Episode 01: Hillary Clinton

But what made you think of it?

I am so distressed by how partisan and divisive and polarizing everything is that I'm always trying to figure out, what are those moments in life? What are those issues that can bring people together? And when I was first lady, I cared very much about adoption and foster care.

I ended up working with Tom DeLay, who was one of the most hardcore republican members of congress from texas but he had adopted at least one child as i recall and so we made this very you know strange fellowship around and common ground and common ground uh which is what we need

so badly

i mean this is what's missing and we we passed the adoption and safe families act and i remember when he came to the white house for an event around that, you know, people were like walking down the hallway saying, what is Tom DeLay doing here? Well, it was, you know, somewhat strained back in those days, but it's gotten so much worse.

And so what is it that we could do that would cross all the you know, the lines that divide us.

And I think children, families, but in particular caring about and helping foster kids, finding homes for kids, creating more families, more adoptive families for kids.

While we're in that area, what are some of the other pieces of legislation that you sponsored that fall into this category?

Well, when I was in the Senate, I also worked.

I was a member of the Foster Care Coalition.

You might remember Mary Landrieu, the senator from Louisiana.

And I think you worked with her on adoption.

That's exactly right.

And foster care issues.

And so she formed the first ever caucus in the Senate of people like us who cared about it.

It was bipartisan.

We were able to pass legislation that made it easier for families to adopt, provided more support.

Because as you know, if you foster a child, you get certain government aid like Medicaid.

Then you adopt the child, you lose.

You lose the payment for being a foster parent.

You lose other kinds of program support.

So we were trying to make sense out of that.

We also took on the really tragic problem about what happened to a child who aged out of foster care.

And we're seeing a

lot of that right now.