Inauguration. And then john has returned to our stage many times and we are excited to celebrate him and his fantastic book, the hardest job in the world the american presidency. It is safe to say the office of the president looks different than it did in 2009. Not only has the party in power changed but the tone of the position shifted. In his new book, the american presidency has become an almost impossible job between trying to fulfill Campaign Promises and solve every urgent crisis that arises. As he prepares how we choose our president and what we should expect from them once they are in office. His impose reporting resume includes his chief political correspondent, coanchor of cbs this morning at his current role as a 16 minute correspondent. He corresponded with the journalism gene, his pioneer in journalist. Join will be joined in conversation on the subject of the presidency. Susan page of usa today. So excited to have her here, in addition to covering 6 administrations and 10 president ial elections, this is a journalist reward for the coverage of the white house. And New York Times bestselling author of barbara bush and the making of an american dynasty. I dont think we could be in more capable hands for conversations. Later we will take your questions, using q and a not the bottom of the screen and a link to purchase the book in the chat Box Including a bookplate and you should buy them. Thanks for joining us and please tell me welcome John Dickerson and susan page. We did it. We managed to turn back the video cameras. We practiced this previously. We are inviting you into our home, and justin is in his home in new york. A very intimate occasion. An honor to hear this on the publication date. Such a great thinker, great to be here today. I am thrilled that you, because we talked over so many years, i am usually asking you questions on tv but i will settle down and handle it. I want to say we started a lot of access to dean i, wonderful place to start this book tour. I look forward to the day that we can be together, you will not get questions just from me over the next hour and also those who joined us, welcome to submit the question. I cannot stop looking at the cover of your wonderful book. It is a remarkable picture. Tell us what it shows. And then johnson in summer of 1968, in the picture, you have a real to real tape recorder on the table at the white house, a report from his son in law who went on to be senator from virginia giving him a report, a marine in vietnam giving a report to his father in law, lbj, security wasnt getting a great story, so one of his soninlaws sending back his patches. We dont know whether johnson was particularly overwhelmed by the reports but think about what else is going on, the tet offensive, Martin Luther king, Robert Kennedy had been assassinated and it was a time of woe, and the cover, if we chose it, we want people to know this is a historical book although we have a president who is fascinating and interesting. This is a book about the burdens of the office that gets you to the burdens, the author of my favorite quote about the presidency, nice to have him there as well. What is your favorite part . He could keep writing books about johnson because he is so powerful and has so much character, sometimes it is like being a jackass, you have to sit there and take it. That is a colorful earthy johnson quote but also one of the central questions of the office, what i was trying to do was what are the basic tenets of the office . Johnsons view is the obligations are unfair. We have to sit there and take it. Your job is to sit there and take it. Donald trump instead of saying i will sit here and take it punches those obligations in the nose and says no, i dont have to take it. That represents the change in the presidency. We could talk about why that is good or bad. Lets go to the founders, you describe the presidency is the hardest job of the world. Is this the job the founders thought they were describing in the constitution . It is more powerful than anything they worried about. John hanson, the first president before washington, there wasnt much to do when Congress Told him to do something, he said the job was tremendously irksome. President s have been complaining about the job since it existed. It has gotten harder because the founders wanted a limited job where you could have a president who could act in moments of crisis, could keep secrets because that was necessary for National Security but congress had a mammoth role in the creation of legislation and the handling of public business. All those duties moved into the presidency. Everything from the Second World War to the cold war to the war on terror has put all kinds of power inside the white house because we are in a constant state of emergency were the founders thought there would be methodical emergencies and we are in a permanent state of that and obviously we could get into whether the president should have all the power he does through all the agencies which would have terrified them. You described the founders of thinking of the presidency is a risky bet and one of my favorite, your book is called historical tidbits. One of my favorites, a book George Washington bought as he was leaving the Constitutional Convention to go back to mount vernon, what did he buy for his reading pleasure . Don quixote which was the game of thrones of the time, the hottest thing going so he spends four months in philadelphia in a room where they nailed the windows shut to keep it secret, a particularly hot summer. Can you imagine all these men in their heavy clothing with no air, four months in their at the end of it he rides off, signs the documents, goes into a tavern and is on his way back to mount vernon and it was quite an extraordinary things they were doing. They were so fearful of the monarchy and yet they were creating essentially something where you had an executive with all this power and it was such a gamble. I found it was basically washington believed in this dream. Could have turned out like john quixotes dream, not possible to be fulfilled but washington picked the right dream and we still have a presidency forged on what they built that summer. That the origin of the presidency. Lets talk about the origin of this book. When did you first get the idea of this topic . I think this is true because part of what we do is a lot of reporting, how might i enter into this story to get a handle on it. You pick one that sets the stage and you wonder after you start writing, making it to more than is the case. I started by saying i remember clearly in the driveway of george w. Bush, we were working for Time Magazine and went to interview president bush in advance of the Republican Convention and we had done an interview that they were standing in the driveway waiting for the car and he says if you want to ask somebody if they would be a good president are not ask how they make decisions. The job is about making decisions. What crystallized for me was thinking about the job. The difference between the job as it is and what you do all day which is making decisions and investigating what that means in the structure you built relative to what we talk about in the campaign which tends to be all over the map. When talking about issues we talk about the abstract, not the way they really come before a president or the president has to make decisions so that is in 2004. I wrote a series of articles in 2010 about the presidency on this theme, how would you do a Job Interview for the presidency and three years ago i wrote a cover story for the atlantic, the last two years i have been writing this as i cant believe it. Keeping up your day job, you have been thinking about this for a long time from well before the time donald trump was elected president. It is impossible to talk about the presidency when thinking about donald trump. Did his presidency change the conclusions or assumptions that went into your thinking when looking at the american presidency. Yes. The challenge you put your finger on was a central one because part of the argument, one of the things i discovered we have become a presidency obsessed nation and that has stuck in my head. The founders would be terrified we turned the president into a celebrity. And and and restraining yourself for the purposes of rebuttal, that would be see very foreign in the way we treat the president as a celebrity today and so that has been the way im thinking about the presidency so we have donald trump is a celebrity who became president , very hard to measure the Office Without thinking about donald trump. The president to be analyzed and touches every part of the presidency and shines light on it and helps us decide about telling the truth and responsibility. The head of the party and the country. And the notion of staff and how important they are. I think of it as the abstract and wrestle with it, whether donald trump, worth telling his story to illuminate that or as a way to illuminate his presidency and about the office. This is the question i struggled with which is donald trump has challenged every mark, four years after that does the presidency snap up to predonald trump era or doesnt fundamentally change the tenure of donald trump . Great question and there are things that changed before hand that invited donald trump into the office. They were not going to change. It had nothing to do with donald trump. It wasnt questions i wrestled with and you know this so well. How many times have you heard Ronald Reagan and tip oneill got together and you hear it all the time and starbucks told that story. A story supposedly about two towering people, two towering representatives with two visions got to gather and worked in a bipartisan fashion to keep Social Security around for a longer time. That is true but the structure in which it took place was a structure in which there were a lot of conservative democrats who would work with Ronald Reagan because it helped them get reelected in a district. When he won he won 1980 with 144 democrats who won him districts reagan also carried so democrats new they voted in their district for who really wanted donald Ronald Reagan. There were 14 democratic district who voted for donald trump and those democrats are not working with donald trump. Unless you have the structure of a congress that has incentive to work with a president of the opposite party you are not going to have this fairytale story of leaders working together. That has nothing to do with donald trump. He was elected because it was a partisan time where you can win. In partisan, then the normal conciliatory types. To your question, how much does donald trump have to do with any of that. I want to make sure i didnt lose a window popped open on screen. The nsa has control of my computer. What you could imagine, say a democratic president comes in and all kinds of executive behavior in the name of we have to fix everything that went awry during donald trump would be the same power grab for the executive kremlin on the prerogative of congress that would send the founders into a tailspin the democrats complain about with donald trump today in terms of overstepping the powers of the office and that would be not snapping back. That would be using Donald Trumps means to their end. You saw that in the president ial campaign as Democratic Candidates were saying i will do all the things we want using the tools he so elegantly has shown us can be used and finally, this depends on congress becoming a different kind of body, if the presidency is going to turn to Something Else because Congress Needs to reassert itself. We have Great Questions from people joining us on zoom. Rebecca asks how do you think president s like the other roosevelt, largely successful in his time would fare in the modern presidency . This is going to sound flip but it is not flip. His voice was very high and i think roosevelt was a kind of a jumpy, excitable fellow and i wonder if that is how that would play on the cable screen, people would come across it is too hard and intemperate. On the other hand you immediately say donald trump is by the standards of the presidency quite intemperate in his personal behavior so it wasnt an impediment to him but the way roosevelt behaved in a presidency that is dictated so much by how you appear on tv is one thing. Also he was on his party in a way that is different from anybody would do today. But he still operated in a system i think he was probably in the donald trump mold assuming he didnt take on his party, the problem is he took on his own party so he would have lost support within his own party and not got the nomination was totally happened to him as well when he ran against taft. He tried to make it appeal in the primaries of his party and they wouldnt have it so if they wouldnt have it in 1912 they wouldnt have it today. I dont know much about Theodore Roosevelt but Theodore Roosevelt was a trumpian figure, bigger than life, doing adventures, getting shot and carrying on with his speech that he was delivering. That story may be in your book but great question. Is a question from jeff, jeff says you expressed skepticism about whether the campaign reflects the demands of the office. When you moderate a debate later this year how will you make it work, that is a great question. What can journalists you write at length how the job search does not match the job for the presidency, what could journalists in the form of the debate when the National Number of americans tuned in to watch, how do you make the system work better . It is not easy because debates happen in a narrow lane. One of the attributes i was surprised by, the president s Team Building capacity putting together an organization. The job is so big you have to have a good team around you instead of an operating tempo so you can manage the job in an emergency. How do you get at that . If you ask about management and teambuilding, a lot of people will go why is he asking about that . You have to create a predicate for the question at first and the actual candidate has to answer the question. We get a lot of responses that are different from actual answers. You could ask a question to get at their hearing for leadership and management. Not just answer any questions they want which is often the case. Which ones can you tf that would illuminate something and what we want to do, i always felt in debates you want to get them to think out loud which is in their answer to tell you something about the bedrock of their views because everything will get stripped away, so different then they think and back to their bedrock views and you can ask questions that illuminate those and i would try to form questions around these attributes that are necessary but i can tell you it is so hard to get candidates to answer the question and you dont have all day, you cant waste the clock getting them to answer the question. Is very hard and we need a concerted effort throughout the campaign rather than just during debates. You write about, the book is not about the media but something about this, you talk about things you have criticized and done things in the past. One thing that i thought was interesting, you spent too much time looking for hypocrisy in candidates and that is not necessarily the thing to talk about. Talk about that . Hypocrisy is important. I dont want to just throw it out the window but a couple things happen in this is donald trump with particular challenges here. Hypocrisy is the third politics and lying is part of politics in some of our best president s were really good liars. If we have tweet too fragile a view of not telling the truth and hypocrisy, we spend this time with a fragile version of it and doesnt give us a realistic picture of the office but this person in the office. What i am trying to do is say telling the truth is important but what exactly is important about this . The shading a president has to do of himself, or hiding his true motivations . It is all part of governing, that is one thing. Consistent lying for the purpose of undermining the future of truth, undermining the office of democracy facing the world. I dont mean to suggest, my point is there is a continuum. We shouldnt set the gauge at 0 but we should set it at 203, not an excuse for somebody who operates number 10. I think in some of my own coverage for hypocrisy is easily understood, gets people riled up but it may not be about the most important thing a president will face or that we should be thinking about in public debate. When i thought about it the opportunity caused when a president acted, every minute i spend on a story is a minute im not spending on Something Else in your assignment editors told you what to do but try to think of the tradeoff. A story about hypocrisy is not important, worth spending time on when there are other stories you should be thinking about. Every campaign i end of thinking why didnt i see this more, why didnt i do this better, covering campaigns is a humbling experience i have to say. In your book you list 17 key president ial attributes. I appreciated the fact you listed them in alphabetical order from adaptability to vision and i wanted to ask a modern president , what president had the attributes that made him best suited to the job . The attributes that make him best suited to the job that they encountered is the tricky thing. That list, 17, i didnt even know there were 17 attributes. What i was trying to do, take a look at one of the things that will challenge the way we think about president s is on the one hand we look at Something Like a political instinct and say he only cares about politics and use that to dismiss a president or a candidate and that is not right, things happen on the continuum. It is important to think about politics the way you get power and that is how you get stuff done. If someone shows political maintenance instinct it should not be disqualifying. I really political . Do they only care about political selfinterest . If they show some political skill that might be a reason to vote for them. To figure out where you set the gauge on each of them. Who is good . One wants to say fdr. He had a lot of those skills and also i dont think what im trying to do, how to make their own determinations about these things. I dont know that i can come down with the final voice of wisdom . The idea that fdr had a firstclass temperament, that temperament went a long way and dealing with the uncertainty of the job and the crazy presidency he inherited. If you have 17 attributes, that one has more weight than the others. President bush, George Herbert walker bushs restraint in office which i write about because i found it fascinating he showed such skill in office and his campaign that was considered one of the most restriction free campaigns, his restraint i thought was notable for him so i think of it more as they had a bundle of these but certainly nobody has all of them. The thing about hiring president s which is what we do to the campaign, what are you hiring them to do . You make the point, what they are going to have to do. When you talk about recommendations, hire more black swans. What does that mean . That comes from a conversation with condoleezza rice. When i was talking to her i started almost every interview by saying, if a campaign is a Job Interview what would you want to know from any of these candidates, doctor rice said i want to know what they thought the black swan event would be a presidency and how they would solve it, and fixating on cyberwarfare and cyberattacks, this was finished before covid19 was on the radar screen, and we thought that we would face a cyber attack. The idea behind that question in a debate to go back to that earlier question, i have asked one particular candidate and they dont answer because they know it is too dangerous. Once they pick the black swan event and how they handle it they hurt themselves so they are willing to give a soft answer that doesnt hurt anybody and they move on but the notion of hiring black swans is this, the job is going to surprise every president. George w. Bush in three debates, our gore in 2000, terrorism only came up once and in passing. No major polling organization talked about it during the campaign through the first section of his presidency and that defined his presidency. Woodrow wilson said wouldnt it be funny i i had to concern myself with Foreign Affairs because i spent so much time documenting the mystic affairs and had to wrestle with world war i. Everybody gets a big surprise and that is what tests you and whether you understand the job and can act in a moment of crisis. That is why you hire for president ial traits, not ideological. In a Perfect World. Right. Heres a question from ira. Click on the q and a at the bottom of the screen and take as many questions as we can. Do you think it is possible for congress to reassert itself in this era of president ial obsession and if so how . If you want to make it a more manageable job Congress Needs to step up. Is that possible . I dont see how it happens. You hear this all the time i am sure. Senators of both parties, i just want to vote. I came here to vote. Some dont, they want to be safe and get reelected but a lot say i came here to talk about the issues and vote. They dont take votes to deal with forney issues because they are all connected and the future of candidates tied to their president , the president of their party, a lot of times people say my vote is a referendum on the president who is in office. They raise money for the same Interest Group which means a situation which senator from ohio and new mexico had different interests and their voters cared and raised money based on different interests. Now they are all raising money for the same Interest Groups which make the candidate a lot more electable. Candidates are more like it are kinds to the presidency which means Congress Needs the president to do well. Republicans need a republican president to do well because their fortunes are tied to him. They are unlikely to push back against the president in a way that will diminish his political standing because of about back and hurt them in their races because races are donated by primaries, it will hurt them particularly with the most maryland in party which if you have a president who has strong ties to participate in the primaries, you heard the president and you have a primary challenge or you have to raise 12 million just to fend off a challenge so you have to be careful and you can often see senators get braver once their primary date has expired about a president of their own party. He writes nice to have you join us. Reflect on how president s have harnessed the media of their era. I would be interested in how it is harnessed because in ways, the relationship with the news media would surprise a lot of americans in that it was that campaign he had good press relations. Yes. I think, some of these embedded reporters had a tough go of it. I mean it this way. He talked to questions almost every day when he was in trouble and things were going quite well. He was accessible in a way that Hillary Clinton was not so for someone who fashioned the press as an enemy of the people does it tell the whole story . That is 100 true and people say about 2016 the press always puts donald trump on tv or interviewed him because the other candidate is not anxious to be interviewed. In a Perfect World both candidates would be accessible all the time explaining themselves. One thing that was true about donald trump in the campaign, i interviewed him 19 times which i only say, not to give the total number for any reason other than this because we had contentious interviews. Out of the oval office, forgetting what happened. That is what happened not when he was president but when he was candidate they were quite contentious and he would get very angry but then would come back. You are quite right about that. What was happening with fdr and the fireside chats. Something i discovered in writing the books was fdrs mastery of radio changed, theres a study of acceptance speeches that political conventions. It became shorter and less substantive because of the effective radio and fdrs mastery. His fireside chats have become a fundamental part of understanding his success. He did not give a lot of them in central to them is something that is almost entirely gave the presidency its incarnation. He felt his job was to explain thoroughly everything that was going on. You talk to psychologist about the benefit of that and people in a fearful state like to have things explain even if the explanation is not great, that things will be bad for a while. And fdr found a way to harness that. John kennedy, one of the things i found in tv guide in which he said television is going to become the new thing and figure out how to pick a president and trying to spin everybody before his campaign in 1960 on special talent television, the inside truth about a candidate. If he looks good on tv, theres Something Special about his ability, turns out it works well for him so kennedy begins with a huge change in politics. The other big change is clinton makes use of talk shows and away nobody used them before even though kennedy had gone on jackpot and uses the internet very very well. The kind of outreach, twitter interests me because donald trump has not been able to use the persuasive power of twitter at all whether it is dismantling of lawn care, building the border wall or his tax cuts. They are more popular after he pushed for them rather than before. Twitter has a persuasive tool that is not successful. Not the power that fdrs fireside chats did so to control the media and put distraction up he has been singular. Another story, the communication device, writing what you say, heres a question, which president surprised you the most . One thing that happens when president s right speeches, they start writing a speech not knowing what they think and then you figure it out. Writing a book is like that. You start out thinking you know what the book is about but by the end of the book there is Something Else. Talk about surprises and the president something about a president that surprised you. A fantastic writer has a quote that said if you write something and dont discover something along the way, that turns your head and makes you go in a different direction that is a warning sign and thats why we get in the business, the joy of finding something out and figuring out if it is true or not. That makes it strange that is in a book now. As you know, good luck in the final stretch. It lives in your head and you cant just say doors closed, i am sure you are still having thoughts about barbara bush. Eisenhower really interested in surprise to me, i considered him a bumbling kind of caretaker president that floated through the office, wrote a book called the 10 hand of eisenhower which in the Republican National Committee Headquarters in washington theres a picture of eisenhower with his hand in his jacket and i wondered if the hidden hand of eisenhower was in that portrait. But eisenhower is much more engaged to his presidency than people thought. When he thought he gained power by not being seen all the time, his power came from that restraint and as i spent time thinking about eisenhower i became fascinated with the way he did things, the book is an exploration of why president s do or dont do things. I found carter interesting. This is a challenge. Carter had a lot of theories how to build an organization in the presidency and they didnt work out. He built a team for governing and went through the campaign so he would be ready on day one to hit the ground running in the governing team to get this done, a huge crackup, the campaign team, a challenge for the president and the way carter thought about the job is one of the arguments is we should think about the job, he has done that but that was all you need because it didnt work out. There are moments the presidency is pushing for Herbert Walker bushs restraint i became more familiar with following the wall of communism but then also a lot of the ways he behaved in office, his sense of restraint in 1990 as a part of this too. That was his vision and those are some of the ones that surprised me along the way. The president is popping up in my head. For George H W Bush and eisenhower, the president s who turned out to be the right person, we were lucky, you dont agree with george bush ideologically thinking he is the right person for the fall of communism and the collapse of the soviet union, we were a fortunate nation in so many ways. We are actually in the room where you wrote the book. Behind you are the many books you cite as resources in your book. Talk about the process you followed, 3 00 in the morning, tell us how you managed this. It was in my head all this time. I remember talking to you over breakfast at one point, the ideas and challenges and what we are seeing in conversation with the Trump Presidency and you were talking about the responses to it, you might have mentioned the number of candidates who decided to run as a reaction to donald trump and it was one of the signs i kept trying, working on the book, to open the aperture, i kept trying to think bigger about what i was looking at in the point you had made for me was to think a president does ask and why. Over here, changed the political dynamic and alive to the other affects. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and kept it with me and hopefully it made it into an outline that i kept it ended up being 300 pages long, which was basically how i thought they would work. One way i forced myself to go to the stories that are part of the book is in a podcast i did, the whistle stop protest which was originally about campaigns and became about president ial moments and i love the doing it because it is basically storytelling which i love but it forced me to look at individual moments and think why are these important and that is what i do throughout the book so i gave myself a test along the way and i got up early in the morning when i was on cbs this morning i get up at 3 30 or 4 and right and after i left cbs this morning, i wrote nonstop for a year or more on the book all day long, reading and doing interviews and also when i was working on this on the atlantic piece i was running these through a realtime filter. I was asking questions about where the thinking led to parts of the book. We have two questions having to do with transition. The first one came now i cant find it. The second question came from jonathan who set our transitions too short, how would you make them better . Wherever the question is, and i think the question is should we put more emphasis on transition to a better job . Max stier, the reason i was turning around the transition, four books on president ial transitions. It is an incredibly important question. It has gotten put into law. There is now an obligation for president ial campaigns to work on their transition about right now which means the Biden Campaign is talking to the trump administration. I became obsessed with transitions because the about the private sector. If you had a merger which happens to the campaign although mergers are much more ordered. If you had a 4 trillion merger you would spend years with teams of lawyers and sake over the new company with some already in place you would understand the organizational chart you would have experience that would be up to speed a little bit, two months, there is no real organizational chart. The institutional memory is hard to come up with. Congress tried to get them to start earlier but you have a president who is committed to transition and committed to the idea that you cant just add water to a presidency, you need to get the right soil in your gardening metaphor from their but you have to do careful preparation. Donald trump said i dont want to deal with the transition. It is bad karma. Mitt romney ran a state of the art version with hundreds of staffers doing those things. I would think it would not only make it so the candidates took it seriously but also as part of the questioning to get them to talk about the transition and remove the old idea of measuring, that you talk about your presidency, that is what president s used to do to change that the core of the white house and if you think too early about your presidency then youre being obsessively prideful. Romney came at this with a business background, worked on mergers, was accustomed to working with big systems and how to take them over but it was not the same as getting elected. Heres a question from mary beth. Is it too early to judge barack obama against the standards of the office as outlined . If so how would you say he measures up . It is too early. One way i think about that, this is preliminary, george w. Bush, i will be fascinated to read robert drapers a book on the iraq war, donald trump the decision to go to iraq was the worst mistake in American History and george w. Bush should be impeached for it. He has not and probably will never recover from the iraq war but in summer of 2005 he came to the white house after reading a book on the spanish flu and said his Homeland Security adviser, i want to plan dealing with the pandemic, wanted soon, comprehensive and gave a speech about it. Lets imagine the pandemic had hit. He would have been prepared, he gave that plan to the Obama Administration who did their pandemic work. Sometimes president s do smart things thinking about the future, being longterm oriented, not just shortterm for which they get no credit because disaster never happened. How do we way that. It is not the same category as going to war in iraq but when we think about presidencies, president s in their time. You evaluate a president as you did in africa helping to diminish the number of aids cases and mothers who had it, a successful humanitarian gesture. I am still coming to a theory how you look at the presidency and you weigh these elements when you have such a big thing as the iraq war. That is a way of talking about barack obama. Coming back from where it was was a big achievement. How big . You dont want to measure it relative to economic numbers but against the weight that was on it. Here are what we face, how much harder is that to do than others. But he made the same mistakes in military, National Security affairs with respect to isis, they recognized bushs learning on the job with respect to the war on terrorism, saying deciding over time about getting more involved and more rigorous. Libya has to be wrestled with when it comes to president obama and then do you measure president obama, his attempts to unify america in the abstract or relative to what happened with donald trump . I dont have a preliminary view and i dont think you could start for another 20 years or so. That is a point george w. Bush makes all the time. History that he says, he doesnt talk about his legacy. Is not talked about his stewardship of the iraq war because history takes a long time to come to its conclusion and we are not there yet. Thats a point to make. There is a place where we are at this moment, an example of what you are worried about in your book the hardest job in the world the american presidency because donald trump, a pandemic which was not discussed in the campaign and incredible protest against Police Brutality and Racial Injustice that have just erupted. Maybe his presidency played a role in the fact of these protests but these are huge events that could not have been foreseen and we expect the president to deal with. Hes got the economy, covid19 and race relations, three huge challenges. There are different ways of dealing with it. Lets pick the race question, these are complicated intractable problems that require the president represents the whole country. He has obligations to a variety of constituencies but also an obligation to hear the agony of people who are not part of his political base. James wilson has a definition of character that i found compelling. What does it mean to have president ial character and his argument is selfcontrol and empathy. Empathy is taking seriously the views and rights of people who are not in your camp. Lets start the clock on two weeks ago. A president has an obligation to respond to the agony of a portion of the electorate particularly blacks in america who are part of americas original sin and that is part of the job that despite the politics and policy questions of policing in america responding to that agony is part of the president s job and that is not where he has decided to spend his Political Capital. He decided to spend his Political Capital on the law and order message and that is something he can do today and on covid19, he could speak to that agony. In response to what we see on the streets he has not come up with an answer yet and covid19, the criticism barack obama got for not solving the bp oil spill. He didnt start the bp oil still, or any capacity to manage oil. With the federal government is supposed to do. Barack obamas application to solve the bp oil spill. One final question. A lot of americans feel pretty battered, by being confined at home with their children or looking at developments in the nation. Having finished this book and thinking we are heading into another president ial election unlike any other do you feel fundamentally optimistic . Look at what america has done . Do you feel more pessimistic with a greater sense of concern whether we have gone off track . If you spend time in the most corrosive social media places, you can get depressed instantaneously but twitter is not america and politics is not. All of those poles and discussions with a broader part of america show a country that is people who are not as quick to judge the political subsystems, who tend, great experiment in deliberative democracy that when you put people together in a room and present them with the issues they become less fixated on their positions. The outcry from a huge portion of america at the injustice and the feeling that something has really changed in a fundamental way in which humans are treated in american culture, that represents an instinct and a fellow feeling that is, that is, you know, is, its a source of anguish, but its also a feeling that people are moved because they feel like something is wrong. And in that they have a better vision of america. And then if you look at what people have done with respect to the covid response, the majority of america basically did what they were told for a long time because they believed that it was worth doing for their fellow americans. And so there are places of hope that you can find which you are put in a mood to seek when you pend a lot of time spend a lot of time in the political field because it has become so much more contentious. Point storing is so much more a part of the political debate. You remember when you covered your first campaign, there would be actual long political debates. Now its kind of theatrical sniping, which can get depressing. Your wonderful new book, its been such a pleasure to talk about, the hardest job in the world. Everyone should read it. Buy it, buy it then read it. And, john, thank you so much for writing it. Susan, thank you so much for those wonderful questions and for your friendship. And also, by the way, your example. Its really, its been great to talk to you tonight and thank you. And thanks, everybody out there, and thanks to sixth and i. Thank you so much. It was such a pleasure if to have you. Thank you to John Dickerson and to susan page. I encourage you along with susan, buy a copy of the book. Copies bought through sixth and i include an autograph, were also emailing the link as well. We have more Virtual Events with authors coming up including tomorrow night, you can check out our calendar at sixth and i. Org. And when the time comes, we really look forward to welcoming you back into our historic sanctuary at sixth and i. Take care and good night. Heres a look at some books being published this week. Fox news host sean hannity argues that a Democratic Victory in 2020 would lead to socialism and economic strife if live free or die. Cnn and New York Times legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin recounts the Mueller Investigation and later impeachment of President Trump in true crimes and misdemeanors. Isabelle wilkerson argues in her latest book, cast, that American History has been shaped by a hidden caste system. And in a lab of ones own, the National Science foundations first female director, rita caldwell, discusses her career and sexism in the scientific field. Also being published this week, evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom explains how to identify misinformation in datadriven arguments in their book, call them b. S. In make change, journalist sean king writes about his work as a social justice activist. And National Book awardwinning author edward ball recounts the life of his great great grandfather, a ku klux klan member, in life of a klansman. Find these titles this coming week wherever books are sold, and watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on cspan2. On our weekly Author Interview program after words, syndicated columnist cal thomas offered his thoughts on whether the United States will remain a superpower. Heres a portion of the show. It used to be when you had an election, the losing side would go lick its wounds, theyd have meetings how do we retool our message, how to we win next time. Now its how do we bring this guy down. This person down. And they were arguing about impeachment, the democrats were, even before the election and certainly the day or two after. Some of the quotes from some of the more radical members of congress. Thats not the way to do it. And this poisons the atmosphere. And as people said during this recent impeachment fiasco, impeachment was supposed to be rare. And now i fear that when republicans get back in control of both houses of congress and theres a democrat president , theyre going to go the same route. And that will polarize and poison the political atmosphere even more than it is now, which is bad enough. To watch the rest of this program and find err episodes of after words, visit our web site, booktv. Org. Click on the after words tab near the top of the page. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to this 2020 virtual gaithersburg book festival, or we like to call it the vgbs. Im your host, and although were missing you in person, were so happy youve chosen to spend your time with us virtually for this evenings watch party. We would very much appreciate if you would do three things for us. First [inaudible] second, leave a comment below to leapt us know where your watching us from. And third, if you subscribe, youll get
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