Singer: 1992 was the "year of the woman" in the Senate and 2004 has been heralded as the "year of the minorities" because three people were elected to the United States Senate. So there are now three minorities in the United States Senate out of 100.* It doesn't seem like much of a start, but it is a beginning. What steps can be taken to continue it - to better represent the United States population?

Moseley Braun: Campaign finance reform. The reason that minorities and women don't have a better shot at getting elected to the Senate or to statewide office is because the campaign finance rules are so skewed as to make it very difficult for non-traditional candidates to raise the money necessary to get elected. So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.

Singer: There are two prominent African-Americans running for Senate right now, both in Tennessee and in Maryland. Kweisi Mfume and Harold Ford might be running-

Moseley Braun: I was about to say I hadn't heard him announce yet.

Singer: He's just released a poll today.

Are there other opportunities for not only African-Americans, but other people of color, Hispanics...

Moseley Braun: I think so. The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything. I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates. So I think that that change -the majority population is willing to tap some additional capacity - will just benefit and serve the whole community better.

Singer: Can I ask you just one more quick question? Your home state of Illinois is represented in the House by either nine Democrats and eight Republicans or ten and nine. But it's a state that voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the last Presidential election, and the House makeup is very much a result of gerrymandering. We've seen re-redistricting in Texas, but Governor Blagojevich say he does not want to do the same thing in Illinois. Do you think it's time to redraw the districts to be more fair in Illinois?

Moseley Braun: No. I think it's time to get a reapportionment process that frankly takes out the incumbency protection and the raw politics of the process. We can do it by computers, frankly, at this point. It is an antediluvian outrage that we are still letting people set up and draw lines that have no relation to the people whose right it is to be represented by the person of their choice.

I went through suing my own state on the issue of reapportionment, and I really think it is past time to get it out of the realm of the purely political and respect the voters' rights to elect.

Singer: Thank you. It is really such an honor to speak with you.

Moseley Braun: Well thank you.