The Building Blocks of Democracy

President Obama: I'm spending more time thinking about the building blocks of democracy and where we've seen it break down. In all these places, what you're seeing is that if you define democracy just as elections, that's not enough. There's an infrastructure that has to be built and a set of values that have to be transmitted. The immediate short term response to these threats is you have to get people in there who believe in the basic precepts of democracy. But over the long term, some of these structural issues that we have not addressed are still a problem.