these veterans have been promised is delivered. And it's delivered as the first fruits of the federal Treasury before anyone else gets their nose in the trough, the veterans get their benefits paid – not on the basis of a limited budget, but on the basis of making sure that we keep promises to the people who have kept us free.

That, I believe, will help people want to be a part of the military.

I think we have some role to play in it, but I guess what disturbs me even more, we have not even addressed the genocide that's going on and the infanticide in our own country with the slaughter of millions of unborn children.

And we also have extraordinary poverty in this country.

Yes, we ought to be involved. But you know something? There are a lot of people in America that don't think the only poverty is in Darfur – understand there's poverty in the Delta.

There are people who don't have running water, people that don't have access to medical care and don't have a decent school to go to and you don't have to go halfway around the world to find it. We've got it right here in this country.

I probably dislike the death penalty more than anybody on this stage, but for a very different reason. I've actually had to carry it out, more than any governor in my state's history. I had to carry out the death penalty because that was my job.

I did it because I believed, after reading every page of every transcript and everything in that file, it was the only conclusion we could come to. But I didn't enjoy it.

And God help the American who somehow has this cavalier attitude about the death penalty and says they support it and they can do it. Let me tell you something from the person whose name had to be put on the document that started the process: It's a necessary part of our criminal justice system for those crimes for which there is no other alternative.

But God help the person who ever does it without a conscience and feels the pain of it.