This week, on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell discusses why the glacial pace of deliberations and decisions in the Senate is a feature, not a bug.
“Once it was clear the president was going to try to turn us into a Western European country as rapidly as he could, about the only strategy you have left when your opposition has a forty-seat majority in the House. . . . We knew we couldn’t stop the agenda. But we thought we had a chance of creating a national debate about whether all of this excess was appropriate. And the key to having a debate, frankly and candidly, was to deny the president, if possible, the opportunity to have any of these things be considered bipartisan.” (37:41)

Condoleezza Rice, the Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution and a professor of political science at Stanford University, discusses a new report by the Council on Foreign Relations that sounds an alarm on the poor state of our nation's education system. Rice, who cochaired the task force that released the report, talks to Charlie Rose and Erica Hill on CBS News about the report’s findings.

Allan H. Meltzer, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses the economic recovery in the United States and the world.

This week, on Uncommon Knowledge, Michael Barone, American Enterprise Institute fellow, author, and senior political correspondent for the Washington Examiner, explains where the Republicans are headed, how Obama operates, and what’s at stake in the 2012 election. (52:46)