DW: So I’ve asked a lot about health care. Different question: If the Syria crisis is mostly behind us, what do you think of the resolution to that?
BS: What was the resolution? The diminishing of the American brand in the world?
DW: When it came to chemical weapons, having the Security Council setting up the program instead of sending missiles in there.
BS: I’m a guy who’s running a college, and getting to know the people in Nebraska, I’m not an expert on these kinds of issues, but from where I sit and listen to Nebraskans, you don’t hear the president making any public case for why there is a clear national security interest in country X, country Y, country Z, and I think the American people overwhelmingly believe that the first duty of government is to defend us from enemies foreign and domestic, so we need a robust military to fulfill its primary duties, and then we want to be incredibly reticent to ever use it. We want to be strong enough to do anything that we needed to do to protect our people, but reticent to ever get in to conflicts where Congress is voting to send somebody else’s kid to die.
When you listen to people in Nebraska, and they hear the Syria conversation, the thing you hear every town hall you're at is, "If we go to war in Syria, why wouldn’t we be in war in 20 countries right now? How do we know that his one is a higher priority than any other?" And there’s so little trust of and good will toward this city that there’s just not a lot of confidence that serious adults are helping to create order. What are our risks? I don’t think the American people have heard President Obama make a compelling case.