Barack Obama

Right now, there's just a little discomfort.

And so when I say, for example, if you're a law firm,

You know, you saying to, we're going to represent who we want and we're going to stand up for what we think is our core mission of upholding the law.

And maybe we'll lose some business for that, but that's what we believe.

That's what's needed.

If you're a university president, say, well, you know what?

This will hurt if we lose some grant money from the federal government, but that's what endowments are for.

Let's see if we can ride this out because what we're not going to do is compromise our basic academic independence.

If you're a business, you say, you know what?

We think it's important because of what this country is to –

hire people from different backgrounds.

And we're not going to be bullied into saying that we can only hire people or promote people based on some criteria that's been cooked up by Steve Miller.

We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.

And ultimately, this goes back to something I said earlier about convictions.

If convictions don't cost anything...

then they're really just kind of fashion.

They're not really conviction.

And I do think that our generation, yours and mine, Mark, because again, we're about the same age, we were so accustomed to things kind of getting better consistently over our lifetimes, a little less racist, a little less sexist, less homophobic, a little more generous, that

It was easy, I think, to say, well, yeah, I'm a progressive.

But it didn't really cost us anything.