Im the guy you had to put up with during the first panel. Fortunately, we have a new cast of people to add their voices to the wonderful voices you heard from the scholars who were on the first panel. Once again, weve got Miller Center people here. And the Miller Center, one of its main emphases, is the focus on studying the presidency in depth. Historical depth with objectivity. In other words, we are all in the business of doing stuff that an editorial cartoonist is not in the business of doing which is reacting to events on a daytoday basis. As pat oliphant did more than 10,000 times in his 60 plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. Where as we all strived to be as objective as we can, the job of the editorial cartoonists and pat oliphant, as well as anyone whos ever done it, to provide comment, to provide opinion, to provide something to provoke discussion rather than perhaps aspire to settle discussion. The panel today, this afternoon, which will cover the president s from george bush i dont use the h. W. He was george bush when he was president. When John Quincy Adams became president , john adams did not have to change his name so im sticking with george bush. And of course, his immediate successor bill clinton. George w. Bush, the one who came next, and then finally we sort of dip our toe into the obama presidency. Part of which, pat oliphant was able to capture in his cartoons. We will also see at least one example of pat all of france great gifts as a sculptor. Unfortunately, we only get to seat into dimensions. We only get to see an image of it. But it is an extraordinary work and one of our panelists that i will introduce right now, mary kay carey, can actually tell us something about that sculpture and about the president who it portrays. Mary kate is a senior fellow at the Miller Center. She has been teaching this year in the Politics Department of the university she was a speech writer and a Communication Specialist of all sorts in the bush quail campaign in 1988 and then during the george bush presidency. We have the former director of the Mueller Center philip zelikow. Hes a member of the History Department here. He held prominent positions in both bush is administrations. Both george and george w. He probably did other things that im not even aware of that are worth noting and then chris lu, a Senior Member fellow at the center the Mueller Center. Hes worked in all three branches of government. I dont know how many people are able to say that. Including seven years in the obama administration. So what we are going to do is the same thing we did the first time around. We will take cartoons from each one of these presidencies in sequence. All of them oliphant creations that are now part of the university of virginias special collection library. And they are available, in many cases, for you to go see either there or over at the Miller Center where there are some others. Lets start with that first cartoon. For those of you who cant read that far back because i know it is a little difficult, you have george bush on the top, what they tried to sell and then as he is perceived. And then to caucus, what they try to sell and how he is perceived. And then it says altered egos and i cant read. Can anyone else read that . Youve got it . Thanks philip. Altered egos or how we think of them when we think of them at all. There you go. So, i was on the 1988 bush Dukakis Campaign on the bush side and i would say the top half is exactly not true, not how he was perceived and the bottom half is exactly how dukakis was perceived from our point of view and i remember being, i remember having a tshirt that said the where of greeks wearing lifts, and there was a lot of joking about the difference in height between governor dukakis and president bush. President bush was six foot two inches or six foot three inches. I remember there is a saturday light live skit called dukakis after dark. And it played upon this that there was this other side to Michael Dukakis that nobody sawyer knew about. But on the top side, though, i would say the left side of what they tried to sell is exactly what we all perceived in george bush. A war hero, 58 combat missions, and lifelong public servant. I met David Mccullough when i was making a documentary as president bush. David mccullough said to me 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 that 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. I also realize im a little biased. Lets see if this is on. Yeah, so whats being portrayed here, one of the challenges by the way for the panel is that for many of you we dont need to explain what the references are in these cartoons because you can see it. Many of you probably remember, oh, they are talking about the whip effect, they are talking about pushes a wig. 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 news week magazine cover that actually had a president of bush under, the wimp factor, which stunned. At the time i was a Career Foreign Service officer, i was not on the campaign trail, in fact had no declared political affiliation. I would go into the administration actually as a detaily 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 was he labeled the word and why did the label seem to stick . Even if you are a bush partisan and frankly just about everyone who worked for bush became one if they had not been before and its interesting 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. And he commanded a lot of loyalty among the people, so why . There is something about the thin, ready voice having been kind of a second banana to reagan for eight years, the sense that on the campaign trail 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 then public, reagan by the way and sometimes was just the opposite. So, you know, there are qualities there, there is an emotional quality that would occasionally leak to the surface and in the sense that on the campaign trail the conventional pablo people would ask him to say two different audiences, and therefore people had trouble getting a firm sense of him and then some people both on the right on the left wanted him to be a more muscular conservative, one image of him, and he didnt fit that and so there is something to this that you just have to recognize, there is something in the image of him that people are perceiving, i dont think, im not sure that by 1992 mr. All of thought would have drawn the bush the same way after the gulf war but you will see he sticks with this image after a while in the early bush period, frankly, because the caricature seems to capture something that designated with a lot of the American People and you just have to then face up to that and understand, and this is a final comment, this is one of the reasons these cartoons are so valuable is the 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 ingrained these Public Perceptions get in peoples minds and that 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, of course the most famous unforced error from the 1988 campaign is what you all will call Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with kind of an ill fitting helmet. No candidate would ever do that now. And so, you know, that could have just of easily been the perception here of two caucus and of course youll remember and mary kate has been talking about this better, some of the 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 1992 debate when he looked at his watch seeming to be bored. And now whenever we prep a candidate for debate we take their watches off or tell them never, ever look at your watch. I remember when i was looking for john kerry in 2004 he was doing a president ial debate prep in wisconsin, we wanted him to go out and do some public event and gas prices were high, we wanted to highlight how gas prices were high so we wanted him to fill up a gas tank and 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 that you just didnt want to happen. In part because of these moments in 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 into peoples brains. One thing we havent note again which has been a presence in every cartoon weve seen and every cartoon we will see is the presence of that little character down there on the lower white quadrant, punk. The pitch and who is kind of a de facto greek course. Not a pigeon, a claim when, that he often included in all of his cartoons just to provide an additional dollop of commentary but for me the joy of these cartoons was on the one hand they are snapshots of a moment, but on the other hand they are 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 in 1960, it was if achilles and hair achilles were once again meeting on the field of battle. To titanic filter figures, either one of them was worthy of trotting on a heroic stage and i think by 1988 we are thinking of president ial candidates as diminished and even comic figures and that in some ways has become the default setting ever since. 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 the same time george bush was sworn in and 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 and 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. He did not say it at the time but said it afterwards. That brought it to mind as well. All the jobs that president bush had done in service to this country before he became president i think perfectly prepared him for that moment. It is the reason why we were able to get through the cold war without a single shot getting fired. End of the cold war, excuse me. That is what jumped out at me. He was very proud of that moment the only thing i felt was amusing with this one is the building on the righthand side. If im not mistaken it is the Old Post Office which is now the trump hotel. What is interesting about this, without talking about the current president and mary kate or philip can comment, president s, i dont think, i think it scene is bad for them to compare themselves to previous president s. While it was perfectly appropriate here for president bush to pay homage to George Washington. Its nots seen as a classic thing to say on the greatest president since someone so. I was referring to somebody else actually. There are subtle ways that president s reference back to previous president s. Everyone wants to see kennedyesque without saying im being like john kennedy. That is one of the interesting things that i saw in this cartoon. You cant really see what punk is saying. He says beautiful aint it george . Whats interesting is the second george is written in a different fought. What is that fought . 18th century bond. It is upon on to georges and then the 18th century font. There is 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. Solid and virtuous in every way but no spark of life do we see in any of the pictures that 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 portrait tests portrayed him as. So i had to ask, i guess should i read this out loud . Here is apparently down then quail in the baby carriage saying the car theism. George bush saying my goodness, listen to that little first word in office. And then punk saying so proud. This apparently, i had to ask, is a reference to the tower nomination. And then quail said the people opposed to john towers nomination were engaging in mccarthy some. I find this very unfair. I think that there is 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 a special election after johnson left to become Vice President. That is when the two of them first became friends. So at this point they have been friends for almost 40 years. In 1968, i think there was a discussion earlier in the earlier panel about nixons short list for Vice President ford. But in 1968, according to john meachams book about bush, testing in power, nixons shortlist for vp was john tower, george bush, spiral agony and one more, Ronald Reagan. Wouldnt that have been something . So then comes 1989. At this point, tower is former senator tower, former chair of the Armed Services committee in the senate. Bush names him his old friend to secretary of defense. It comes out that there is concerns about his love of women and boos. 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. The vote went down 47 to 53. 53 no. So that to me means, i believe, to democrats crossed over. And they voted yes or republicans voted no. But it was due to the fact that the democrats were in control of the senate. 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. He was tremendously loyal to john tower despite all of 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 he stuck with them. He also, i think, set the stage for why he was so tremendously loyal to Clarence Thomas is nomination as well. I believe he inaccurately is depicted here as a treating dan quayle as some kind of baby. That could not be further from the truth. He went against the advice of everyone. Who had lots of people on a short list for Vice President. He went with quayle in a surprise move. He really treated him as an equal. I think because he was a Vice President and he wanted the same treatment for his own Vice President to continue the tradition he started with president reagan. They had lunch every week. There was a very close relationship. And i think this is not the way he looked at dan quayle. Philip probably has more to say. This is about a speech that quail gave after the nomination. I take a more sympathetic view to the cartoonist perhaps then mary kate there is on this one. I do not join the dan quayle rehabilitation model. I agree with what mary cate said, bush tried to treat quayle the way he thought a Vice President should be treated and with the appropriate dignity. Do not think that dan quayle was one of the key insiders of the bush admin administration. Though he was in a lot of meetings and bush treated him appropriately. What he was not a very influential person i believe at in the senior ranks of the administration. So this is what happens here. This is early 1989. Tower has gone up and been defeated. And quayle gave a really quite nasty speech. Basically saying tower was defeated because of mccarthyism. You have to understand the investigation of tower had been run by sam nunn, who is determined the chairman of the Armed Services committee. For not knowing anything about this panel, last month i was actually with sam none. And jack reed for other reasons. And none, basically for some reason, started reminiscing from the tower fight at some length. To this day, he feels like it was perhaps the hardest thing he ever had to do in the senate. He had known tower a long time as all anything he would try to get done on National Security issues for the next four years. Including, by the way, handling the confirmation of the person who was nominated to take the place a tower which turned out to be dick cheney from wyoming. So as the secretary of defense. People noticed in 89 that this was dan quayle making his political debut in a big way. Here is making his debut in early 89 in the hitman role. Like agnew what do for nixon and gore did a little bit of that for clinton. It was not an attractive role for quayle, and i dont think it was an attractive role for bush to have quayle play. And i think oliphant its basically calling him out on. It whether one thinks that dan quayle was underrated or for the first time tonight, overrated. This to me is a brilliant example of the caricaturists art. Weve seen cartoon after cartoon where noses and chins and eyes were treated in typical caricature fashion. Exaggerated right . And here, we dont even see dan quayle. The impression being that he is in infant and therefore have no significance at all. But do not show a caricature i character as a former caricature is, i think, interesting. The baby carriage has that fancy monogrammed initial q. Like its this super fancy baby carriage from a very wealthy family. Thats a nice little touch. I forgot to say earlier, the little bubbles or whatever signifying than quail there, invisible dan quayle. It reminds me of doonesbury at the time. He would always show president bush as escapee the evil twin and he was either a feather or an asterisk or little bubbles like that. That became a huge joke in the white house. And president bush got a big kick out a bit. And there were many prank photos taken of bob gates, dick cheney and people like that talking to an empty chair. Talking to the podium when no one 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 carving at the time doing hilarious impersonations of the president and then after he lost the office, or the election, he invited dana carvy to the white house and left that himself tremendously. It was the beginning of a great friendship. And both the doonesbury cartoons and some of the oliphant cartoons and the dana carvy stuff what is at the bush library because it was such a big part of his time in office and his self deprecating humor. Lets move on to the clinton years. We do . Then lets not move on. In one week, after he left office, it was the funeral of president ford at the National Cathedral. And i went to it. There were a tremendous number of boy scouts who are 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 new 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 iran to the next day and they said, mrs. Cary, we want you to know that we had a vote and president bush gave the best eulogy of all of the eulogists. I said oh my gosh, boys, i will tell the president. He would love to know that. And in hindsight, i told these stories years this story years later at his funeral, that i think bush knew there would be boy scouts in the aisles and so the tone of the eulogy is this is what young people can learn from jerry ford. Sure an off, there were 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. Its still there. I loved it and i thought it was really funny and it captured his love of horseshoes and his athleticism in many ways. I wrote a lot of notes to president bush over the years and he would right back. We were pen pals. So i have this binder. Personal notes from 41 which i brought with me. 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 and see this thing. I will go with you. He wrote me back and i thought i would read it to you. And 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 sunday with my new hip in place, which he had just gotten. I have to go out now and kick some serious but. Thanks for writing, love gb. The next thing you know, he did not come to washington to see it he sought images of it. The bush library had a second one purchased and there is one at the National Gallery of art and there is one of the bush library and it is 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. There is when it uva. There is . Any other comments on this marvelous sculpture . Let me take this one. I love this cartoon and let me try to describe it to you. It is deepening a couple of used car salesman. On the left it says conservative health care and its kind of a thuggish looking salesman. The sign says, like new, runs real nice, needs cosmetics. Then you have bill clinton. It says imagine your new car here. Clinton health care coming soon. And the right manner is important. Clinton, we finance. And then punk in the middle says, who do you fancy we should buy a used car from . The reason i love this cartoon is that it is incredibly timely. This is from the 1993 health care fight. 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, whatever donald trump has proposed or wants to propose, you could put medicare for all there. The wheat finance is perfect because, obviously, that is the criticism a big Progressive Health care plans like medicare for all. How do you pay for all this . So it really depicts, i think, the challenge we have with health care in the system. We dont have we have a series of not very 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. And so a lot of the cartoons we will be looking at our particularly timely. This one is especially timely. I will only add to that, other than the fact that the republican car is an old gta. It has the fuzzy dice hanging from the mayor. I 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 that is portrayed captures something deep about clinton and a lot of things that i think really, in a way, only a picture like this imagine in this way could do. One of the things that is 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, and its sort of worked its way into the popular memory of the 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. He did not talk very much about health care. He talked a lot more about welfare reform and other issues. But when he became president , 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. I let me lead off on this. The date is important. Its october of 1993. To help you remember, late october 1993, this is the month of black hawk down in the somalia catastrophe. This was a really bad month in clintons first year in Foreign Policy. The haiti malice also. So what you have here is blind man clinton in the darkening park. Is this the best a 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. Then you have punk in the bottom right hand corner letting them know that the buses coming. Next stop, bosnia. They are in the dark and they are blind as to what they are doing and where they are going. And they are looking for that bus to Foreign Policy. For that particular moment in october of 1993, it 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 willing to make tough decisions. And clinton, his own sense 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 was, 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 will start with this one. Its incredibly timely. February 11th 1999. This is after bill clinton is acquitted on impeachment. He is dancing on the left playing bongos, smoking a cigar saying, free at last, free at last, break out the bras, im free at last. Then you have ominously history writing in the book in the upper right. Punk is saying, the moving finger rights in having writ moves on. Punk might be wrong on this one in the sense that people remember post impeachment. Clinton was fairly popular, very popular. He actually left office fairly popular. History does not just write once. And weve seen the way that history has continued to reevaluate bill clinton and his perceptions have changed obviously over the last couple of years as well. But it does short of sort of show that even an impeachment impeachment effort that fails still leaves a mark in history. And 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. In some respects, both those cartoons you just looked at. Clinton is portrayed, they are poking fun at him but theres also sides of the cartoon that are affectionate. I must say this strikes me as a bitter cartoon. The view of clinton has soured in some deep way. And the way he is portrayed, even down to the imagery of the bongo drums, the irresponsible beat nick side of it. This is an angry cartoon. And the contrast between that and even the health care cartoon, which in a way, is really so affectionate and this image is powerful to me. My reaction the Previous Panel there was a lot of discussion of noses. Clintons nose has evolved here since 1993. And the cigar. He looks like hes kind of naked to me only wearing socks with the bungled drums. As a mother, im like ew. I think 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 where how they are now, in the opposite way as it was with george bush. As i recall, this incident of bill clinton, this post acquittal rivalry. Going to africa and playing the bungled drums and smoking a big cigar, that actually happened. There is 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 bush is case, is off putting. I think pat oliphant capture that moment. Yes we did not force him out of office. Yes we think hes still doing a good job as president but come on. I will take this one. This is george w. Bush surrounded by republicans saying, im going to have to reposition myself away from you guys. I am a compassionate conservative. One of them says, what the hell is that she w. . The third one says, i thought you said you will need all the help you can get . This is before the 2000 election. This was october of 1999. I remember at the time, when he first labeled himself a compassionate conservative. There were many of us on the right who said, wait a minute, are you saying the rest of us are not compassionate . It was a real sticking point. Arthur brooks has written books on this, that that was not helpful that he did that. I can see why it was fodder for humor because it did step on a lot of peoples toes. Its not a very nice portrayal of the other republicans. They look like something out of the good, the bad and the ugly. It does make a good point. What is your take philippe . You will see, he has given bush this big white hat. He is going to use this motif again. At this time actually, bush barely seems the white hat seems roughly appropriate to bushes size. Ill just stop there. Let me add one thing. I think what is important here is that this is october of 1999. This is when he is running for office. It is this interesting diamond dynamic when president ial candidates either run against washington or run against their own party. Hes saying, im not like these other people in washington. This is not inconsistent with the way bill clinton ran for office or barack obama ran for office. I suspect if you were to draw the same cartoon for years into office, they would all have the same color again whether it is white or black depending on your perspective. Because as president s learn, you may have run against these people but these are the people who are going to help your legislative agenda done. They will help you in times of impeachment. They will help fight your battles for you. So it does not become that us versus them mentality once you are in office. Thats interesting. There is a real trajectory between george w. Bush is relationship with other republicans. As captured here, he in some ways to find himself in distinction from the prevailing image of congressional republicans. They were seen as hard edged and callous and not at all captured by the way word compassionate. So in a sense, he was running for president by running against his party. While he is president , after he wins and is reelected, people are saying he is the true incarnation of Ronald Reagan. Hes more like Ronald Reagan than he is like his father. So 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. His comment was if they 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 and not this. I will leave that to history. History is going to have an interesting time with his changing reputation within his own party. Incidentally, perhaps the most eloquent riders, if you are interested in the subject about reagan and the bushes and how george w. Bush is trying to reconcile that, carl canon to wrote a terrific book reflecting on all of that. I will give a shout out to carl because its trying to come to grips with some of the things you just raised. What is it called . I think maybe reagan and bush, both those names are in the title. That is your homework. This is six days after 9 11. If you cant read, the little boy is reading a wearing a tshirt that is saying Civil Liberties. There is no pumped, there is no comment. And the car to needs very little comment from me. Except, one thing is its in ambivalent cartoon and very sensitive. You see, there was a way in this could have been done in which uncle sam is being 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 back swing kid. Again, i dont know if this is intentional but uncle sam looks like abraham lincoln. Which then goes back to the suspending of heaviest corpus during the civil war. That may have been me reading too much into it. I thought the same thing. It looks like lincoln. It goes to the continuing debate between privacy and security. This sums it up perfectly. It is interesting that six days after 9 11, that pat oliphant would realize that Civil Liberties are going to be part of what we are going to have to end up being concerned about in our understandable and immediate desire for safety and security and order. And i think if you recall that time, there was not just the trauma of the actual events. But there was the almost predictable i or we were all predicting that 9 11 would be the first of the 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 out from within the United States. And the idea 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 sword. I think that was an extraordinarily timely comment at a time where most people were not even thinking about that. Okay all right. Is there not the other one . There he is. Okay. All right. Now weve got our act together. So this cartoon requires a little bit of explanation. I dont know how well you remember this episode mary kate about the u. S. Attorneys in oh six and oh seven. I remember. When you go first. This is march of 2007. A little context. In the winter of 2006 2007, the white house and the new attorney general, ill gonzales, come up with the scathingly brilliant idea that the patriot act at the time had been passed in a way that allowed u. S. Attorneys to be appointed without u. S. Senate confirmation if needed. Someone had the idea, lets fire several of them that are of noxious to us for one reason or another. Lets put together a list of them and then we can throw appointees into their place without having to go through Senate Confirmation quickly. They actually began this process notoriously, i think they fired eight of them. And then in defending that they fired eight, there was talk of 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 is well into the second term. So there is an outcry that is going on for a couple of 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 and come straight from the white house and had become gonzalez chief of staff. He had to resign. Then another woman at the Justice Department who uttered words like that also had resigned. Because the emails emerged and it turned out the white house had been involved. There were political issues. And some of this did link to carl rove who was putting a bit of the heat on the white house counsel. So here you have this cartoon. As all these emails are coming out and it was clear that the white house and rove were involved to some degree in the socalled non partisan 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 Myers is idea. The night was politically motivated. Perfect. Then you see of course Doctor Strange rove. Punk on the bottom left is saying another brilliant idea. Then you have dick cheney. Notice 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 as i read this in the march of 2007 is actually on the inside, cheneys power is actually already waning a lot in the second term. The public image has not caught up to that reality yet. In my view, roves influence is also waning. This particular episode did not help. Bush himself had to go out and publicly state that he thought the firing 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 someone at the Justice Department who is interviewing new u. S. Attorneys and saying how much do you love our president . Please tell me. Do you remember that philippe . There was sort of a loyalty question that was added to the job interview. That hit the Washington Post and there were rogue line prosecutors who saw an opening because they felt that the Justice Department was on the rocks a little bit. They indicted senator ted stevens. 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 later got overtone overturned by the obama attorney general once he got in office. But there is a longer story with all that. The thing that struck me just looking at it from a comic point of view was that carl rove there looks so evil. And he has actually kind of rehab himself over the years and turned into a nice guy talking head on tv. I dont know if you saw the cheney from that came out, but cheney has been completely vilified. It is kind of interesting to see cheney looking benign and karl rove looking so evil when nowadays it is sort of reversed in pop culture. One thing that i think is interesting is if you ask most americans, at least at the time, the perception was karl rove is evil genius and dick cheney is pulling all the strings and george bush very small. It will be interesting how history evaluates that relationship. If any of you have been to the george w. Bush library, its a wonderful place to visit, i think they try very hard to push back on this narrative. That his decisions were controlled by other people. And again, it will be interesting to see how this Public Perceptions change as history goes on. 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 cheney and gore, in the course of our investigation. Arranging these interviews was difficult. So we go to the white house to interview bush. Bush and cheney actually had asked to be interviewed together at the white house in one like the ship session. We accepted that request. It was basically ten commissioners and me. And then the president and Vice President had their note takers. The commissioners some of the commissioners, the democrats, were very upset by these ground rules because cheney would dominate the conversation and they would not be able to hear from bush. Of course, exactly the opposite happened. Bush completely dominated the conversation and you actually had to work hard to actually get questions into cheney and get changed to talk. Afterwards, the democrats said maybe that was cheneys plan all along. By the way, to people who knew bush a little bit and knew about this relationship, it was not a surprise. And this is in the spring of 2004. Bush is not a shrinking character. He is quite articulate and he has a characteristic the decisive style. His style and talking to him is entirely different from clinton, who also fills up the room conversationally. But clinton is full of wandering digressions and musings and speculations and just burns the clock up on you when you are questioning him, which i did. Bush, by the way, is just not like this at all. Bush is incredibly direct, to the point. This, this, key point, boom, boom next. That very that was very much the pattern when we actually talked to him in 2004. Here you are a few years later and you know why. Let me ask a question of all of you. But i wonder, is there a 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 does not arise for all president s. So for example, it arose for george w. Bush. The perception of cheney or rove pulling the strings. President trump, steve bannon. Nobody ever said that about barack obama or bill clinton. Is it a partisan thing . Is it the press tends to think republicans are not smart enough to do it on their own . There must be somebody else behind them and democrats are smart enough . How do you explain . This you just answered the question. That was too easy. I did not work with bill clinton although i certainly spent time with him. Barack obama, you could say many things about him. Honest face, brace mart, barry profits oriole some would say. He clearly had his hands on everything. To his fault, he probably had his hands on a lot of different things. Part of it i think is the ethos of the white house as well. We could talk a little bit more about this. We had a mantra, no drama obama. It was a very lowkey white house. We did not leak, we did not write books after we left. It was all about what was best for the president. Its not to say that there were not people who were strong advisers before him but that just may never have come out. This next one, this ones a little harsh. We are now going backwards in time. This is july of 2004. Park in the bottom right hand corner has nothing to say. I think you can read the caption on the upper right hand. Its bush who is wearing that wide hat you saw in an earlier cartoon. He does not fit the white had quite so well in this image. Would it make you feel better to know that we had inaccurate intelligence . He is saying to the dying soldier. And of course, you see how big dick cheney is standing over. He has nothing to say in this cartoon. Again, the image does not require much commentary from the. Six months after this was written, i would spend a lot of time and iraq. And i did for the next few years after that. So a lot of these issues are very close for me. I will just say, just to help you said the context, july of 2004 is really a point at which the war in iraq really starts to go south. Things were not going well and ahead been gradually unraveling. The un envoy to iraq was killed in a truck bomb in august of 2003. And then things began to degrade, kind of a in a slow incremental way. But really the host whole country burst into flames during the second half of 2004. Actually, things had gotten so bad that when it burst into flames frankly, we had a very bloody fight in iraq. Really hold the american position. We almost lost the war in the second half of 2004. The fighting was very bloody in the second half of 2004. And thats just getting going here. But at the beginning of 2005, they have stabilized the situation a bit and then they start getting overly hopeful again. We go through some more cycles like this. But here we are. This cartoon is really set as the country is really begin to visibly explode. And oliphant thinks its time to offer this image. For those who do not know the reference, and i actually did not know the reference, i had to look at up. It pieta is a famous statue in vatican city where mary is holding jesus. I think this is 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. There is an irony here. You see here president bush with an expression on his face that includes compassion. Holding this fallen soldier. The irony is after leaving office and ever since, this has been a major activity of former president bush. Wounded Warriors Program and so on. Im also struck in this picture, totally different kind of comment, but whenever cheney is portrayed there is 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 that. 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 someone would draw cheney if they werent a caricature. The resident obama one. I will take this one. This is from march of 2007. This is a month after barack obama jumped into the race to run for president. On the left is Hillary Clinton and barack obama wrestling over the black vote. And clinton is saying the black vote is mine obama i have pander to it for years. I have taken it for granted four years. It is mined by right obama. Obama says its mine clinton, who has a greater right to it . And notably punk in the lower left says, who asked me . Punk says you will be told later. An amazingly harsh about how democrats view the american African American vote. Something we fight over and its a monolithic thing and we fight over it. The context for this cartoon is obama ran for president , the first African American to do so, but he was not necessarily seen as the African American candidate. He sort of ran as this post racial candidate. He did not talk about race. The clintons had this amazingly goodwill meng African Americans from bill clintons time in office. So it was really not until after barack obama started winning racism, particularly the iowa caucus, that hes the African American vote started to come to him. Then it became a very 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. 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 seems to pervade mrs. Clinton for many years. I just think it is very funny from the other side of the aisle. I think its very funny. At this time and 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 African Americans. Not so much about him per se although he was a relatively new figure on the national stage. But rather, couldnt African American 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 a black america. Obama ran in a more transcendent way. But 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 African American voters in states like South Carolina was white people will vote for this guy. He could actually win. And that, i think, had a lot to do with his winning this sort of tug of war with Hillary Clinton for the black vote and then going on and getting the democratic nomination and then of course being elected and reelected as president. This one is dated 2008 but i will say it is april just because i know when the pennsylvania primary was which was april 2008. In the upper left it says pennsylvania, hillary instructs brock on the finer points of being a regular guy. You see Hillary Clinton sort of wearing these low riding jeans. She has a tattoo on her right arm and she is saying an anchor, right. Beer and a shot. Toss down the shot chase it with the beer and dont raise that pinky when you drink. That is elitist. Obama wearing a very out of place suit in a kind of trucker bar. You can see his pinky is kind of out. And then punk is saying, not to mention dangerous. When you drink, that is elitist and punk is saying not to mention dangerous. The funny thing about the cartoon is the portrayal of Hillary Clinton. You will recall during her time as first lady, she was sort of seen as out of touch. Thenxd obviously when she ran as president in 2016, she was seen as not the choice of working class voters. At this moment in the president ial primary, brock obama was winning a lot of suburban voters. A lot of young people, a lot of African Americans. He was not winning that White Working Class voters that ended up prolonging the primary contest. We went up virtually to the last president ial primary. After those victories, he lost a huge number of states in the midwest. The irony is this is the only moment in Hillary Clintons campaign where she was seen as the working class. This looks to me as if harvard and Yale Law School at the bar trying to figure out how to drink a bar. It made me laugh. The guy with the harry back over there and depends falling down. The whole thing makes me laugh because it totally hits a nerve of what people perceive those two. One elitist telling the other how to drink a beer. There are offhand comments, but i think often stick with candidates for president. Basket of deplorables, the 47 thinking back to mitt romney in 2012. And it was about this time, wasnt it chris, that obama was trying to explain in sort of a clinical analytical way why it is that so many White Working Class people were drawn to his opponent and, in some cases, to republicans. When he said, in their desperation they cling to their guns and they cling to religion. I dont even know what the context was for speaking that or how it came out, but it became sort of see, this is what he really is like. I will say that at this point in the campaign, someone had the right idea to send obama bowling. He built 47 so you could see he was clearly not a boulder. This goes back to mike dukakis, 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 seventies, bowling shoes had different souls on them so that you could slide with one foot and put brakes on with the other. The secret service did not know that he was lefthanded and therefore left footed. So they put they gave him a regular pair of shoes and he went flying as soon as he threw the ball and ended up on a in a heap on the bowling alley. He jumped up and said, nobody said this was going to be easy and nobody was right. I love that quote. How about the last one. This is obviously a big statute head of barack obama. The masses are chanting obama, hes come to save us all. Police say bus, all hail barack obama. Oh great missile. Punk or, the donkey on the left is all us ive got is carey or a hillary. I guess punk says you could blow this thing. Im guessing this is 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. They have idolized him. They had this great expectation at the time. Probably outsized, unrealistic expectations. I think this also plays on the critique of obama as a celebrity. This was a constant theme that came up earlier in the 2008 campaign. You will remember sarah palin famously mocked him for that hope change thing. The very First Campaign john mccain ran against barack obama was titled celebrity. Obama, when he accepted his nomination in denver, he did it with these giant greek columns behind him then made him look almost god like. So this is, i think, a fairly mocking the passionate way democrats look at obama. And probably unfairly the lion i say shun 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 statute motif. It does evoke that sense of pagans warshiping the idle. Of course, the pagans are all going to be in a banished civilization. And actually looking at this now in 2019, you wonder if this civilization has vanished. And it is being reborn on some other island in some other form. I look at this photo and the Easter Island imagery to me suggests that this there was some mystery. We do not know what the Easter Island figures were about and i think a lot of people having a hard time understanding, what desperado bomber means . What is it mean that we elected somebody as president , unlike anyone we have ever elected before . Is he some magical figure . Is he some god like figure . And another way of looking at the crowd that is beneath him is that, in effect, that is 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 captures something of the sense of hope. Of not knowing how high obama could lead us. And naturally, this happens with all president s, but maybe in his case to an exaggerated degree, the ensuing disappointment when you realize hes very smart but he is a mortal man. I thought this was astonishing cartoon. And its the last of our astonishing cartoons. You have all been wonderful to bear with us through all of this. Lets thank our panel. applause and please, before we leave, another expression of gratitude towards pat oliphant who is here in the audience. applause