Transcripts For CSPAN Q A 20150413

[video clip] Andrew Ferguson the general point i was trying to make is that people seem to sort of assume the responsibility, journalists assume the responsibility to become experts in everything, in every manner of public debate and hold forth on them and i do not see that they have done much work, Much Research on the pieces that they do. I think that in magazines like the spectator, you seldom see people popping off for the sake of popping off. Brian lamb that was 1986. Andrew ferguson looks like i had taken a quaalude or something. I remember i could smoke during the interview, thats how long ago it was. Brian lamb only callin show somebody called up any of lung dying of lung cancer and said put that cigarette out, and that might have been the last time anyone smart. Anyone smoked on the show. Andrew ferguson christopher hitchens. Brian lamb you have been a pundit all your life . Andrew ferguson i would hate to think i was a pundit. It was interesting to think about that, 30 years ago because it is an obsession of mine in washington journalism, as that guy said on there, there is a class of people that make themselves experts on everything by which i mean they become experts on nothing so they can talk about the intricacies of centrifuges in iran and the minutia of the religious freedom act in indiana. It is just implausible. People really do not know enough about that many things to arrive at a real, plausible conclusion that they can articulate to people. It is one of the fictions we all live by here. Brian lamb we are in the political season. How much time have you spent with politicians in the last six months . Andrew ferguson i have not spent that much time with them. I have written a fair amount. It is in odd thing, when you go on the campaign trail now, it is so crowded. At this point in the cycle, the actual election will be held next year. And the Iowa Caucuses will be eight months from now. You dial that back to 1988 which i think was the first election i really covered extensively, at this point in the cycle, you could call up Dick Gephardts office and say i am going to be in New Hampshire, i would like to talk to him. They will pick you up in exeter and drive to portsmouth and you would have a half a day with them. And now, at this point in the cycle, you have to beat down the door to get time with these guys at all. When you go to events, i was at an event in des moines for an article about jeb bush and it was an event, the first annual ag summit, to bring out the republican candidates to talk. Half the republican candidates in the field showed up. There were maybe 450 people in the audience, 500, and there were 300 reporters. There were 1. 2 normal people per journalist. Ranks and ranks of people sitting there with laptops and phones at the ready. I just thought, man, this has changed quite a bit. Brian lamb how close did you get to him . Andrew ferguson this is the perfect example of beating down the door, i went for a long time getting unanswered emails. And then a phone call or two would be answered and they would say, oh yes, we want you to come see the governor, we can hardly wait. And then radio silence for another 10 days. This is not just true of bushs campaign, this is true of all of them as far as i can tell. Finally, they called up and said that if you can be in des moines next saturday we can give you 20 minutes with him but you have to fly to des moines. Brian lamb lets run a clip of when he was recently in iowa, it may have been the same trip you were on, to get a sense of how he addresses an audience. [video clip] jeb bush i do not know why the press is here but it is good to see them. [applause] [laughter] thank you for supporting your congressman, he will meet your help Going Forward and early money does matter. I want to get the legal part of this out of the way, i am seriously considering the possibility of running for president. All of this allows me to talk about the possibility in a way that does not trigger a campaign so thank you for allowing me to be lawyered up. And make sure i get that part of it right. I have fond memories of iowa. I got married when i was 21 years old, i fell in love at first sight, my life can be divided into b. C. And a. C. Before and after her. I met my wife when i was 17, it took me four years to convince her that i was ready to marry her then and there. I fell head over heels in love with this young, beautiful girl from mexico and it kind of changed my life. Part of that was we got married quickly, we had two kids, we lived in venezuela, and i came back to work on my dads campaign and the beginning of that was in iowa. Brian lamb what did you see up close that we do not see on television . Andrew ferguson not much. I guess you are closer physically in proximity to them in a way you are not. I was at that event and that was another one of those things, i showed up. I guess bushs Campaign Spokesperson gave me a ride over there, we met at a bar, i walked into this place and it is a museum like place outside of des moines. Inside there was 1. 5 normal people per journalist, ranks of cameras. It is just, such overkill in a sense because nobody is going to say anything at this point unless they make a mistake of course that is newsworthy. Polls do not matter. Anything that will affect the campaign happens behind closed doors were they are lining up money or campaign operatives. These events are perfectly staged and control as much as they can be controlled. And yet all of these news organizations are spending thousands of dollars to send somebody to des moines and stay at the hyatt so they can walk 20 minutes of jeb bush talking to a room full of iowans. Brian lamb what is your sense of why these people run . Andrew ferguson a lot of them one thing i have noticed about this field, and i think it is different on the republican side than it was before. How many of them are pure politicians. That is, they really havent done anything in their life since they started their campaign for hall monitor in seventh grade and have been running ever since. Scott walker started out of college, marco rubio has never really had a job, jeb bush started really late but he had these business jobs that depended a lot on his celebrity. Christie is a guy who was with the Prosecutors Office and straight into elected office. Their motives i suppose are slightly more suspect because this is the next rung on the ladder for these guys. To show that you are king of the hill you get to run for president , it is the next step. Brian lamb i want viewers to know that they can go to google, type in Andrew Ferguson, new republic new republic, the Weekly Standard. [laughter] Andrew Ferguson not anymore. Brian lamb this is a column that you wrote earlier this year, 2015, about huckabee christie, and paul. The fantasy will come to an end long before he reaches the white house gate. They wanted, we can assume, not a professional gambler, a fashion designer, or a collector of 19thcentury doll houses. No racecar drivers need apply. Neither do they want a prickly unconvincing hipster or a 52yearold man who still plays air guitar. Andrew ferguson those last three people are huckabee, paul, and christie, who i lumped together after they had one bad week. Huckabee was actually a very good governor of arkansas but he seems to have decided they wanted to be a talkshow host and a creature at the same time, a terrible combination for a president ial candidate. He started to show signs of his prigishness. The hipster is rand paul who have shown himself to be short tempered and i thought if he is getting this mad this early he is probably not going to be able to sustain a campaign. And the other one was Chris Christie who was just portrayed as returning from a trade trip to england. I think the times reporter talked about him going to three different parties with bono the rockstar. That also does not strike me as a president ial kind of affect. I do not think fdr ever went crazy because he met bing crosby or Ronald Reagan because he met madonna. I hope you never met madonna. It is not something a selfpossessed and worldly guy does. Brian lamb your career, we saw you back in 1987. You were working for the National Spectator ergo how long did you work there . Andrew ferguson it started in indiana and i think i started in 84. We all moved out here in 85 the following year and i worked 88 i covered the 88 campaign so probably until 89. Then i went to an editorial features writer and did that for a couple of years and was asked to write speeches for the first president bush. His chief speechwriter was a friend of mine. I did that for a year. As i said before, when i started working for him in the hellish year of 1992, i started in january when his approval was 47 or 48 and by march i got it down to about 35 . It just continue to plummet. The longer i worked, the worse it got. It was an invaluable experience and i have tremendous respect for him. Then i went to washingtonian as a writer and then john called up and said we are going to start a magazine and we have fred barnes and david brooks so lets go. I went to the standard. Brian lamb on the personal side, if you are talking to young people today, they do what you have done . You have a family, can you make enough money to make it work . Andrew ferguson i really do not know because the business in the time that i have been here has changed utterly because of the introduction of the internet. We started the Weekly Standard because there was no weekly conservative opinion magazine. There were monthlies like the spectator. There was a biweekly which was bill buckleys review. We decided that the pace accelerated to the point where we would be behind if we did not have something every week to comment on what happened the week before. Of course i am going to look back on that as just a joke. Now you are out of date if you are five hours behind the new crisis of the century and you have not read the last 40,000 tweets about it. When that change started to happen i thought, what i do is done for. There is not going to be an opportunity left for people to come up and write the kind of stuff that i write, which is sort of longer and more freeform and relaxed. It is not really on the news, to say the least. But i was wrong about that. In fact, now, there are so many journalism jobs and so much journalistic activity in washington, three times when i first came here. When i first came here and you wanted to be in the opinion line of work in journalism, you could work at the spectator, the new republic, washington monthly, that was about it. Now buzz feed has a huge political operation, the daily caller, the huffington post. But all seem to have 80 people working for them. That is one of the reasons that you go to these ag summits and there are all these people, have generated enough money they can send somebody. Brian lamb one of the things i want to do is talk to you about writing and words and what they mean. This is Chris Christie on the campaign trail. Chris christie i think what really matters to folks is do you get the job done . Do you tell them what you believe from your heart, even if they do not agree with every word of it . Let me say this to my fellow republicans in the room as we prepare to enter the primary season. If the standard you will hold candidates to is they must agree with you 100 of the time, let me suggest something to you. The only person you agree with 100 of the time is the person you see in the mirror every morning. The fact is, if we hold candidates for Public Office to that standard, let me tell you what you are going to get. Liars. Brian lamb your reaction . Andrew ferguson every time i see him, even when he is making kind of an inoffensive comment like that, he has a way of turning it into kind of an accusatory thing. You people do not get it. Let me explain it to you. You are not supposed to agree with him 100 of the time. It just reminds me of this tremendous truth that all of my friends from new york and new jersey do not understand which is that the rest of the country does not like people from new york and new jersey. I saw the same thing with giuliani. All of my friends in new york and jersey, when he ran for president last time, and of course he did not make it into the president ial year, were saying that he was a shooin and he is so popular. I was not going to like him, indiana is not going to like him, he is a new yorker and they do not like new yorkers. I think that is christies problem as well. It is a harsh, inyourface, unpleasant. Brian lamb you wrote in your column history records no case in which a republican hurt his reputation among fellow republicans by yelling at a reporter. It is always assumed that the reporter deserved it just on general principle. Andrew ferguson right. He had gotten in trouble because you snapped at a New York Times reporter on the trade trip i was talking about. People were suggesting that that was a faux pas to a reporter and i have been around republicans all my life and they do not mind it. Brian lamb why do republicans not like reporters . Andrew ferguson they assume they are all antagonistic and to a large degree they are right. They feel that they have not gotten a fair shake, that they are an unknown species to a lot of reporters and again i think they are right about that. There are a lot of reporters who have never had a conservative republican in their circle of friends. And tend to think that conservative republicans must have a screw loose somewhere. Brian lamb i do not know how close you get to calling yourself a reporter, but here is something you wrote, talking about antagonistic and sarcastic. The book is pretty good, by the way, written in a smooth and jokey prose. That is the book that mr. Huckabee wrote. Andrew ferguson i was impressed that he spoke truth to power. I am not big on namecalling but when you have the insult and the person perfectly matched as huckabee does there are think it is fun. Brian lamb does anybody tell you what to write . Ever . Andrew ferguson no, and i have probably suffered for it. Brian lamb you are told to write what you want to write . Andrew ferguson bill kristol is the chief editor of the Weekly Standard, and i have known him for 30 years, since the mid80s. We started the magazine with total respect for each other and if anything my respect has only grown. I cannot speak for him. He has never had called to call me on the carpet for something i have said and i have never had reason to think i have to ask to Say Something in particular. Brian lamb in a lot of these columns you have been critical. Lets watch a little bit of rand paul, and you talk about his open shirt. [video clip] rand paul i do not get it, i am from pennsylvania and i do not get it. You want to be new york . Do you want to be california . You have a governor that is allowing your energy industry, something nobody predicted was there 10 years, 15 years ago, it is there and you are tapping it and creating all kinds of jobs and you have done for your second now . Why would you give that up . What kind of craziness is going on in the state . How could you even consider . Do you want to be new york . There is no fracking and no natural gas. Theres natural gas, but it is under the ground and remains there. In california, the monterey shale formation is one of the biggest in the country and it sits there because the idiots do not want to bring it up. They do not want civilization, they do not want to advance. Do you want business or growth or jobs . Return your governor to office. Brian lamb does calling somebody an idiot work . Andrew ferguson , hardly ever especially if you mean it. Brian lamb does he mean that . Andrew ferguson probably, i think so. I have called people names and print over the years. But it shows that you have run out of other ways to discuss the person you are just going to because you ran out of gas, your creative juices are dried up so you are going to say he is an idiot. Heres a windbag or something. On the other hand words like that can be used to good comic effect but if you really mean it and are hurling it as an epithet i do not think it is effective. Brian lamb here is how you wrote about it and i want to ask how much you think about it. [laughter] Andrew Ferguson not at all. I can guarantee that will stop i can guarantee that. How long did it take you to write that . [laughter] Andrew Ferguson longer than it would you to read that although that does take some time, it is a long sentence. It takes a long time. The way i would do Something Like that, i think the sentence is probably overdone now that i hear it read back to me. But what would happen was , Something Like that is i would write it out in the first draft and i would over elaborate. There would be too much going on in the sentence, too many jokes or idealettes running around and i have to comb it back and do it again so it does not sound too extravagant. My problem is extravagance, the thing i have to avoid. Too much singing and dancing. Brian lamb what are some of your favorite words to use in a column . Or what are words you do not ever use . Andrew ferguson i cant use them, i wont tell you. [laughter] Andrew Ferguson you know, if you gave me another 10 minutes, i could come up with them. Brian lamb you did a column on the word issue. Andrew ferguson i hate reach out as a verb meaning that i telephoned or call somebody or asked something. I am not big on the word share i shared with him that i am going to dinner. I have a whole list of those. I have been really on alert lately for the phrase datadriven. Ive noticed mrs. Clinton loves to say things are datadriven. First cousin to that is evidence based. What they are usually talking about is somebody did some social science studies somewhere that produced some lame data ostensibly to prove one thing or another and that is data. Data drives their judgment meaning that we are not putting emotion into this, we are not thinking off the top of our heads, we are taking the data and going where the conclusion would lead. And that is never true. Brian lamb ive got a word i want to ask you about at the end of a sentence here. It is no suprise that a candidate that would use twitter to engage adversaries would be uncomfortable with an interview with a cnbc cupcake. Cupcake . In this day and age you can get away with that . Male or female . Andrew ferguson i have called men cupcakes, too. I use it as the shorthand for the extremely attractive sometimes too attractive people that have reading the news on the cable channels who do not carry a lot of gravitas and show off a lot of it is not like they all went to the sorbonne or are members of mensa or something. They are there because they are pretty. Brian lamb are you a member of mensa . Andrew ferguson i could never get in. Brian lamb what is the requirement . Andrew ferguson 200 and something. Probably double what mine is. Brian lamb another politician you write about is governor huckabee. God, guns, grit, and gravy. Explain the title, first of all. Mike huckabee it is not a recipe book for southern cooking. I went to put everybody 80s. If you are saying, i do not even know what a great is, relax. Grit is, relax. Here is the point of the book. There are three major cultural bubbles in america. New york, washington we are in two of those. And the other is hollywood. From those three cultural levels and might fashion, government, music, entertainment, movies television, all the things that set the american cultural table. But my point of my book is there is a big disconnect from the people, the values, the attitudes, the lifestyles of People Living in the three bubbles and People Living in what we often call the flyover country. Brian lamb does that work . Andrew ferguson his demeanor . Brian lamb talking about flyover country. You hear a lot of politicians say that washington is horrible and new york is horrible. All that there is a great deal of resentment towards washington and the over class in general, whether in entertainment or media or finance. I talked about in that piece about huckabee, was the danger that republicans, especially in this hyper specialized age where the echo chambers are the only components of the political conversation. Rightwingers only talk to rightwingers and the same with left wing. They will pick up remarks from the other side just so they can refute them. You can get your own kind of bubble that he is not talking about there. In which i said this about him, when he was promoting his book, when he would get in trouble was when he went with likeminded radio show hosts and he would just start talking. You forget you are in a bubble as well. You are always exposing yourself to people who agree with you on almost everything. As i say, the internet is really only tripled the tendency people have towards that. Brian lamb the once you have covered and written about, who do you think is catching on the most out there . Andrew ferguson i think everybody says scott walker. Who i have never met. I have only seen him in person once i think. He does seem to have a lot of things that people like. Especially primary voters. Talk about the bubble. They want somebody who looks like hes stood up for them. Im amazed to the degree to which primary voters are the most motivated by resentment. The sense of being put upon. Those people really dont understand us. Here is a guy who does understand us and he is going to stick it to them. And that happens on both sides. Hillary clinton will give her own version of that kind of thing. I dont think i was actually true 30 years ago. Resentment has always been part of politics, obviously. The degree to which it is almost exclusively the motivating factor in truly committed republicans and democrats is you is new, i think. Brian lamb in your article about jeb bush, tell me what you envision of the audience reading this. I think he proved he was fairly conservative when he was governor. Then you dredged up this. At a public forum he was asked what he was prepared to do for black floridians. A questionnaire evidently expecting a bundle of special programs swaddled in ghazi gauzy rhetoric. His terse answer, probably nothing, became instantly in infamous. Andrew ferguson i think he tried to defend it at the time. But its so shocking and grating on the ear. Pure ideology is often grating to people. This point i mean, i would understand what he was saying. I think it was 94 when he ran that campaign. When i first met bush, he would come by the American Spectator offices a few times. He liked to hang around journalists and intellectuals. That would not have struck me as particularly harsh, because i was used to the conservative point he was trying to make. Which is not a harsh point, but simply a point about government either serves everybody or it doesnt serve anybody. If you start dicing the population up, you have programs over here and there. You do it more over by racial classification, then it can be something quite pernicious. Brian lamb less famously, he said women on welfare should be able to get their life together and find a husband. Andrew ferguson he talks about the mistakes he made by saying this not much line about programs for black people. But he did not bring that one up. Very much. I think because it is so crude. Brian lamb how much time you spend researching . Andrew ferguson a long time. Brian lamb you did an article about Mitch Daniels a number of years ago when he talked about his split marriage when his wife left him and married a doctor in california. That was the first time a lot of people knew about that. Where do you find this stuff . Andrew ferguson i dont remember the daniels thing. I think a friend had told me about it. Then there had been a mention in an old old clip about it. So i followed up with other friends. Brian lamb are you worried you will do damage to these folks . Andrew ferguson absolutely. That one i was worried about. My god, ive never met mrs. Daniels. I have nothing against her. I think her life is her own. Its not true of her husband, he thrust himself into the public light. I really went backandforth on whether this should even be brought up in the story. I figured if the article is going to have any claim to being comprehensive, i had to mention this. If he was going to run for president , somebody was going to mention it. Then someone would say ferguson missed this. I was partly covering my rear end professionally, but also because i thought somebody should say it. If somebody was going to push it into the front, might as well be me. I really didnt like it. It was just mentioned briefly in the piece really almost , offhandedly. Brian lamb lets change to another politician. Ted cruz. You did a long piece on him. You went to houston to see him. Andrew ferguson they were quite accessible. This was last year. 2013. A year and a half ago. Time flies. Yeah, they were very accommodating. I think it was not about me, its about the magazine. They thought they would like to reach that audience that the Weekly Standard reaches. They were happy to let me tag along with him as much as i wanted. Brian lamb you wrote, you will discover that ted cruz is far more than a freshman senator. Only eight months in office, he is also the scary mccarthyite taliban bully bomb thrower known for extremism and arrogant disregard of the facts. What were you getting at . Andrew ferguson the headline was, washington builds the bugaboo. My point was here was this guy who definitely wanted to become a polarizing figure. I think he thinks that is the way he is going to rise. The sort of washington journalistic establishment was more than happy to accommodate him and make him look a lot more extreme than he actually is. And also they ran all the one of the terrible things about journalism are these socalled fact checks that magazines and newspapers run. They are much more complicated than simply checking facts. I have been going to quite a few of them there. Miracle of miracles, i kept finding that half of what ted cruz said was not true. In fact, it is much more ambiguous than that. Often he was absolutely correct. Sometimes it was a matter of interpretation and so on. This is sort of a method by which they turned this guy into a monster. When he is not. Im no big fan of him, but hes not what people want to be scared of. Brian lamb lets look at a little bit of him on the stump. Ted cruz thank you very much. Thank you all for coming out. God bless the great state of New Hampshire. [applause] ive spent all of last week down in washington, d. C. It is great to be back in america. [laughter] jennifer, i enjoyed hearing, you said that you thought New Hampshire was ready for hillary. Im actually told that this dinner tried to get hillary to come speak. Unfortunately, they couldnt find a foreign nation to foot the bill. [laughter] brian lamb why is it politicians take their tie off . They are dressed in a suit and then all of a sudden it comes off. Andrew ferguson because theyre just people. They really want to just talk to you. They want to get down and said shed the formalities and just talk straight. Brian lamb god bless the people of New Hampshire. Andrew ferguson [laughter] it was terrific. A lot of that piece is about the way he comes across in his person, which is i trace it back to him being a champion, i think National Champion debater in college. He started in junior high and high school and a woman who had helped coach him in high school said he would stand in front of the mirror for hours and practice his gestures. And repeat what he was going to say. And look at himself to make sure everything was moving right and would be at maximum effect. You still see that here. This is a guy who looks like you wound him up. And let him go. If you came back to years from two years from now, he would still be making the same hand gestures and using the same jokes. Brian lamb in this piece about him, you write, he paused lost for a moment in thought. You know, he said, cocking his head. Im convinced that the real divide in american politics is a between republican and democrat is between the people and the entrenched politicians in washington d. C. You write, it sounded like an applause line to me. He went on for a while until leaning back with his press secretary tapping her blackberry, he began to sound as if he were giving a stump speech. You mentioned that more than once. Andrew ferguson thats what i mean about winding him up. I was riding around with him in the back of a car, in close quarters, and he was doing the same thing. Kind of quoting himself with what he had already told me. It was one of the odder experiences i have ever had in reporting on somebody. I made a joke that i thought how badly would i get hurt if i just opened the door and slipped out, and he would keep talking . This tells you a lot about him i guess. His press secretary told me not long ago that after the came after the piece came out, he wanted her to buy a crash helmet to give me for the next time we rode around in case i jumped out. She didnt do it. I appreciated that he didnt hate me completely after i wrote that. Brian lamb what kind of column do you enjoy writing the most . I know that some are much longer than a column. Andrew ferguson you know, because i think im iffy as a reporter, and i doubt myself, i like doing an essay where i have 4 or 5 books. They just stay put. I put them on my desk and they are still there when i get back. Whereas, literally a human subject is a moving target. Its almost infinite the amount of money information you can accumulate about a person. You never feel like you are done. Brian lamb a political candidate in another column, this is in 2012. The most puzzling thing about the career of gore of it all gore vidal, who went toes up last week at 86, with the reverence in which he was held by people who might have known better. He was famous for announcing the death of the novel as an art form, and as if to prove the point, he kept writing them. Lets watch a little bit of gore vidal when he got the award at the National Book Foundation Event and was you tell me what you see. Gore vidal nowadays it seems that the progress of literature is really first you print the book, and then you pulp it. And it saves such a lot of time. It is for everybody, everybody can dance around the fire and he be delighted we live in such a glorious era. [laughter] where is bill buckley tonight . Bill . Bill . [laughter] you can come out now. Usually i let him out at midnight, but [laughter] brian lamb hes talking about the deceased bill buckley. Andrew ferguson they had a longrunning feud. Sort of. Brian lamb do you remember what year . 68, when they debated each other . Andrew ferguson yes on abc, and buckley called vidal and unmentionable name referring to his sexual inclinations. Vidal called buckley a crypto nazi, and it got worse from there. I was with buckley one time, went for a show where i cant remember it oh, ted koppel was going to interview him. A very wellknown abc news reader. He was interviewing buckley. He had a setup where he had a screen, and he showed buckley the tape of that famous encounter. From 1968. Buckley, one of the few times ive ever seen it, was taken aback and speechless. It was because he had been told there were no copies of this confrontation with vidal. He was ashamed of it. He thought he had lost his cool. Of all things bill buckley was never supposed to do was lose his cool. Anyway, he hadnt seen it in 45 40 years, i think he was not happy to see it. Brian lamb in your column, you write about the death of gore vidal, about something that was said by diane sawyer. Sawyer identified him as a celebrity novelist of taking special care to tag buckley as the arch conservative. Then you wrote why arch . , the two tags make for a serious imbalance. Four years, buckleys views were safely on the rightward edge of the american popular consensus. Vidals were shared by a tiny minority. Cranks and ignoramuses in hollywood, manhattan, and northwest, washington, d. C. , various college towns, and ruby ridge, idaho, yet it was buckley who earned the intensifier arch. Andrew ferguson the reason i wrote that, it was right after gore died. Not speaking ill of the dead but that doesnt mean you cant ill of the deads fans. They were lionizing this guy. I have tremendous respect for vidals skills. But he was an antisemite. He was a crank. His views were so far beyond what ordinary people would think of as even remotely plausible. About huge conspiracies running the country and stuff. And yet for some reason when he died, people held him up as some kind of paragon. It was all a slight defense of the establishment protecting its own. It is important to protect his reputation as a noncrank. Brian lamb you said, the man must have felt bulletproof with implausible romances like lincoln that he wrote in burr. He filled readers heads with more historical crapola than anyone since parson weems. The word crapola, did you look that up . Andrew ferguson i think it has anglosaxon roots. [laughter] i dont know. Brian lamb i found the subject you have written the most about is dwight eisenhower. This is about the memorial, the proposed memorial, you can see here. Here is comments from Brigadier General karl, retired as executive director of the dwight d. Eisenhower memorial commission. These monumental, heroic sized images of general president and eisenhower will be framed as you see here by three transparent 65 foot tall stainless steel tapestries depicting a great plains landscape of kansas, artistically rendered as you see here. This will be the only National President ial memorial placed in a very difficult urban park setting. But this is a superb site surrounded by institutions directly related to eisenhowers presidency and will be directly accessible to millions of visitors. Brian lamb why have you written about this so often . You point out 44 million have already been spent on something that does not exist. Andrew ferguson probably another 100 Million Dollars plan ned for when they actually build the thing. This story appeals to me in many ways. One thing is, i actually get kind of irked and passionate passionately irked about this. Which i dont often get emotionally entangled in what i write about. But, i do agree the eisenhower. I think he was an amazingly great man. In all kinds of ways i think some people dont even realize. Its another thing about circling the wagons. This commission went out and hired an architect the most famous in the world. Frank gehry. They seemed to hire him because he was the most famous in the world. For no other reason. You just cant really criticize what frank gary comes up with. He came up with this mess of a totally preposterous arrangement of columns and screens, to put in the middle of this park in downtown washington. Not far from here, actually. It seemed like a classic case of what tom wolfe used to talk about, the most average people are so intimidated by the assertion of artistic superiority, and we all feel so disarmed when talking about the arts that when somebody like that comes around and throws this, we are supposed to say, he is frank gary frank geary, he must know something. The next thing you know, 44 million is going to him. Taxpayer money. We are stuck with a big empty square down there. On maryland avenue, and no memorial to eisenhower at all. Im worried about what will come from this. Nothing will get built. That wouldnt be the worst. The worst outcome would be if they actually build the design. It is a very just dispiriting kind of display. Brian lamb you went to Occidental College. There is a man named jewel hauser. Huell howser. He is deceased. Died young, actually. He worked for kcet in los angeles. He wrote a program on occidental and relationship to barack obama. I want to show you his promo of that. Then ask you why you wrote about occidental and barack obama. Huell howser well, we spent the entire day on the campus of Occidental College, whose claim to fame this day is that the president elect, barack obama, spent the first two years of his undergraduate College Experience at Occidental College. During this day we spent there we not only met his very First Political science professor, but we actually stood on the very steps barack obama stood on to make his First Political speech ever. We also visited his exact dorm room. It is still there. In one piece. Ive got inside information about his dorm days with one of his dorm roommates from back then. Brian lamb huell howser, promoting his program on occidental and barack obama. You wrote about a dvd. Explain. Andrew ferguson he did a segment about Occidental College and barack obama. You can see from that, he was such a wonderful television presence. He was so enthusiastic about things. It went right through the screen and grabbed year. He was, i thought, just a wonderful performer. He applied that kind of enthusiasm to Barack Obamas time at Occidental College. The thing about Barack Obamas time at Occidental College is he left almost no impression of any kind. There is a shrine set up to him in the lobby of the student library, or used to be. I think it is still there. It is supposed to be you know, obamas time at occidental. But theres really he wrote a poem in the literary magazine. Other than that, there is no real trace of him. Kind of like a water bug skidding across the top of the surface of the school. The school has twisted itself into a pretzel to try and assert its importance in Barack Obamas life. In fact, it wasnt that important to him. It got him out of hawaii, but then he went onto columbia where he actually did start to have real intellectual influences. He is a perfect metaphor, if i can use that phrase, for people trying to gin up enthusiasm when there really isnt anything there. Brian lamb and that clip of huell howser reflected the way that he did his television. Andrew ferguson yes, everything was breathless. He stands there, and there is a place where obama supposedly gave an antiapartheid speech. He stands there with the camera on him, its like the enunciation has happened. Its almost overwhelming to him. I really like that about him. Again, it says a lot about obama that there really isnt that much there. Brian lamb i would suggest to our audience that they can look of that column from june 18 2012. The remainder of it is you talking about two books written about barack obama. From a conservative and one from david marinus, and you ended up liking davids book better. Andrew ferguson that is a wonderful book. There is another one by a guy who claims to be a rightwinger. I guess he is. But the book is just trash. I say the truth as a conservative republican, im was kind of sad and saddened when the intellectual standards on the left are higher than they are on the right. One of the reasons i used to be a lefty one of the reasons i drifted right was because the left had abandoned intellectual standards. I saw this in graduate school. Instead of embracing those standards, so many of the people on the conservative side fall for just preposterous books like ed kleins books about obamas. Obama. Brian lamb last time you are here you talked about your son. How old is he . Andrew ferguson 24. He has a job now. Brian lamb did he go to brown . Andrew ferguson he went to uva. Brian lamb when i was looking on the web, i thought i saw a picture of him with how often can people see your work in the Weekly Standard, at all . Andrew ferguson if you ask my boss, im sure he would say not often enough. Every couple of weeks. Ryan lamb is there a book . Brian lamb is there a book . Andrew ferguson yes, i am doing a sequel to crazy you. My publisher asked the to do a sequel. They are supposed to be making a movie. It would be great if i could time the next books to release with the movie. Then i might actually sell some. Which would be a first. Brian lamb Andrew Ferguson, writer for the Weekly Standard, and book writer. Thank you very much. Andrew ferguson thank you for having me. For free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda. Org. They are also available at cspan podcast. As cspan at marks tenure as of compelling conversations here are other programs you may like. Se cupp talking about her political views in life before she became a television commentator. George will. And robert novak on his memoir the prince of darkness 50 years of reporting in washington. You can watch these any time by searching our Video Library at cspan. Org. Monday night on the communicators spectrum policy director carl medio on the importance of spectrum for the government and the public. The last two administrations have written president ial memoranda on spectrum. When i first started in Spectrum Management back in 1979, i came out of the marine corps being an artillery officer, i did not know anything about spectrum. Most people ive met did not understand anything much about spectrum. But now everybody realizes it is a part of our daily lives. Our ability to communicate and stay in touch with her family. Monday night at 8 00 eastern on cspan2. Former secretary of state