Transcript
E.J. DIONNE: I think we're going to start. Our friends at C-SPAN want to start broadcasting, if they haven't already, and so if everybody would be able to take their seat we'd be grateful. It's such a great honor to be able to do this, partly because I am such a huge fan of Margy Waller, which I will explain in a moment, but also because I think it's so important to hear from mayors about welfare reform. In the nature of things, because of the way laws are structured, governors tend to play an enormous role in the debate, and it seems to me that mayors aren't heard from enough and yet mayors are the people who end up having to deal with these problems on the ground, that the problems of poverty manifest themselves in the very practical issues that mayors have to deal with every day, whether we're talking about schools, or childcare, or community development, or, god help us, crime as well. And in the end, these are the guys who have to deal with it, and women who have to deal with it.