House in 2011 and left in 2016, as a special assistant to the president and senior president ial speech writer. Described as the comic muse for the president , he contributedded jokes to president obamas speakers and was a lead wry writer on four white house chanter leader presentations. He was the head write are for funny or die d. C. Are hes Adam Davidson is a staff write at the the new yorker. He has been a frequent contributeyear to to this american life. Hi work appeared atlantic, harpers, gq, Rolling Stone and other publications. They bring us tonight mr. Ly itts new book, thanks, obama, my hopey, changey white house areas. Barack obamas eight years in the white house were defined by young people. In 2011, david litt became one of youngest white house speech writers in history. Until leaving the white house in 2016 he wrote on topics from health care to climbed change to criminal Justice Reform and took the lead as president obamas goto comedy writer. Now in this refreshingly honest memoir, mr. Litt brings us inside obama world, full of hilarious stories and told in a Truly Original voice, thanks obama is an exciting debut about what it means personally, professionally, and politically, to grow up. Michael key caught the book terrific. Part firsthand story about being inspired bay cultural icon, part how to manual for getting involved in politics and making change. Thanks obama is a hysterical, pithy hartfeld trip down memory lane, and we need it. Join news welcoming david litt and Adam Davidson. [applause] thank you very much. Im adam david, so i im going to be doing most of the talking tonight. Right. David, i was telling david i agreed to do this event before i read the book and was very relieved to love it. Its a fabulous i think Keegan Michael key explained it very well, it hits a bunch of different tones and takes you inside a whole bunch of different worlds, both from your sort of naively enthusiastic dream of one day making change in the world to actually being in the rooms where change is made. But i think to i was trying to think of what would give this audience a sense of the tone of the book, and it feels like a cheap shot to start with the golden girls story but is that a fair story to start with to set the scene. That is the first half of the book. I divided it into two parts because i felt like the first my first couple of years at the white house, my central question was sort of, why on earth would they hire somebody like me . Since i am the kind of person who presumably could write speeches okay but goes not always remember to wear a belt, and it seemed like people who work at the white house are people who should remember that kind of thing. And then the second half i think, as i started to feel more comfortable at the white house, i did try to write about this sense of all of us, including i see some former colleagues here tonight, we all played some small part in this big thing and trying to figure out what that meant, and grapple a little bit more with what it means to be in public service. Now, to the golden girls, so this was i had been to the white house for about nine months, and the chief speech writer at the time, john favreau, called me into his office and said betty white is turning 90 years old and nbc is doing a comedy special where different famous people are wishing her happen birthday in 30second skits and youre pretty funny and no one else wants to do it. Do you want to give it a shot . I said, absolutely, this way my gettysburg grate. Managed to rupe any first meeting in the oval office and was about to leave in disgrace when the president , who was supposed to bob his head in time to the golden girls theme song said, if im going to bob my head in time to the music i need to know how the music go. Does anyone here know the theme song . He look another our videographer, hope hall, and she didnt say anything. So i looked at hope, and hope didnt say anything. So president obama looked at me, and suddenly i knew what could i do for my country. And i was standing in the oval office and i looked our commander and chief in the eye and i said, thank you for being a friend, bum bum bum bum, and as the thing i dont write about that ive always wondered there, a was a secret Service Agent in the hallway who couldnt see into he oval but could clearly heard and i always wondered what he most be thinking. I heard you read the audio book so you sing a good chunk of it. Very poorly. Thank you. So, i feel like just to sort of set the stage of the book to talk about who you are right before you went to the white house. Someone with a touch of political experience but thats that first opportunity to enter the door. Who that kid was as opposed to who you became. Yeah. I always thought i was going to go into comedy after college. I did standup comedy when i was in high school. Was the weird 15yearold at the amateur night. Did improv in college and then as a southeastern, i saw barack obama speak after the white house caucuses, after he won that night, and i was on a plane and it was one of those when they had free cable on planes, and i was watching cnn because there wasnt anything else on, and two minutes into the speech i was totally a different person. By the time the plane lapped i wouldnt shut up about probe barack obama and the fact ive now rent a book called thanks obama indicate is have not changed very much since thin had got ton write speeches issue sort of fell bas can ack wards sunrise but it was one of those things, i had a conversation with one of the members of the senior staff who had read some of my done withof my speeches and like and it asked me to help on another, and i met her fer the first time she looked at me and her chief of staff and said, hes very young. Im not comfortable with this, and now i dont really blame her. That was the moment that when i was walking into the building for the first time, it felt very surreal because you always assume these kind of that the white house is populate bid grownups, people who do not make mistakes and juan reason i wrote the book i wanted to talk about the times things went well and also the mistakes made. So, without giving too much away, the arc of the book is you coming to this maturity, i would say very mature. Exactly. Really is sort of a complex love story. It reads as a in a very light and enjoyable way, but id say the spine of the book this is their vietnam coax love story about obama and coming to a going from a juvenile in done infatuation to this understanding of what the man and is what the president is, which i think you do a masterful job of thats just which but its not never feels too preachy. Theyre anecdotes but youre changing over time, and then i think there was a period where maybe you were a little disappointed in the president , and then sort of realized who he was and what his role was. I would love to hear you talk about that. Yeah. For me, when i started writing the book, i thought, well, this is going to be easity. Ive written speeched for the president of the united states. How hard can a book be . And the answer is very hard. It whereas hard to think about the overall arc. As a speech writer i was always trying to make sure people only focused on one thing, a speech has to be about one thing and not five things. Every sent in my first draft of the book, my ed store said this is pretty good but whats at about. Said its about five things. Crap. And that was as i went back and we wrote it, i think to me the book is a story about what it means to fall in love and be in love, what thats with a person or president or country, when youre 21, when youre sort of just starting out, and then when youre still i think its fair to say a young person but when youve aged a little bit and matured a little bit and what it means to be an adult in the way that you love a person or a cause as opposed to being kind of head over heels and having this very exciting but ultimately less fulfilling kind of crush that i think i had when i first fell in love with barack obama, when was on the plane. And you really get a sense of when you take us into the oval office, into the conversations, not all golden girlssongs. Mostly just the golden girls theme song. Over and over again. We learn a lot about the fight for health care and other things sort of through the eyes thief character who happens to be you. And it helped me think about just what is the role of the president , what is reasonable to expect of that person and what the world is like when that role is held by somebody who takes the office very, very seriously, and thinks deeply about what that means. But there is a sort of heartbreaking momenty where you almost fall out of love with obama. The president ial debate where you saw him fail to bring it, and then sort of that set like a turning point in your temperature about your story about him. Can you talk about that time when we have a Recalcitrant Congress and they refuse to let obama do anything and you realize, even though im rising within the white house we dont have as much power. Talk about that part of your career. My experience with it i know theres some campaign veterans here so were all going to have these first debate flashbacks together, but i wanted to write about that moment because in the first debite with mitt romney, as many of you probably remember, president obama did very poorly, and more than that it was i mean, he is the best political performer of his generation, hands down, and i write in the book about how exciting it was to get to write speech for someone like. That at this moment when the stains were high, watching him have the ball in his hands and not come through, and what i wrote about there was never a moment when i said, okay, im quitting, or this whole thing is a fraud, but i did have this moment where the idea that their there exists somebody who is just better than people, that doesnt seem to be the case and realizing even the profit the united states, even a president you admire and you think is doing a great job for the country, is a human being, and trying to grapple with that because i think when i had first imagined what it would be like to have an Obama Presidency, remember on the campaign he used to say, im not a perfect person and i wont be a perfect president , and i thought thats exactly what a perfect person would say and hell be a perfect president. And realizing thats not the case. And i dont think in the end to me i think the world disillusionment gets then around washington and we all get disillusioned with whatever we do philosophy bit fact our leaders are only human isnt disappoint its liberating and also makes us uncomfortable and i wanted to try to write a book bat by the end of president obamas eight years in office i felt more confident because i knew i had a sense of the humanity of even our most powerful leaders. Can you talk about the mechanics of writing a president ial speech in which is something a picture you paint well. I liked how you conveyed two different approaches, the head approach and the heart approach, but thats just getting the first draft. Theres all this other stuff. Mostly picking the right elton john analogy. I promised we wouldnt do much topical stuff, but i so every white house is different and in the Obama White House we generally had one writer hold the pen on a speech. So lets say if i was writing a policy speech i would meet with the policy teamed the speech writer is the token ignore ragous and my job would to not know much about the issue and have the experts stuff information into my head, and then i would do my best to come up with a draft, do some research on my , then then second speech writer and from there it would good to the president for a big speech, the state of the union, even the Correspondents Dinners, the president would edit well in advance of the speech. For a smaller speech he would usually look the night before. One thing i admired about president obama was he decided did just to edit. If he made a change it was 99 sometimes out of 100 a really good change. Itself if wasnt he would leave it alone. And how long a big speech well, theres the dish get the state of the union is the biggest thing, takes months and months, but for a decent size speech, is it weeks of work, hours of work, days of work. We usually had a week. Talk about message events. That was routine maintenance for speechwriters. Wont end up in the history books but sort of president obama goes to kansas city to talk about the Auto Industry or whatever you can madlib it that way. The president goes to this play to talk about this thing. For those speeches we would have about a week. Sometimes you would have somebody passes away and you have to write a statement in a couple of hours or a day or two. Then sometimes with the Correspondents Dinner, for example, we would know, we have plenty of time so we can prepare and that would for the Correspondents Dinner take maybe the weeks. So depends on the speech. You hatt had a lot of fun but a you had comedians sending in jokes. That was an exception to the rule where we could have people we could have more of a writers room. Nat physical room but you could have 12 or 15 people sending in jokes and a lot of them were current staff or former staff and also professional comedy writers from hollywood. That was a fun change of pace. Didnt realize he was writing material. He did. He wrote very good material. How did it affect your thinking about great orators, great political speeches throughout history . Did it is that your calling upon . Jfk or churchill or reading cicero. Maybe there was a much core conscientious person than me who was reading cicero before embark on a speech you have a lot to dos not a lot of time night and then you realize, maybe cicero had the same problem. So you i do feel like you learn that about the job very quickly, that most of what youre trying to do is do a job that you think you can do but you dont know whether you can do it under that level of pressure or when the stakes are that high, and the other thing i feel i learned about speech writhing is that speech writers play a role in what our leaders say, but they dont really put words in someones mouth. Thats not really possible. So when you hear a great orator from the past say something, it does really reflect who they are. Some of those people may have had help writing but when you see a speaker and it looks like they dont really know what they want to say, its usually because they dont know what they want to say and no amount of speechwriting will fix that. Has to come from a principal. I can think of an example of that. I cant. Is it i remember i loved radio and then i became radio reporter and i loved magazine writing and became a mag writer and theres part of me that just cant read an article without tearing it apart, i see what theyre doing there. And oh, boy, stayed a couple beats too along there or should have moved that here do you read shakespeare or whoever and with that, hey, ive done the thing that person is doing. Not shakespeare. I do think that when i listen to politicians speak, sure, you do have that moment where you edit in your head. Sure that happens when youre listening to a radio story or Magazine Article and say, see the craft or the lack of craft and i do think that its sortly true. So you its interesting now as a democrat we have a lot of democrats kind of making a bid to be a future leader of the party, and so you do see, okay, this isnt just what theyre saying but its how theyre approaching these questions of communication, and that its an interesting sort of thing you develop, although sometimes i imagine you have a similar experience you wish you could turn it off and just enjoy it. From time to time you can, if its a totally different genre but its hard. Thats how i know that something is really good and different, is if i listen to a speech and feel moved rather than thinking. Partly because i overthink things anyway but also because that is a sign that someone has gotten past the questions about craft and into the things that kind of make speeches great. To begin with. Like rocket man, totally destroys. Exactly what i was talking about in that moment. I do feel like we do have to talk about the orange elephant in the room, and the sort of the premise of your job, the premise of the Obama Presidency was, this is the right thing to do and also this is a sustaining thing to do, that being very careful and thoughtful about your words is how you become president , and how youll lead the country, and president obama said, trump is not going to win because that i trust the american people. Thats just out in how it works and, obviously could make fun of trump all day long and i would enjoy doing that myself, but if to some degree trump is a refuteation of president obamas understanding of the world and i would think your understanding of the world, this totally different way, this crude, untrue, blustery way of speaking and the hamfisted reading of worded that someone else wrote when you are on teleprompter, how do you think about that as how you understand America Today . Well, dont think first of all i dont think the main issue with trump is the order in which he organizes his words. I dont think thats the main issue or the main reason that i imagine president obama certainly many of us who worked for him objected to trump so strongly and assumed that america thens wouldnt vote for this guy. I think when it comes to his speaking style, some of the things he does are out there but i also think there is sort of two modes of communication. President obama was always making a very clear argument. I think he was a writer before he was a politician. Also a lawyer before he was a politician and he wanted to tell one story, he wanted to make an argue; a. , leading to b. , leading to c. I think with trump, the one thing i will a ask the reason i dont feel my opinion of america has fundmentally changed issue think we have to look back and remember that donald trump wasnt elected by a majority of voters most americans rejected him. And continue to. And continue to. So what it reminds us is that our political system is really broken but that americans are better than our politics, and i think that thesis is one that president obama was saying for years before that; that when you look at the value that americans have theyre not reflected in washington and they should be. I guess you already said that point, the clarity of obamas speaking was a reflection of the clarity of his understanding and so if someone, for example, was not very clear in speaking i think you see a window into trumps thought process, which is a little jumbled. There is anything artful you see in a great Steven Miller speech or one of trumps in. I think i dont think im just say this pause were in manhattan, home crowd for democrats, but i do think that when i read sort of teleprompter trump speeches theyre not i dont object to sorry i dont agree with the ideas. The language is fine, but its not great. Its sort of middling. And then it seems like so low on the list of issues , the thing that drive meds crazy is the danger that we lower the were in general for what is president ial. We say, okay, when president obama would speak off the prompter we would get grief from the conservative media constantly and thats just a fact. When President Trump citifully speaks off a teleprompter, suddenly he is president ial. Its important we remember not to set expectations for the future based on donald trump. Think this is an aberration. I think well open it up to questions. Theres a microphone. Were on cspan, so you dont want to be on tv, dont ask a question. I was wondering if west wing or house of cards influenced your writing. Mostly house of cards. Most of the murder is committed were based on house of cards. No, i think the speeches, the president ial speeches in west wing were good president ial speeches and in that sense, the same way you can go back and look at a speech that rfk o jfk gave, you could look at a peach that aaron sorkin wrote for jarrett bartlett. Like most democrats under the age of 35 i was raised in part by aaron sorkin so the idea that politics can be inspiring and meaningful, that had a lot to do with the west wing. Reading your book gave me that kind of west wing feeling, like entering this world, really thoughtful president who is a human being and a bunch of highly competent people who really want to do the right thing. The world of your book, mistakes happen, people screw up, usually its you but a world that people are earnest and serious and want to make america better, and it gave me that feeling, i remember having watching the west wing during the bush presidency, nice to take a break from the world today and go to this alternative universe. I think to some extent both when i was writing it and now readers of the book are approaching it like a little its a little time machine. Doesnt last that long but for a brief moment youre back when obama was president and that was nice when i was writing it. You have mentioned and adam mentioned you grew to really love and admire obama, and you have conveyed that he was thoughtful and took it seriously. Can you elaborate a little more as the president , what about him you admired the most . And also give examples. Sure. So just so you know, communicating narrative, its better when theyre specific so if you can build. Ill add some details. I think the one thing ill mention here, just because i think it was maybe not necessarily evident if you were watching president obama speak. I talk about some of the ways that working on his jokes gave me these glimpses into the way his mind worked and he made decisions in much more consequential moments and that was nye itch didnt write about what it was like to be in the situation room saying mr. President we should get bin laden because i didnt do that. I got to talk about this other thing. And i write about one point in the book where we were doing a taping, and we had two takes, president obamas got stuff to do, so we only have ten minutes. He reads through the first set of jokes and theyre not bad but its not perfect. He sort of sometimes emphasizes the wrong word, things arent quite right and i remember being a little worried. The second time he read it i could see he had not rehearsed it. But it was like he had studied this thing he knew exactly which word he needed to hit in order to make every joke land. And that was in a very low stakes context, a version of equality you saw with him a lot. That he was very, very good at figuring out, sorting through lots of information, figuring out what the most important thing is to focus on, and then executing on that thing flawlessly, and that is a quality that i dont think if you had asked me at 21, what would make barack obama or make a good president good at their job. I depth think i would have sad that ability to identify the important and focus on that. That is something i dime admire a lot about the president. As david knows im one of the people who used to do the visuals for the president , one of the people who made sure he could deliver the words that david had written without the stage falling out from under end so i dont mean to dep denigrate the word bid but theres a book called on deaf ears that was written about in the new yorker that puts together a body of social Scientific Evidence how over the last 20 yours years, soundbites have gotten shorter, the extend to which people Pay Attention to those has diminished. As you write a whole speech, how do you think about how to sell the portions of it that the majority of americans might actually listen to or absorb. Yeah. I will say that sometimes being a speechwriter felt like being a very, very sort of wellqualified horse and buggy repairman. You feel that 20 or 30 years from now president ial speeches will not be as important as they are today. There will still be moments after a tragedy, for a state of the union, when a president ial speech is important, but one of the things i i write about in the book is the ways we started communicating, not just interviews but in a variety of different way us. Write about what it was like to have funny or die, now my employer, but at the time they came in and president obama was a guest between of between two ferns and i thought it was a terrible idea but is was wrong. A moment when we realized theres other ways to get this message across, and the phrase we used and heard a lot, specially the second term, was meeting people where they live and i think when it comes to the ability of speeches to persuade, it was not so much i dont think we thought somebody who voted against obama twice was going to listen to him at a message event and say, never mind issue was wrong and now i support this policy ump think we could focus the countrys attention on the issues that you knew, if people were think about that, then they would sort of join you on the other stuff. So if we could talk about the Auto Industry and the hey it had come back, thats something that people all agreed was sort of wasnt hard for people to wrap their heads around why that was important. So i think that is how i think bit. I write in the become, is president s cant tell people what to think but they can tell people what to think about and thats our sort of guiding idealism dont know if we ever expressed it that way but thats how i think about it. You messenger that obama speeches had a point of view or trying to make an argument. So the extent you agreed with the argument, maybe a policy you didnt agree with, affect your ability to write the speech or how challenging it was. Didnt have to write speeched about something i didnt agree with. Werent a lot of policies i thought were terrible. When people ask me was there a speech that you just feel like you had to write about something you disagree with, did write a speech about the new chips in credit cards and how great they were going to be, and i have been told they are good policy for reason its dont really understand, but every time i sit at one of the credit card thingies and wait for 5 second its feel just a tiny bit personally responsible, and so ill regret that forever. Its apparent that mr. Trump has unusual antipathy toward former president obama, and thats highly unusual for one president towards another and its pitiful actually. There is would a foreign Correspondents Dinner or several years ago in which obama pretty much crucified the president. It was like a personal roast. Too you remember that or did you see that . Yes, i remember that. Did you write for that and did that contribute that was in 2011. I had just started at the white house, so john love already live vet, former speech writer, he was our sort of managing the jokewriting process from inhouse and he wrote those jokes about trump. My experience with it was kind of sitting in cheap seats in the back of the room and watching trump sort of the back of his head but you could see how red he was turning from behind and then we have all seen him on the video of it and it is he seems to go sort of inside himself to a very strange and dark place, and the one thing i will say is some people have said thats the moment he decided to run, but its not like president obamas just picking on some random person in the audience. Donald trump had been on this sort of birther tour for quite some time, so he clearly had gotten a taste for politics and had some sort of political ambition and i think what really got trump in that moment and obviously speculation but i feel like speculate about going on in Donald Trumps head is a new National Pastime so ill participate. To me it was this is an audience of hollywood celebrities, media figures, and washington politicians and those the people who donald trump has always craved the approval of his entire life, and he is watching president obama gain their approval by roasting somebody who he feels has done sort of acted wrongly to him so donald trump was not just being the subject of humiliation, he was also watch his fantasy play out on stage, and i think that there was a sense of envy and i think one reason he is so obsessed with president obama is that he game president and discovered just because youre the president doesnt mean that Everybody Loves you. You have to earn it and when youre the president you can do a good job and your friends still are frustrated with you. Im not sure trump has learn that lesson. He has not. Think hes beginning to realize that i think there is this notion that he would walk into the white house and everybody would love him, and or at least everyone would pretend to love him and dont think he draws a distinction and he is learn in a democracy its the opposite. People who love you the most still give you a hard time. I dont know that hes come to terms with that but i think it comes out in weird ways. Thank you. I wonder if you would agree that to some of us, maybe the substance of the speech is more important than how poorly or how might not be delivered in a very good way. Its what he says more than how he says it that he gets his arguments out. Yeah, would agree with that. It was a real joy to write for president obama because he was a fantastic speaker and there are moments when he used that ability to accomplish goals that he maybe couldnt have if he wasnt so good when it came to rhetoric, but certainly when it comes to jokes, for example, he has good comic timing. Thats not a requirement to be president. You can be a good president and not be a good comedian. I think that the so i certainly agree that most of the problem in speechwriting, when a speech doesnt feel right inning its not how someone said it, its what they said. This i not talking about be president or hi experience but a about speechwriting. The question people dont ask is what is the point. And you see speech nobody answered the question, what is the point of this . Now, i think in the white house we were lucky enough that we were able to do both things. A clear sense of what the point would be and the person delivering the remarks was capable of doing a lot as a speaker and so that is one reason i dont see myself doing a lot of speech write neglect future because i feel like i had the speech writing job you can get. I would just observe that theyre not its not two separate things. Its not like theres air process of having clear goals and policies and then theres this other thing of making them look pretty or not. Its at the very fact theres a Competent Communications team and that the goals can be articulated well, is a reflection of a wellfunctioning white house itch was in iraq when they were having trouble communicating their policies in iraq and it wasnt all the best shakespeare himself couldnt have made to the policies sound good. It was reflection of a muddled, confused policy. A good point. Time for one more question. When we talk about humor and politics, the role is usually to be the outlier us to say the things that politicians cant say so you have like jon stewart or people who are getting in trouble consistently for crossing lines, but here your job is to create humor that actually is the thing that the president can say, and how did that sort of change your own notion of humor and its value and the effect it has in politics . So, i think that when it comes to humor and writing for a president , the way that i put in the book was that writing a joke for a politician exlike dedesigning something stunning for Marlon Brando when he is past his prime. When we were writing for president obama, even though he had a sense of comic timing that lot of politician does not, youre still thinking about what is the line for him, so, for example issue think about a joke in 2013, he said one thing i all republicans agree on they need to do a better job of reaching out to minoritied. Call me selfcentered but i can think of one minority they should start with. Liked the joke but we wondered whoa he president want to refer to him as a minority in public. Not have been a question in jon stewarts writing room. Of course you could say that but that was edgey for the president. To me humor one thing you learn is its similar to other speeches. Its not just the words on payment, not just the speaker. Its the kind of combination of the person, the moment and the content. Your introduction emphasized the use of the administration and your own opening remarks discussed an undercurrent of your naivete maybe, think was your word in the beginning, and idealism and your maturation. As a centrist, outside observer who there is no love between me or either party the anyway naivete of the administration was not hard to discern at the beginning, i wonder if you could identify anything you thought were lost opportunities because in the early part of the administration there was so much euphoria that by the time they got the end of the administration, if they could have revisited them again they might have achieved goal they were unable to achieve because in the beginning they didnt know how to achieve it. Well, one thing let me answer your question and then hey something completely different but somewhat related. So, i think that one of the things i talk about in the book was the debt ceiling negotiations in 2011, and i think it was surprising to all of us how far republicans were willing to go to try to draw concessions out of the white house. They were basically willing to hold the entire economy hostage and if we had trying third debt ceiling and we had defaulted on our debt it would have been another check crisis, possibly worse than 2008. I think there was a that was almost incomprehensible in part because in the Obama White House, we were, i think i say this as a good thing idealist, so the idea that someone could be so cynical and purely driven by power, i think sometimes that was a moment when maybe it took us a little bit by surprise. I think the one thing i would just sort of rephrase a little bit. You talked about naivete and idealism. They dont have to be related. One thing i wanted to write the book is i think lot of washington books have this could two side the spectrum. One is being naive idealistic the other is worldly and cynical. I think that the challenge for all of us not just politically but as people, is if you want to be an adult you need to be a little bit worldly and realistic but itself youve want to be a good adult and good person you have to have idealism as well. Its a book about becoming an idealist and also a realist simultaneously. How do hold those who seemingly contradictory idea inside your head at the same time. Thank you so much, david. [applause] thank you. Be signing books over here. Right behind you. I cant encourage you enough. Youll enjoy reading the book. Wont feel like youre learning anything but by the end of it youll realize the world is a different place. Big round of miss for david litt and Adam Davidson ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. If you like the event, follow us on social media, bn upper ws. Be well, have a great evening. [inaudible conversations] booktv is on twitter and facebook. We want to hear from you youre watching booktv on cspan2. Its television for serious readers. Were at the paris hotel in las vegas for the freedomfest Libertarian Convention and interviewing authors who are speaking here. Up next with us, michael medved. Heres hiss most recent book the american miracle Divine Providence in the rise of the republic what was your goal with this book. Guest my goal was to answer a fundamental question that i think has profound consequences to all of our politics and our cultural and the way that americans feel about our country. The question is, how did america