During the presidency of clinton and hw and george w bush. Were going to get started here with round two of president s on whom oliphant was able to bestow his gifts and a country on which oliphant was able to give his gifts to the american citizens. We have a cast to add their voices. Once again we have Miller Center people here. And the Miller Center, one of its main emphases is the focus on studying the presidency in depth, historical depths, with objectivity. In other words were all in the business of doing stuff that an editorial cartoonist is not in the business of doing, which is reacting to p events on a daytoday basis, which pat oliphant did more than 10,000 times in his 60 plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. Whereas we all trooif to be as objective as we can, the job of the editorial cartoonist, and pat oliphant, as well as anybody has ever done it, to provide comment, to provide opinion, to provide something to provoke discussion rather than perhaps to aspire to settle discussion. The panel today, this afternoon, which will cover the president s from george bush i dont use the hw. He was george bush when he was president. When John Quincy Adams became president , john adams didnt have to change his name. So im sticking with george bush and his immediate successor bill clinton. And then george w. Bush, the one who came next and finally we dip our toe into the obama presidency, part of which pat oliphant was able to capture in his cartoons. Were also going to see at least one example of pat oliphants great gifts as a sculptor, unfortunately we only get to see it in two dimensions. One of our panelists, mary kay kerry, can tell us something about that sculpture and the president who it portrays. Mary kate is a senior fellow at the Miller Center. Shes been teaching this year in the Politics Department of the university. She was a speech writer and a Communication Specialists of all sorts in the bush quail campaign of 1998 and during the george bush presidency. The former director of the Miller Center and member of the History Department here held prominent positions in both bushes administrations. And probably did other things that im not aware of that are worth noting. And then chris lu, a senior fellow at the Miller Center, has worked over the years in all three branchs of the government. I dont know how many people get to say that truthfully at least, including seven years in the obama administration. So what were going to do is the same thing we did the first time around. Were going to take cartoons from each one of these presidencies in sequence, all of them pat oliphant creations that are now part of the university of virginias special collection library. And that are available, in many cases, for you to go see, either there or over at the Miller Center where there are some others. And lets start with that first cartoon. Okay. So for those of you who cant read that a far because because i know its a little difficult. You have george bush on the top, what they try to sell. And as he is perceived, and then due k dukakos, what they try to sell, how he is perceived. And then it has altered egos i cant read that. Can anybody . I can. Altered egg goes or how we think of them when we think of them at all. Goes or how we think of them when we think of them at all. Goes or how we think of them when we think of them at all. Oes or how we think of them when we think of them at all. S or how we think of them when we think of them at all. There you go. I was on the 1988 campaign on the bush side, i would say the top half is exactly not true, not how he was perceived and the bottom half is exactly how dukakos was perceived from our point of view. I remember a tshirt that said beware of greeks wearing lifts. There was a lot of joking about the difference in height between governor dukakis and president bush. I remember there was a saturday night lift skit, that played on this there was the other side to michael due is exactly what perceived in george bush. A war hero, 58 combat missions, and lifelong public servant, and i met david mucull k mccullough said it takes about 50 years for historians to render judgment on a president and how glad he was to see that historians had come around on george bush and given him the credit he truly deserved, and that george bush was alive to see it. And so i do think that he was admired widely, especially by the time he died. And so i do think the top of this is not accurate, but i also realize im a little biased. See if this is on. Yeah. So whats been portrayed here, one of the challenges, by the way, for the panel is for many of you, we dont need to explain what the references are in these cartoons because you get many of you probably remember, oh, theyre talking about the wimp factor. Theyre talking about bush is a wimp. For young people nowadays, they thought george bush was a wimp . Why did they think he was a wimp . Thats actually a really good question. The origin of the wimp factor label was a Newsweek Magazine cover that actually had a picture of bush, under it, the wimp factor. Which stung. At the time, i was a Career Foreign Service officer. I was not on the campaign trail and in fact had no declared political affiliation. I would go into the administration actually as a detailee from the state department to work in the Bush White House at the beginning of 89. It may seem like 49 now, as i age, and it all looks misty. But the question, why did first, why was he labeled a wimp, and why did the label kind of seem to stick . Even if youre a bush partisan, and frankly, just about everybody who worked for bush became one if they had not been before, its interesting, just as a little sidebar comment, you do learn a lot about these leaders by looking at the attitudes of the people in the circle around them. And he commanded a lot of loyalty among the people around him. So but why . There is something about the thin, reedy voice, having been kind of a second banana to reagan for eight years. The sense that on the campaign trail, he was he was actually not, in my view, a forceful and charismatic public speaker, by and large. He actually is one of those people, actually, johnson had a little bit of this, too. Came across much better in private than in public. Reagan, by the way, sometimes is just the opposite. So there are qualities there. Theres an emotional quality that would occasionally leak to the surface and a sense that on the campaign trail, he would just kind of spout the conventional pabulum. People who asked him to say to different audiences, and therefore, people had trouble getting a firm sense of him. And then some people both on the right and the right wanted him to be a more muscular conservative, in one image of him, and he didnt fit that. So but there is something to this that then you have to recognize. Theres something in the image of him that people are perceiving. I dont think by im not sure that by 1992, mr. Oliphant would have drawn bush the same way after the gulf war. But youll see in the next cartoon, he sticks with this image for a while in the early bush period, frankly because the caricature seems to capture something thats resonating with a lot of the american people. And you just have to then face up to that and understand it. And this is a final little comment. This is one of the reasons these cartoons are so valuable as historical items. They capture something about the way people are perceived in their generation that will then be lost 30 years later. And that by looking at the cartoons, you can recover. What i find interesting about these cartoons is how engrained these Public Perceptions get in peoples minds, and to somebody who spent a lot of my life working on campaigns, the Honest Campaign recognizes your liabilities and tries to push back against that. You try to push back against the unforced errors, and of course, the most famous unforced error from the 88 campaign, youll recall, Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with kind of an ill fitting helmet. No candidate would ever do that now. And so that could have just as easily been the perception here of dukakis, and of course, then youll remember mary kate is going to talk about this better. Some of the more important moments of george bush 41, whether its the unfair, i would say, the grocery scanner thing where he didnt know how that worked, or the famous moment in the 1992 debate when he looked at his watch, seeming to be bored. Now, whenever we prep a candidate for debates, we either take their watches off or tell them, never, ever look at your watch. I remember when i was working for john kerry in 2004, he was doing a president ial debate prep in wisconsin. We wanted him to go out and break a debate camp to do some public events. And gas prices were high. We wanted to highlight how gas prices were high, so we wanted to send him out to fill up a gas tank. To avoid the dukakis moments or the george bush grocery scanner moment, we actually checked, do you know how to fill up a gas tank . And its not that we were ever sure that senator kerry had never filled up his gas tank, but thats one of those moments you just didnt want to happen. In part because of these moments and some of these early campaigns, you double and triple check every time you put your candidate in public, because you dont want these visual images to stick in the peoples brain. You know, one thing we havent noted yet, which has been a presence in every cartoon we have seen and every cartoon we will see, is the presence of that little character down there in the lower right quadrant, punk, the pigeon who was a de facto greek chorus, not a pigeon, a penguin that pat oliphant included in all of his cartoons, just to provide an additional dollop of commentary. But for me, the joy of these cartoons is on the one hand, theyre snapshots of the moment. But on the other hand, theyre windows into a period. And i think what we start seeing in 1988 in this cartoon is the departure from the era in which we regarded president ial elections as contests between giants. Think of theodore whites the making of the president 1960. Its as if achilles and hair aclees were meeting on the field of battle, two titanic figures, either one of whom was worthy of trotting on a heroic stage. And now, i think we see by 1988, were looking at president ial candidates as diminished and even comic figures. And thats in some ways become the default setting ever since. So this is actually a very nice cartoon. And this is george bush and George Washington walking down pennsylvania avenue on Inauguration Day 1989. And that was the 200th anniversary, not to the day, but to the year, of George Washington being sworn in at the same time george bush was sworn in. And so president bush was actually very honored by that. And got sworn in using two bibles, one stacked on top of the other, and one was the bush family bible, and the other was George Washingtons bible. And he started his inaugural address by pointing that out because he was so honored by that. And one other comment that brought this to mind was that same conversation with David Mccullough, David Mccullough believes that george bush was the most qualified person to run for president since the founders at the time. And didnt say it at the time, but said it afterwards. And that brought it to mind as well. All the jobs that president bush had done in service to our country before he became president perfectly prepared him for that moment and is the reason why we were able to get through the cold war without a single shot being fired, end of the cold war, excuse me. So thats what jumped out at me about that. He was very proud of that moment. The only thing i thought was amusing in this one, the building on the righthand side, if im not mistaken, is the old post office, which is now the trump hotel. And what is interesting about this, simply, without talking about the current president , and mary kate and others, philip, you can comment. President , i dont think, i think its seen as bad form to compare yourself to previous president s. Im not sure, and again, i think while it was perfectly appropriate here for president bush to pay homage to george bush with a bible, it was seen as its not the classiest thing to say im the greatest president since soandso. I was referring to somebody else, actually. Simply to say that, you know, there are subtle ways that president s reference back to previous president s. Everybody wants to sort of seem kennedyesque without saying im being like john kennedy. Thats one of the interesting things i saw in this cartoon. You cant really see what punk is saying, but it says beautiful, aint it, george. And interesting is the second george is written in a different font. I guess you would call that, what is that font . 18th century font, actually. So a pun on two georges and the 18th century font. Im struck with the image of the other president in this picture. George washington. Who has come down to us, i think, largely because of the pictures we have of him as this sort of bland and even boring figure. And a solid and virtuous in ever way, but no spark of life do we see in any of the pictures we have of George Washington. Just take out your dollar bill and look at that. Whereas in truth, i dont think any american in history has been a figure of such excitement and adoration in his own generation as George Washington was in his. People were crazy about washington. They thought he was not only respectable and had all the virtues of respectability, but was an exciting guy. A sexy guy. But washington, i think, is doomed to always be the bland figure that his portraitists portrayed him as. So, i had to ask well, i guess, should i read this out loud . Here is apparently dan quayle in the baby carriage saying gug gug, mccarthyism, gug, gug. George bush saying, my gosh, listen to that. Dans first word in office. And punk saying, you must be so proud. And this apparently, i had to ask, is a reference to the nomination, and that dan quayle said that the people opposed to john towers nomination were engaging in mccarthyism. And i find this very unfair. And i think that theres a little bit of background, which is that george bush first met john tower in 1961, when george bush was Harris County republican chair in houston, which was quite a big deal. And john tower decided to run for Lyndon Johnsons senate seat in the special election after johnson left to become Vice President. And thats when the two of them first became friends. At this point, they had been friends for almost 40 years. In 1968, i think there was a discussion earlier on the earlier panel about nixons short list for Vice President ford, but in 68, according to jon meachams book about bush, destiny and power, nixons short list for vp was john tower, george bush, spiro agnew, and one more, Ronald Reagan. Wouldnt that have been something . So then now comes 1989. At this point, tower is former senator tower, former chair of the Armed Services committee in the senate. Bush names him his own freld ldo secretary of defense, and it comes out there are concerns to, as they put it, his love of women and booze, and there was also some sort of conflict of interest investigation as well, and it was the First Time Since 1959 that a cabinet officer was not confirmed. The senate at that point was 45 republicans, 55 democrats, i believe. And the vote went down, 4753. 53 no. So that, to me, means i believe that means two democrats crossed over. And voted yes. Or more republicans voted no. But it was due to the fact that the democrats were in the senate, in control of the senate. And that is why tower did not get through. The larger point to make here, though, is george bush felt very strongly that loyalty goes down as well as up. And was tremendously loyal to john tower despite all the flaws that were exposed. In meachams book, he cheerfully says to john tower, i will not pull the rug out from under my friend and stuck with him. It also, i think, set the stage for why he was so tremendously loyal to Clarence Thomas nomination as well. He, i believe inaccurately, is depicted here as treating dan quayle as some kind of baby. And that couldnt be further from the truth. He went against the advice of everyone who had all kinds of people on the short list for quayle i mean, for Vice President , went with kaquayle ia surprise move, and really treated quayle as an equal, i think because he himself had been a Vice President and he wanted the same treatment for his own Vice President. So he continued the tradition he started with president reagan on having lunch every week with the Vice President. They had a very close relationship. And i think he was this is not the way he looked at dan quayle. Philip probably has more to say. This is about a speech that quayle gave after the tower nomination was defeated. I take a more sympathetic view to the cartoonist perhaps than mary kate does on this one because i do not join the dan quayle rehabilitation lobby. I agree with what mary kate said, that bush tried to treat quayle the way he thought a Vice President should be treated. And with appropriate dignity, but do not think that dan quayle was one of the key insiders of the bush administration. Though he was in a lot of meetings and bush treated him appropriately, but he was not a very influential person, i believe, in the senior ranks of the administration. So heres what happens here. This is early 89. Tower has gone up and been defeated. And quayle gave a really quite nasty speech, basically saying tower was defeated because of mccarthyism. Understand, the investigation of tower had been run by sam nunn, who was the chairman of the senate Armed Services committee. I actually had, for not knowing anything about this panel, last month i was with sam nunn and actually, jack reed, for other reasons. And nunn kind of basically, for some reason, started reminiscing about the tower fight at some length. And he, to this day, feels that it was perhaps the hardest thing he ever had to do in the senate. He had known tower a long time, as all of the senators had. He had worked with him on Armed Services for many years. To accuse and by the way, a lot of this investigation was done extremely confidentially. And very little of the detail of what was found in that investigation was ever made public. And so to accuse basically sam nunn of being the latter day version of joe mccarthy was not a wise thing to say. And it was not as george bush might be caricatured as saying, it wasnt a prudent thing to say. Since of course bush was going to be depending on people like sam nunn as an absolutely essential partner in anything he was going to try to get done on National Security issues for the next four years, including, by the way, the handling the confirmation of the person who was nominated to take the place of tower, which turned out to be a guy named dick cheney from wyoming. As the secretary of defense. So here, people noticed in 89 that this was kind of this was dan quayle making his political debut in a big way. Because he had been very mild mannered on the campaign trail in 88. And here he is kind of making his debut in early 89 in kind of a hitman role that people had used to associate like agnew had done for nixon, gore would later do a little bit of this for clinton. And it was not an attractive role for quayle, and it was not an attractive role, i think, for bush to have quayle play. And i think oliphants basically calling him on it. Whether one thinks that dan quayle was underrated or for the first time tonight, overrated, this to me is really an example of the caricaturists art. We have seen cartoon after cartoon where noses and chins and eyes were treated in typical caricature fashion, right . Exaggerated. And here, we dont even see dan quayle. The impression being that he is an infant, and therefore, of no significance at all. But to not show a character as a form of caricature i think is really interesting. The baby carriage has that fancy monogrammed initial q like its the super fancy baby carriage from a really wealthy family. Thats a nice little touch. You know, i forgot to say earlier, the little bubbles or whatever signifying dan quayle there, invisible dan quayle, reminds me of doonsbury at the time would show bush as a skippy twin, like an asterisk or feather or bubbles. And that became a big joke in the white house, and president bush got a big kick out of it. There were many prank photos taken of john sununu and bob gates and dick cheney and people like that talking to an empty chair, talking to the podium when nobody is at the podium, and then they would sign it and send it to the president. It would be this big joke. You may recall, dana carvey at the time doing hilarious impersonations of the president. After he lost the office, the election, he invited dana carvey to the white house and laughed at himself tremendously and did impersonations with him. The beginning of a great friendship. Both, the cartoons, some of the oliphant cartoons, and the dana carvey stuff, is at the bush library because it was such a big part of his time in office and his selfdeprecating humor. Should we jump to the next one . Do you want to comment . Move on to the clinton years. We have one more. Oh, we do. Lets not move on to the clinton years. So in one week, there was, after he left office, there was a funeral of president ford at the National Cathedral, and i went to it, and there were a tremendous number of boy scouts were the ushers at the cathedral for the service, because jerry ford was an eagle scout. And so my children went to the Cathedral Schools and knew some of the choir boys who sang at the state funeral, and president bush gave a eulogy for president ford amongst other president s speaking, and the choir boys i ran into the next day, and they said, oh, mrs. Cary, we want you to know, we had a vote. And president bush gave the best eulogy of all of the eulogists. And i said, oh, my gosh. Boys, i will tell the president. He would love to know that. And in hindsight, i told the story years later at his funeral, that i think president bush knew there would be boy scouts in the aisles, and so the tone of the eulogy was, this is what young people can learn from jerry ford. And sure enough, there was choir boys there who got the message and loved it. So the same week, i go to the National Portrait gallery that had just opened their new president ial portraits wing, and this sculpture by pat oliphant is right in front of the official portraits of president bush 41 and 43, still there, and i love td and thought it was really funny and captured his love of horseshoes and his athleticism in a lot of ways. So i wrote him a note, and i wrote a lot of notes to president bush over the years, and he would always write back. We were penpals. I have this binder, personal notes from 41. And i brought it with me. And so i wrote him this note and said, first of all, you won the choir boys vote. Second of all, you have to go to the National Portrait gallery next time youre in town and see this thing. He wrote me back, and i thought i would read it to you. It is, dear mary kate, overwhelmed am i. Imagine, a guy like me winning the vote of the National Cathedral choir boys regarding my eulogy. Yes, i would love to go see the newly opened portrait gallery some day with my new hip in place, which he had just gotten. I have to go out now and kick some serious butt. Thanks for writing, love gb. I just thought, the next thing you know, he did not come to washington to see it. He saw images of it. The bush library had a second one purchased and theres one at the National Gallery of art and one at the bush library, and its still there, and it was one of his favorites. So he really enjoyed that sculpture, and i want to say thank you to mr. Oliphant for creating it. There you go. Any other comments on this marvelous sculpture . Let me take this one. I love this cartoon. Let me tell you, try to describe it to you. Its depicting a couple of used car salesmen. On the left, it says conservative health care and kind of a thuggish looking salesman. The sign says, like new, runs real nice. Needs cosmetics. And then you have bill clinton in a kind of, it says imagine your new car here. Clinton health care coming soon. Then the right banner is important. Clinton, we finance. And then punk in the middle says, who to you fancy we should buy a used car from . The reason i love this cartoon is that its incredibly timely. This is from the 1993 health care fight. And you could fast forward and you could basically take the Affordable Care act, obamacare, put it where conservative health care is. You could either put in the Clinton Health care, you could put whatever donald trump has proposed or wants to propose. You could put medicare for all there. The we finance is perfect because obviously, thats the criticism of big Progressive Health care plans like medicare for all. How do you pay for all this . It really depicts, i think, the challenge we have with health care and the system. We dont have we have a series of nonvery appealing options that are presented by politicians. And a lot of it is simply imagining what something could look like if you could finance it in some way. So a lot of the cartoons well be looking at are particularly timely. This one is especially timely. Ill only add to that, other than the fact that the republican car is an old gt, you see that its got the fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. I just think this is the best cartoon i have ever seen about the clinton administration. Really in a way, that image of clinton and the whole way thats portrayed captures something deep actually about clinton and a lot of things that i think really in a way only a picture like this imagined in this way could do. One of the things thats interesting about the oral histories that the Miller Center has conducted is reading through the ones that have been released, including most of the interviews for the clinton project. You may recall that, and it sort of worked its way into the popular memory of that election, that James Carville famously wrote on a wall at their headquarters in little rock, change versus more of the same. Its the economy, stupid. Dont Forget Health care. And a lot of people concluded from that that one of the issues that clinton had emphasized when he ran for president in 92 was health care. Well, it comes through loud and clear in these oral history interviews which you can access through the Miller Center website, that he didnt talk very much about health care. That he talked a lot more about welfare reform and other issues. But when he became president , there was this, he sort of inherited this impression that health care was going to be a major part of his agenda. He bought into that, and it turned out to be the biggest political failure of his first term. Well, let me lead off on this. The date is important. Its october 1993. To help you remember late october 1993, this was the month of blackhawk down in the somalia catastrophe. This was a really bad month in clintons first year in Foreign Policy. The haiti mess also, and so what youve got here is blind man clinton in the darkening park. Is this the best of Foreign Policy, christopher . And his seeing eye dog, who is also blind, says yes, sir, i believe it is. Of course, christopher is warren christopher, his secretary of state. And then you have punk in the bottom righthand corner letting them know that the bus is coming. Next stop, bosnia. Theyre in the dark, and theyre blind as to what theyre doing and where theyre going, and theyre looking for the bus to Foreign Policy. Really, for that particular moment in october 1993, it just kind of catches it. One of the things that clinton learned by virtue of being president on the job was that he could make unpopular decisions on Foreign Policy in matters like haiti and bosnia and mexico and so on. He could make decisions that in the short term he knew would be unpopular, and yet derive the net benefit of being admired as a president who was un who was willing to make tough decisions, and clinton, his own way of making sense of the fact that by the end of his first term, people thought of him with much high regard in Foreign Policy than they had before is he said its like taking your kids to the dentist. They never want to go, but they appreciate the fact that you took them there when they were kids. And i think he learned something about Foreign Policy by virtue of having to be the president overseeing Foreign Policy. I would start with this one. Incredibly timely. February 11th, 1999. This is after bill clinton is acquitted on impeachment. He is dancing on the left, playing bongoes, smoking a cigar, saying free at last, free at last. Break out the broads. Im free at last. And then you have ominously history writing in the book in the upper right. Punk is saying, the moving finger writes and having writ, moves on. And this is a part where punk may be wrong on this one. In the sense that people will remember post impeachment, clinton was fairly popular. Very popular. He actually left office fairly popular. History doesnt just write once, and we have seen the way that history has continued to reevaluate bill clinton and his perceptions obviously have changed over the last couple years as well. But it does sort of show that even an impeachment effort that fails still leaves a mark in history. That is something that is not to be underestimated either in 1999 or 2019. What really strikes me about this, if you remember, contrast this with the cartoons of 93. And in some respects, both those cartoons you looked at, clinton is portrayed, theyre poking fun at him but theres also a side of the cartoons that are affectiona affectionate. This strikes me as a bitter cartoon. The view of clinton has soured in some deep way. And the way hes portrayed, you know, even down to kind of the imagery of the bongo drums, the irresponsible beatnik side of it. But this is an angry cartoon. And the contrast between that and even that health care cartoon, which in a way is really so affectionate. And this image is powerful to me. Yeah, my reaction, the previous panel, there was a lot of discussion of noses. And clintons nose has evolved here since 1993. And the cigar, he kind of looks like hes naked to me and only wearing socks. And the bongo drums and it just, as a mother, im like, ew. And so i just think youre right. The sense of disappointment in how bill clinton ended his term with history looking over him like that is palpable. And i agree that the assessments of when he left office are very different from how they are now in the opposite way as it was with george bush. As i recall, this incident of bill clinton in sort of post acquittal revelry, going to africa and playing the bongo drums and smoking a big cigar. That actually happened. And you know, theres something about being gracious in victory that i think is appealing to americans. And not being gracious in victory, not dancing on the berlin wall, for example, in george bushs case, is offputting. I think pat oliphant probably captured that moment, yes, we didnt force him out of office. Yes, we think hes still doing a good job as president , but come on. Ill take this one. So this is george w. Bush surrounded by republicans saying im going to have to reposition myself away from you guys. Im a compassionate conservative. One of them says, what the hell is that, gw. The third one says, i thought you said youll need all the help you can get. And this is before the 2000 election. So this was right . October of 99, right. So i remember at the time when he first labeled himself a compassionate conservative, there were many of us on the right who said, hey, wait a minute. Are you saying the rest of us arent compassionate . And it was a real Sticking Point that Arthur Brooks has written books on this, that that was not helpful that he did that. And i can see why it was fodder for humor, because it did step on a lot of peoples toes. And its not a very nice portrayal of the other republicans. They look like something out of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but it does make a good point. Whats your take, philip . Well, youll see hes given bush this big white hat. Hes going to use this motif again. At this time, actually, bush barely seems the white hat seems roughly appropriate to bushs size. This too will change. In the portrayals. Ill just stop there. Let me just add one thing. I think whats important here is this is october of 99. So this is when he is running for office, and its this interesting dynamic when president ial candidates either run against washington or run against their own party. And hes saying, look, im not like these other people in washington. This is not inconsistent with the way bill clinton ran for office, barack obama ran for office, and i suspect if you were to draw the same cartoon four years into office, they all would have the same color again, whether its white or black, depending on your perspective, because as president s learn, you may have run against these people, but theyre going to help you get your legislative agenda done. Theyre going to protect you in times of impeachment. Theyre going to help fight your battles for you. It doesnt become the us v. Them mentality once youre in office. Theres a real trajectory to george w. Bushs relationship to other republicans. As captured here, he in some ways defined himself in distinction from the prevailing image of Congressional Republicans who were seen as hard edged and callous and not at all captured by the word compassionate. And so he was in a sense running for president by running against his party. While hes president , after he wins and is reelected, people are saying, hes the true incarnation of Ronald Reagan. Hes more like Ronald Reagan than he is like his father. He was embraced by the republican party. Since then with the rise of donald trump, george w. Bush is essentially an outlier once again. I remember seeing bush quoted one time on the issue of immigrants crossing the border without documentation. And his comment was, if there are willing to cross the big bend, we want them. And can you imagine a republican saying anything like that today . So bush is a president who often said im not going to try to evaluate my performance in office. Im going to leave that to history. History is going to have an interesting time with his change in reputation within his own party. Incidentally, perhaps one of the most eloquent writers if youre interested in the subject about reagan and the bushes and how george w. Bush is trying to reconcile that, carl canon wrote a terrific book reflecting on all of that, which ill give a little shout out to carl. Because its trying to kind of come to grips with some of the things you just raised. What is it called, do you know . I think maybe reagan and bush, or both of those names are in the title. Thats your homework. This is six days after 9 11. If you cant read, the little boy is wearing a tshirt that says Civil Liberties. There is no punk. There is no comment. And the cartoon needs very little comment from me. Except one thing is its an ambivalent cartoon and very sensitive. You see, there was a way this could have been done in which uncle sam is portrayed as being overbearing and too muscular. Actually, uncle sam in the cartoon is portrayed as a noble, heroic figure. But watch out for the backswing, kid. Again, i dont know if this is unintentional. Uncle sam looks a lot like abraham lincoln, which harkened back to suspending habeas corpus in the civil war, but that might have been me reading too much into it. I thought the same thing, looked like lincoln. It goes to the continuing debate between privacy and security. And this sums it up perfectly. It is interesting, though, that six days after 9 11, that pat oliphant would realize that Civil Liberties are going to be part of what were going to have to end up thinking about and be concerned about in our understandable and immediate desire for safety and security and order. And i think, you know, if you recall that time, there was not just the trauma of the actual events. But there was the almost predictable or we were all predicting that 9 11 would be the first of a series of attacks. That was the beginning rather than the end of a series of similar attacks that were coming out of nowhere and even worse, coming from within the United States. And the idea of being, of saying dont forget Civil Liberties and uncle sam being attentive to Civil Liberties, at least telling Civil Liberties to watch out for the consequences of wielding the sort, i think that was an extraordinarily timely comment at a time when most people werent even thinking about that. All right. Okay. All right. Now weve got our act together. So this cartoon requires a little bit of explanation. This is i dont know how well you remember this episode, mary kate, about the u. S. Attorneys in 0607. I remember that, but you go first. So this is march 07. A little context. In the winter of 0607, the white house and the new attorney general, al gonzalez, come up with the scathingly brilliant idea that patriot act at the time had been passed in a way that allowed u. S. Attorneys to be appointed without Senate Confirmation if needed. And someone had the idea, lets fire several of them that are kind of obnoxious to us for one reason or another, and put together a list of them, and then we can just throw appointees into their place without having to go through Senate Confirmation quickly. And they actually began this process, and notoriously i think fired eight of them. And then in defending that they fired eight, there was talk of, you know what, of course, we could have fired all 93 of them. As president s do always at the beginning of their first term. But this was not the beginning of the first term. This was not even the beginning of the second term. This was well into the second term. So theres an outcry thats going on for a couple months by the time this cartoon is written. Investigations at first, various people at the Justice Department said the white house had nothing to do with all of this. All of the staffers who uttered such words would later have to resign. One of those staffers had come straight from the white house and become gonzalezs chief of staff. He had to resign. Then another woman at the Justice Department who uttered words like that also had to resign. Emails emerged and it turned out the white house had been involved. There were political issues. And some of this did link to karl rove, who was putting maybe a little bit of the heat on the white house counsel, Harriet Miers. Here you had this cartoon. Now, as all these emails are coming out, and it was clear that the white house and rove were involved to some degree in these socalled nonpartisan ideas about the u. S. Attorneys, fire all the u. S. Attorneys, the light bulb goes off. All 93 of them. We can claim it was Harriet Miers idea. Deny it was politically motivated. Perfect. You see, of course, dr. Strange rove, punk on the bottom is saying another brilliant idea. And then you have dick cheney, notice now bush portrayed as practically, you can barely see him in his seat in comparison to cheney. Carl has a brilliant idea. So there you are. One of the interesting things to me is i read this in march of 07, is actually on the inside, cheneys power is actually already really waning a lot in the second term. The public image hasnt caught up to that reality yet. And actually, in my view, roves influence was also waning. And this particular episode didnt help. Bush himself had to go out and publicly state that he thought the firings of the eight had not been handled well. That famous expression was uttered, mistakes were made. So no one involved in this came out looking good. And of course, they did not go fire all 93 u. S. Attorneys. The next step that happened after that in the aftermath was there was somebody at the Justice Department who was interviewing new u. S. Attorneys and saying, how much do you love our president . Please tell me. Do you remember that, philip . I do not. There was sort of a loyalty question that was added to the job interview. And that hit the washington post. And there were rogue line prosecutors who saw an opening because they felt that the Justice Department was, you know, on the rocks a little bit. And they indicted senator ted stevens, and that was the beginning of how that indictment got through, because they thought nobody at the Justice Department would stop the indictment of a republican senator when this was going on. And as we all know, that was a completely mishandled prosecution and got later overturned by the obama attorney general once he got in office. But theres a longer story with all that. The thing that struck me, just looking at it from sort of a comic point of view, was that karl rove there looks so evil. And is actually kind of rehabbed himself over the years and is sort of another nice guy talking head on tv. And meanwhile, i dont know if you saw that cheney film that came out, but cheney has been completely vilified. Its kind of interesting to see cheney looking kind of benign there, and karl rove looking so evil, when nowadays its sort of reversed in the pop culture. One other thing i think is interesting is if you ask most americans, at least at the time, the perception was, karl rove is an evil genius. Dick cheney pulling all the strings, and again, philip pointed out, george w. Bush, very small. It will be interesting how history evaluates that relationship, and if any of you have been to the george w. Bush library, its a wonderful place to visit. Again, i think they try very hard and obviously philip knows better than anybody, to push back on this narrative that his decisions were controlled by other people. And again, it will be interesting to see how the Public Perceptions change as history goes on. Yeah, i recall very personally one occasion where this played out. I was the director of the 9 11 commission. We interviewed both of the relevant former president s, bush and clinton. And the Vice President s, cheney and gore, in the course of our investigation. Arranging these interviews was difficult, but anyway. So we go to the white house to interview bush. Bush and cheney actually had been asked to be interviewed together at the white house in one lengthy session. We had exceeded to that request. The fear was basically ten commissioners and me, and then president and Vice President had their note takers. The commissioners were very upset, some of the commissioners, the democrats, were very upset by these ground rules because cheney would dominate the conversation, and they wouldnt be able to hear from bush. Of course, exactly the opposite happened. Bush completely dominated the conversation. And actually, you had to work hard to actually get questions in to chaina and get cheney to talk. Now, then, afterwards, the democrats said, oh, maybe that was cheneys plan all along. But, by the way, to people who knew bush a little bit and knew a little bit about this relationship, this was not a surprise. For sure, it this was in the spring of 04, and bush is not a shrinking violet. And hes quite articulate, and he has a characteristic decisive style. His style in talking to him is quite entirely different from clinton, who also fills up the room conversationally, but clinton is just full of wandering digressions and musings and speculations. And just burns the clock up on you when youre questioning him, which i did. And bush, by the way, is just not like this at all. Bush is incredibly direct, to the point, this, this, key point, boom, boom, boom, next. And that was very much the pattern when we actually talked to him in 04. But here you are a few years later and you know why. Let me ask a question of all of you, but i wonder, there are certain president s of whom the Public Perception forms that there must be somebody in their administration or somebody in their white house who is really making things happen. That perception doesnt arise for all president s. So, for example, it arose for george w. Bush. The perception, its cheney or its rove. Somebody is pulling the strings. With president trump, steve bannon. Chris lu, nobody ever said that about barack obama. Nobody ever said that about bill clinton. Is it a partisan thing . Is it the press tends to think republicans arent smart enough to do it on their own, there must be someone behind them, and democrats are smart enough . You just answered the question. That was too easy. My question is dont you agree . Look, i mean, i did not work with bill clinton, although i spent time with bill clinton. Barack obama, you could say many things about him. On his face, very smart, very, very smart. You know, very profess oriooriad his hands in a lot of different things. And its also, part of it, i think, is the ethos of the white house as well. We could talk a little more about this. We had a mantra, no drama obama. It was a very lowkey white house. We didnt leak. We didnt write books after we left. It was all about what was doing what was best for the president. And so its not to say that there werent people who were strong advisers before him, but that just may never have come out. Yeah, this is, boy, this next one is this one is a little harsh. Well, were now going backwards in time. This is july of 04. And punk in the bottom righthand corner has nothing to say. I think you can read the caption. In the upper right hand, its bush, who is wearing that white hat that you saw in an earlier cartoon, but who doesnt fit that white hat quite so well in this image. Would it make you feel better to know we had inaccurate intelligence . Hes saying to the dying soldier. And of course, you have, look how big dick cheney is. Standing over, he has nothing to say in this cartoon. Again, the image doesnt require much commentary from me. Six months after this was written, i would start spending quite a lot of time in iraq. And did for the next couple of years after that. And so a lot of these issues are very close for me. Ill just say that, just to help you set the context, july of 04 is really a point at which the war in iraq starts to really go south. Things were not going well and had been kind of gradually unraveling. The u. N. Envoy to iraq was killed in a truck bomb in august of 03. And then things began to degrade, kind of a slow incremental way. But really, the whole country burst into flames during the second half of 2004. And actually, things had gotten so bad that when it burst into flames, frankly, we had a very bloody fight in onbar province, we almost lost the war in the second half of 2004. And the fighting was very bloody in the second half of 2004. Thats just getting going here. At the beginning of 05, they have stabilized the situation a bit, and then they start getting overly hopeful again. And we go through some more cycles like this. But here we are with this cartoon is really set as the country is really beginning to visibly explode, and oliphant thinks its time to offer this image. For those that dont know the reference, and i actually did not know the reference, i had to look it up. Is it pieta . Pieta is a famous statue that is in vatican city where mary is holding jesus. And so this is, i think, one of the most insightful but perhaps one of the harshest of the cartoons we had a chance to look at. It might be one of the truest, i guess. Theres an irony here, which is you see here president bush, with i think an expression on his face that includes compassion, holding this fallen soldier, and the irony is after leaving office and ever since leaving office, this has been a major activity of former president bush, the Wounded Warriors program, and so on. Im also struck in this picture, totally different kind of comment, but whenever cheney is portrayed, theres no caricature to it at all. This is sort of a line drawing of Vice President cheney. I have no idea what to make of it. Is it that you cant caricature cheney . That hes such a caricature in and of himself . I dont know, but i think its kind of interesting that cheney is always just the way somebody would draw cheney if they werent caricaturing him. So, as a resident obama one, ill take this one. This is from march of 2007. This is a month after barack obama jumps into the race to run for president. On the left, its Hillary Clinton and barack obama wrestling over the black vote. And clinton is saying, the black vote is mine, obama. I have pandered to it for years. Ive taken it for granted for years. Its mine by right, obama. Obama says, its mine, clinton. Who has the greater right to it . And notably, punk in the lower left says or the black voter in the lower left says, who asked me . And punk says, youll be told later. So an amazingly harsh view about how democrats view the africanamerican vote, as something that we fight over and its a monolithic thing and someone owns it. The context for this cartoon was, barack obama ran for president , obviously, first africanamerican to become president. But he was not necessarily seen as the africanamerican candidate. When he started his race, he ran as, you know, sort of this postracial candidate. He didnt talk about race. The clintons had this amazingly good will among africanamericans from bill clintons time in office. So it really wasnt until after barack obama started winning races, in particular, the iowa caucuses, that africanamerican votes started to come to him. Then it became sort of a really critical part of his political base. But at this point, it was really kind of a coin toss as to who would be able to win this critical voting bloc. Yeah. The only thing i would add is, this is exactly what republicans thought was going on at the time. And that whole perfectly captured sense of entitlement that seemed to purvey mrs. Clinton for many years. Like you see, very funny. From the other side of the aisle, its very funny. At this time and very, very early in the battle for the 2008 democratic nomination, which was a year and a half yet to be decided, there was sort of uncertainty about obama among many africanamericans. Not so much about him per se, although he was a relatively new figure on the national stage, but rather, could an africanamerican be elected president in the United States of america . And obama, as chris pointed out, did not run as Jesse Jackson had run, for example, as essentially the candidate of black america. Obama ran in a more transcendent way. What validated him among many black voters, and you see this reflected in the polling over the months, is when he won the iowa caucuses. Because the message then to africanamerican voters in states like South Carolina in the democratic party, they constitute a majority, was white people will vote for this guy. He could actually win. And that had a lot to do with his winningness sort of tugofwar with Hillary Clinton for the black vote and going on and getting the democratic nomination and being elected and reelected as president. So this one, it is dated 2008 but im going to say it is april because i know when the pennsylvania primary was which was april of 2008. And in the upper left it says pennsylvania colon, hillary instructed barack on the finer points of being a regular guy. It is hard to see the detail. Shes wearing lowriding jeans, shes got a toattoo on her righ arm. An anchor. Saying beer in a shot, dhas it with the beer and dont raise the pinky when you drink, that is elitist. Obama wearing an out of place suit in a trucker bar. You could see his pinky is kind of out. And then punk is saying not to mention dangerous. So that is the pickup line. When you drink that is elitist and punk is saying not to mention dangerous. The funny part about this cartoon, yes, this is barack obama. Im not going to dispute the characterization, it is not the person you hang out at the bar with. And if you recall during himks time as first lady she was seen as out of touch and when she wan in 2016 she was seen not the choice of working class voters but at this particular moment in the 2008 president ial primary barack obama was winning a lot of suburban voters and young people and africanamericans, was not winning the White Working Class voters that end up in the end prolonging this primary contest. We went all the way until virtually the last president ial primary because after those initial victories that obama won, he lost a huge number of states in the midwest. And so the irony is that at this particular moment, particularly the only particular moment that in Hillary Clintons campaign she was seen at the champion of the White Working Class voter. This looks to me like harvard and Yale Law School at the bar trying to figure out how to drink a beer. And it just made me laugh. The guy with the hairy back and the pants falling down. The whole thing makes me laugh and hits a nerve of what people perceive those two, as both elitist, telling one another how to drink a beer. And theyre offhand comments that i think often stick with candidates for president. So basket of deplorables, the 47 , thinking back to mitt romney in 2012 and it was about this time, wasnt it, chris, that obama, i think, trying to explain in sort of a clinical analytical way why it is is a so many White Working Class people were drawn to his opponent and to in some cases the republicans when he talked about they claim in their desperation, they cling to their guns, they cling to religion. And dont know how what the context was for speaking that or how it came out. But it became sort of, see, this is what he really thinks about the kind of people who were in this bar. I would also say at this point in the Campaign Somebody had the idea to send barack obama bowling. He bowled i think a 47 so he was not a bowler. Dont put your candidate in situations they are not comfortable in. There was a time in the 1980 primaries that candidate bush went bowling and back in the late 70s, bowling shoes had different soles on them so that you could slide with one foot and put the brakes on with the other and the secret service didnt know that he was lefthanded and leftfooted, so they gave him a regular pair of shoes and he went flying as soon as he threw the ball and ends up on a heap in the Bowling Alley and he jumped up and said nobody said this is going to be easy and they were right. I love that quote. Well go to the last one. So this is obviously a big statue head of barack obama. The masses are chanting obama, hes come to save us all. Please, please save us, all hail barack obama, oh, great messiah, or punk or donkey on the left is saying all else ive got carrie or ugh, hillary and so im getting this is probably 2008. Again this is the last one and this is a good one to end on because i think you could probably do the same cartoon now about how democrats feel about barack obama. Theyve idolized him and they have a great expectation at the time, probably outsized, unrealistic expectations. I think this also plays on the critique of obama as a celebrity. This is a constant theme that came up earlier in the 2008 campaign, youll remember sarah palin mocked him for that hopi changing thing. The very First Campaign that john mccain ran against barack obama was titled celebrity and when he accepted his nomination in denver he did it with giant greek columns behind him which made him look godlike. So this is fairly mocking, probably that the passionate way that a lot of democrats look at obama and probably unfairly the lie onization of obama. I do want to note, among the different ways you could have portrayed obama on the pedestal, notice the use of the Easter Island statue motif. It does evoke the sense of pagans worshiping the idol. And of course theyre going to be a vanished civilization. Looking at this now in 2019, you wonder if this civilization has vanished and being reborn on some other island in some other form. I look at this photo and the east island imagery to me suggested there was some mystery, we dont know what the Eastern Island figures were about and a lot of people were having a hard time understanding what is barack obama mean, what does it mean that we elected somebody as president unlike anybody weve ever elected before. Is he some magical figure . Is he some godlike figure . And another way of looking at the crowd that is beneath him is that in effect thats the body politic, like to the extent that this head has a body, it is the people who have somehow folded their own identities into his. And i think it captures something, if you think back to november of 2008 and the months that followed, i think it captured something of the sense of hope, of not knowing how high obama could lead us and naturally, as happened with all president s, but maybe in his case an exaggerating degree, the ensuing disappointment when you realize hes a smart but immortal man. I thought this was astonishing cartoon. Yeah. And it is the last of our astonishing cartoons. And you all have been wonderful to bear with us through all of this. Lets thank our panel. [ applause ] and please before we leave, another compression of gratitude toward pat oliphant who is here in the audience. [ applause ] cspan has unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and Public Policy events. You could watch all of cspan Public Affairs programming on television, online, or listen on our free radio app and be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Coming up, a couple of events featuring former first Lady Michelle obama. We begin in a moment with our cspan series about the influence and image of first ladies. Historians discuss Michelle Obama family life, education and her role as part of the first black president ial couple. And then Michelle Obama on her autobiography after she and her husband left the white house. She talks about her time as a first lady. All ahead here on cspan3. If you enjoyed watching first ladies, pick up a copy of the book first lady, influence and image through interviews with top historians. Now available in paper back, hard cover or an ebook. Tonight on American History tv, our series landmark cases, produced in cooperation with the National Constitution center we explore the issues, people and places involved in some of the most Significant Supreme Court cases in our nations history. At 8 00 eastern we begin with the 1803 case mar berry versus madison establishing the basis for judicial review in which federal courts to invalidate acts of lower courts when they violate the constitution. And then scott versus sanford, a case that declared that dred scott and other black people could not be u. S. Citizens and that congress lacked the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. Watch land mork cases tonight on cspan3 and any time at cspan. Org. After Michelle Obama left the white house, she wrote her auto b autobiography becoming and she was asked to speak to the group about her life and time in the white house. We come into this house and there is so much to do. There is so much coming at you that there is no timeo