If you look at why do we end up with the nominees that we get often? It's because you have only a very small number of Americans participating in the primaries, and those people tend to be your most dyed in the wool partisans.

I suppose there are people who can pass up free guacamole, but they're either allergic to avocado or too joyless to live.

We have Americans who are voting for someone in whom they have confidence, about whom they have hope, because at after the election 2016 whoever wins is going to have to govern. And when you look at the tenor of this campaign, and when you look at the way people feel about these candidates and how partisan our country is for starters, how does the winner govern? I mean that's the real, real problem.

Even if you're trying to remain objective, even if you're trying not to mount any campaigns or endorse anything, when you cover an issue you are at least encouraging people to think about all the possibilities and if you're not covering political reform, electoral reform, you can write stories about them that don't say we must do this but just educate people on the fact that there are various advocates who are tugging us in that direction, that can present the arguments of those advocates, and I do think that's an issue we for some reason completely turned away from.

I think what we journalists too often do is we assume the status quo is unchangeable. I think all sorts of issues of political reform, electoral reform need more discussion than they get.

Are you telling me that the polite little note I sent my college alumni magazine has, by some unbeknownst series of errors, come to be printed in The Paper of Record, instead? What a fiasco!

I think the media has to continually remind itself, and I think we do but sometimes not well enough that we're not just an economic property.