Transcripts For CSPAN2 2015 Gaithersburg Book Festival 20150516

Site. Your thoughts are important to us so please take a couple of minutes to fill one out and submit it to the festival committee. Mr. Mccutcheon and mr. Mark will be signing books immediately after this presentation, copies are also available at the politics and prose tent at the festival here. A quick word about buying books. Even though this is a free event and we want to keep it that way it does help the book festival if you buy a book here. The more books we sell for our events the more publishers will want to send their authors to speak with us, and purchasing books from politics and prose benefits the local economy, supports jobs and the book festival. So if you enjoy the program and youre in the position to do so, please purchase a book. Mr. Mccutcheon is the coauthor of the 2012 and 2014 editions of National Journals almanac of american politics and was coeditor of Congressional Quarterlys politics in america 2010. Mr. Mark is a former Senior Editor at politico and political journalist. Hes the author of going dirty the art of negative campaigning. Theyve written a very entertaining book that explains the political jargon we hear by all of our elected and appointed officials. And at the same time helps our understanding of politics. In addition to enjoying the book, their web site is also great and includes a jargon of the week quote. Last week it was the meaning on its a long way from tip area. So please welcome chuck and david. Thank you. [applause] well thanks, everybody for showing up and allowing us to be the opening act here the kick ah event at the book festival. It is our privilege and pleasure to be able to appear here and speak to such a wonderful crowd about whats becoming whats always an interesting topic, but particularly now as the president ial primaries start to ramp up and we head into debate season and theres more increasing coverage of the candidates. And political language has something that i think has been an interest of both of us with our backgrounds as political journalists. Chuck and i met years ago as colleagues at the old Congressional Quarterly, staking out members of congress in hallways, trying to reconstruct what was going on in closeddoor meetings, and at least i noticed repeatedly that members, elected officials of both parties would often give very similar answers, cliches, you might say where it really was in jargon. No matter what the subject, it could be about health care, Telecom Policy you name it. They would come out of a meeting, and or youd catch them off the floor of the house of representatives and theyd give these kind offed, clicheed answers. Many of these individuals often came from successful careers professionally before they got elected to congress. They might have been successful trial attorneys, wealthy business executives, doctors, military officers and you just know that when they were dealing with clients or business contacts, suppliers, etc. , you know they didnt speak in this kind of coded way. So thats how i got interested in trying to decipher what these elected officials were actually saying. And just want to run through a couple of highlights in the title in the book and then pass it over to my colleague. Ill leave the first one dog whistles to my colleague chuck. But a walkback is something that were probably all familiar with. When you hear an elected official Say Something that they werent supposed to say out loud but they really meant. Committing candor, in other words. Yes exactly. Senate democratic leader harry reid is sort of a master at this. Hes almost built a career saying things out loud that then his staff has to walk back and say, well, he didnt really mean it. Or often what theyll claim is, well, he didnt mean to say that out loud [laughter] which is different from saying he didnt actually mean it. Former governor jeb bush of florida, a likely 2016 republican president ial candidate, has dealt with this issue himself just this last week where hes had three or four iterations of whether he would have supported the invasion of iraq back in 2003 as his thenpresident brother led at the time. And hes kind of had to twist himself into contortions to explain whether he would have taken the same actions as his brother. Finally saying, you know, if id been in office, no, i would not have led, i would not have ordered up the invasion of iraq and everything thats come after that. So thats a great example a recent example of a walkback. A washington handshake is something that many of us are also probably quite familiar with. Its shorthand for the sort of insincerity that we often encounter in politics. Technically, its when youre shaking somebodys hand and theyre kind of look over their shoulder to see if theres somebody more important in the room who can help out your career. Right. And just a couple of other highlights from the book that we often heard over the years and are probably familiar if youve ever watched congress on television or just the evening news, etc. , when youll hear a member of congress refer to, quoteunquote my good friend. Often thats from somebody across the aisle, and thats really shorthand for i cant stand this person, but you cant say that in congressional parlance. And i would just note how that compares to parliamentary tactics in other countries and in ore democracies in other democracies where theyre actually not afraid to go directly at the opponents and really throw out some rather unkind monikers and names. So i think thats actually in some sense a reflection of these sort of civility and genteelness of our political system compared to other places. Another one that you hear often from elected officials is we need to have a conversation about fill in the blank subject matter. This is something that president obama likes to use when hes confronted with a question that he doesnt really want to tackle. It came up a couple of years ago when Edward Snowden had leaked nsa documents fellowed the country. President obama fled the country. President obama was asked repeatedly about privacy concerns and the president said something to the effect yeah, we need to have a conversation about that. Or when the states of colorado and washington both voted to legalize marijuana and he was asked should the federal government legalize marijuana or is your Justice Department going to crack down on these states for violating federal law, and the president said we need to have a conversation about that which is basically means get it off my plate [inaudible] it means i dont really want to talk about this. Right. Its the last thing on earth i want to be discussing. Right. And id just add as i mentioned jeb bush has had to confront some of these issues, political language issues the last couple weeks or so. Hillary clinton, to the degree that shes answered any media questions, has also had to deal with. And just a couple that come to mind that weve had some fun with in the last few weeks, when Hillary Clinton made her announcement, put out her announcement video that she was going to seek the democratic president ial nomination which was about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning but nonetheless we were still parsing her language she referred to Everyday Americans which is sort of a take on a a cousin of a derivation of common people, ordinary americans, something that elected officials particularly at the federal level like to come up with and say the American People. Yeah. You dont want to call them average americans or ordinary americans. So now the terminology is Everyday Americans. Right. Its sort of a work of art because as chuck just alluded to, you dont want to sound condescending, but theres only so many ways to get this across. And one other that came up just recently its not something that Hillary Clinton actually said but it was something that commentators said about her when Hillary Clinton went to nevada and said, basically, we should allow for legalization of undocumented immigrants. We should allow them to stay in the country. Some path to citizenship which was actually getting to the left of the stance of president obama. Many media commentators suggested that she was quoting, setting a trap for her republican rivals. And this was one that had been out in the movies, and its just interesting to see how its taken on a life of its own. I think its entirely accurate, but you just hear one phrase gets out there and it often gets repeated many times over. So with that, ill turn it over to my colleague. Well thanks, dave. Just getting back to the origins of the book, for me, this book started with a word, and that word is disingenuous. Its a word you hear constantly in politics, and you dont hear it much in everyday life. It dawned on me that its code for liar. [laughter] and not just a liar, but kind of a clueless, outoftouch brainless liar. And so Pay Attention, and youll hear disingenuous. Because its not really considered good form to directly call someone a liar. So disingenuous is kind of the nice, polite way of saying it. But getting back to the title of our book, a dog whistle which has become a pretty common parlance in politics is basically term for code words. During his administration, george w. Bush would use the phrase wonderworking power in speeches. And it was aligned from an old gospel hymn. And it was seen as a dog whistle that was intended to appeal to christian conservatives who would recognize that terminology and language. Youre hearing some talk now about fairness and redistribution which i think some people on the conservative side in the tea party, they would consider that a dog whistle for socialism. So we just thought it would be interesting to kind of catalog these words and phrases. Some of my other favorite ones that dave didnt cover and this is one that you perpetually hear from people in government when theyre about to be fired or theyre resigning from a job and they dont want to give the real reason why. Its always i want to spend more time with my family. I mean its this perennial excuse that, you know, people know is just holds no meaning whatsoever. And as we quote someone in the book who studies work and family life, it kind of doesnt ring true because these are powerful people and presumably they should be in positions to be able to spend more time with their family already in their jobs. And it kind of undermines this whole idea that you cant have work and a family life as well. A couple of other expressions that youre going to be hearing a lot more of and youre already starting to hear on the campaign trail is hillary used this and jeb bush used a form of this is we want to have conversations with citizens, you know . We dont can want to just unilaterally we dont want to just unilrl assay oh, were running for president because we know best. No we want to appear to get the informed consent of people. So we want to ask them about. And so, hence we want to have conversations with citizens. Another new one that just came up which were seeing a lot of and that we just wrote about for our Christian Science monitor weekly column is actually since this is a book festival its pretty appropriate. Its from the Childrens Book alexander and the horrible terrible nogood, very bad day. This has now become horrible, terrible, nogood very bad has now become the instant political pundits cliche for something that has just become absolutely awful. Theyve used it for jeb bush for his recent explanations on iraq, theyve used it to apply to obama they used it for nancy pelosi after the democrats wipe out in the 2014 midterm elections, and i think its just one of those political punditry loves to draw from pop culture and they also like to render very swift and sweeping definitive judgments. And using this phrase enables them to bolster that. So again, the point of our book is not we dont have a political agenda but we just thought it would be interesting since both parties use these kinds of words and expressions and phrases. And i think weve just got to get lost. And the media, as i indicated, is just as guilty of it as the politicians themselves. And so we thought it would just be interesting to collect a lot of these and continue to collect a lot of these and try to give some insight and explanation into what they really mean. Yeah. And i would just add on its interesting, each prominent elected official in leadership capacities on capitol hill and elsewhere kind of has their own verbal ticks and habits and its been interesting. I mentioned senator harry reid, the democratic leader whos retiring now next year after hell have been in the leadership for a dozen years or so much of that time as majority leader. His rhetorical style is rather blunt. He just bludgeons opponents. Critics would say that hes discan inagain juice disingenuous to, like going on the senate floor maybe thats a signal from senator reid. [laughter] and suggesting that the thenrepublican president ial nominee mitt romney had not paid income taxes in ten years without any supporting evidence of it. And hes at various times called thenpresident george w. Bush a liar, Supreme Court Justice Clarence thomas a loser maybe im confusing those. Some variation of not very complimentary terms for his political opponents. The Incoming Senate democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of new york has somewhat of a different style. He rarely has to issue walkbacks, per se. Hes a lot more careful with his words. Or at least with senator reid maybe hes doing that deliberately and he doesnt really care, but schumers style is more to issue a sweeping indictment of the Republican Opposition a more sorrow than an anger type tone. Like i wish we could work across the aisle with our republican friends, but theyre not being reasonable. And were devoted to the middle class whereas our republican colleagues are want to only help out the rich, that kind of thing. You might agree or disagree with that assessment right. But its interesting how he, hes a little more savvy about that language. Yeah. Another schumerism is out of the mainstream, you know . That theres a mainstream and that only the democrats are swimming in it, and any republican who is, deviates from that mainstream is, therefore, not worthy of consideration. Thats right. We have spoken a good deal wed actually love to hear some of your questions and thoughts on political language anything that might have come up, you might have seen over the last several years. Yeah. And we, as i said, are collecting these on an ongoing basis. If you go to our web site and we have cards out at the front table that show our web site, its dogwhistlebook. Com, we welcome suggestions and solicitations for any political expressions that really set your teeth on edge. And as i said, we have a weekly column for the Christian Science monitor, and we like to use contributions from the public in those as well. [inaudible conversations] i think theres a microphone coming around. Or up here. Im curious what happens when you have like a male candidate versus a female candidate [inaudible] minefields they can get into involving language and [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] really attractive. Yeah, thats right. This is not surprisingly, this really is a political minefield for a lot of candidates. Otherwise progressive liberaldemocratic senator tom harkin of iowa whos just retired actually got into some trouble last fall just before the campaign. The republican nominee was a state senator who, objectively speaking, might say was rather attractive. And senator harkin basically said in a speech to supporters that was not supposed to be public if im remembering this correctly said, yeah basically all she has going for her is that she has a pretty face and shes really attractive. I dont want to misquote too far, but that was the gist of it. And he got quite a lot of brushback for this. Now, his own favorite candidate, a democratic congressman, ended up losing that senate race and i doubt that one comment was dispositive that actually made the difference. But senator harkin had to walk that back at a time and it was kind of somewhat surprising coming from him because hes otherwise known as a champion of womens issues, prochoice on abortion, sponsor of the Lily Ledbetter fair pay act down the line. But it just shows how anybody can get into trouble. And it is interesting to to see these dynamics as more women thankfully, get into the political process. And its really notable to watch when you have two female candidates going up against each other which has actually happened on an increasing basis. And just one other note about that i think so far some of the republican president ial candidates have had to be really careful how theyve criticized Hillary Clinton, whoever the eventual nominee is going to have to walk that minefield. The one republican candidate whos been rather forceful and forthright in her criticism of Hillary Clinton has been, is the one republican female in the race, Carly Fiorina the former hewlettpackard executive who has not been shy about going directly after Hillary Clinton. Why dont we take another question. Yep. Hi. Can you talk about how people learn about this way of talking and whether newlyelected official, you know, are less deceptive in terms of the way they communicate . Um, theres kind of a group mentality, ive found and people just automatically when you start going around congress and capitol hill and the White House Press room, they just start speaking this way, and they just kind of assume youre going to speak that way too. I always, we say in the introduction of the book that i think it really takes about a year to really learn fluently or maybe not so fluently the language. And thats kind of why we wanted to write our book, is to sort of be kind of a guide book to, you know cutting through this kind of language. Is so so hopefully it avoids that herd group think mentality. Yeah. Did you intend your book to be a manual to learn to speak this way . [laughter] how not to speak this way. Right. How to avoid the trap. [inaudible] yeah. Well, what to listen for if youre watching politics on tv if you happen to go up to capitol hill and youre lobbying members of congress, if its a town hall meeting. Another one that im always wary of when you hear an elected official, a member of Congress Come to a town hall meeting or a public forum, theyll say theyll get asked a question about some subject favorable, well i introduced a bill about that which is technically accurate, but it doesnt really mean much in congressional parlance because anybody whos in congress can introduce a bill. It doesnt mean its even going to get a Committee Hearing or go anywhere. Its like an attorney filing a lawsuit. All you have to do is be a licensed attorney, you can file a lawsuit. It can get the suit can get thrown out of court quickly, but you can say well, i still filed suit over this. So were trying to give people a heads up and weve been fortunate enough to speak to several Interest Groups who are going up to talk to members of congress about their important issues and to say hey, this is what you want to be this is what you want to be listening for. Right. I would just add very quickly onto whether elected officials kind of are trained to say this, in some sense yes they actually have consultants who when theyre running for office if theyre in even a reasonably contested race, the Party Committees the Democratic Congressional campaign committee, the National Republican congressional committee, will have consultants that tell them what to say, what not to say. At least if you catch them in their first year or so in office as chuck alluded to, you can sometimes get some truth out of them. I noticed folks i started covering when i was following, when i was covering the house of representatives who are now Major Players on the National Scene congressman darrell issa from California Republican who was a Committee Chairman, now governor mike pence of indiana who started out in congress, he was first elected in 2000. I remember talking to these guys you used to be able to get em call em up and talk to them on the phone. Now you can barely get them on the line, and its all canned answers. Any ore questions . [inaudible] microphone. I wonder if you have i wonder if you have any examples from historic figures like john kennedy or Lyndon Johnson. You want to take that . Of these come many of these come from history. Some of them actually are derived from other areas. Im thinking of its not precisely from an historic figure, but i mentioned the grade my good friend. Thats a derivation of british parliament, the right honorable gentleman where you try to put something out there. Can you think of any other historic figures . Well, i mean, i think youve had throughout history politicians who will use when they come out of a meeting, um, words like if theyve had a meeting with we have an example in the book, i think it was an ohio politician who when he came out of a meeting he would say the meeting was cordial, which is meaningless. And basically means we didnt resort to punching each other in the face. Right. And so thats one i think that youve heard throughout history. Happy warrior is a familiar one. Right. That was Hubert Humphrey who described himself as the happy warrior, and now its kind of seen as, oh, im above the political fray. Right. It actually originated with al smith back in the 1928 campaign when he was the first catholic nominee, and he faced a lot of criticism at the time. Right. Its another way of brushing off reporters when an elected official doesnt want to answer a question, theyll say im just a happy warrior. Speaker john boehner uses that from time to time. Right, right. Yeah. I believe can you hear me . Yeah. Yes. I believe it was a quote from Lyndon Johnson and this is particularly it had a particular purpose, i think, in he said that it was always fun to accuse his opponent of bestiality because whether or not it was true, he had to defend himself. Right. And so i think theres been a lot, you know theres always been this sort of lets put this out there and see what, you know what dance they have to do to make this, to get out of this. So yeah. And that was probably said, obviously with him in the preinternet age. [laughter] where you can put anything out now about anybody. Bun of the nice things i think and hopefully our book is part of this is theres a wave of trying to hold politicians accountable and sites like fact check and the Tampa Bay Times politifact where you can actually gauge the accuracy of politicians statements. And i would love to see personally more of those types of things in politics. And, again we hope that our book, by alerting people to the fact that sometimes people fall back on these tired cliches and wellworn expressions, can, you know contribute to that understanding. So any other questions . I understand how these spread so quickly with the internet today, but who comes up with these in the first place . Are these tested somehow by Political Consultants, or do they just pop out of someones mouth and other people are like, thats a great idea, i should say that next time . Is. A little of each. In some cases they are poll tested. The most prominent examples are changing Global Warming to climate change, a decade or more ago. Or you know tax cuts to tax relief. Thats something republicans use. Use investment revenue or resources rather than spend money. Thats a democratic favorite. Thats right. After democrats lost a series of president ial elections by landslides with mcgovern mondale, dukakis they stopped talking about spending programs and began thinking about investment and as chuck says resources etc. Some of them i think come out just kind of spontaneously and naturally just like other internet memes these days where one person says it, and it kind of gets followed along. But a lot of these elected officials are counseled by their press staff to be very careful what they say. The most prominent figures now barely even answer offthecuff questions. Elizabeth warren, shes a favorite of liberals and progressives, reporters can barely get a word in edgewise with her in the senate be hallways, and among the reasons she doesnt want to go off message. Right. And i was just going to add that another source is popular culture. A lot of these come from reporters that are again, seeing things in the music and entertainment worlds and thinking, oh, ill try to be hip, and so they adapted to politics. An example of that would be throwing shade which has become kind of the hip expression for talking trash about someone. That has now found itself way into politics a lot. Any other questions . Yes. You mentioned from the political culture, how much does that factor in, like say somebody was using something from hbo. So what is the class dynamic in there or, you know, like different political cultures . Hows that affect and whats the effect of that . Yeah. Its a tricky thing for officials because they dont want to sound elitist, they dont want to be speaking down excuse me, at the level of American People to use one of the cliches that they often come up with. Its a tricky dynamic. I think oftentimes they find themselves sounding silly if they try to use something from popular culture. Also if i think the more savvy politicians have learned not to show up at Sports Events and be introus dod because introduced because they usually get booed when they do. So try and be careful with that. All right. Well, thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks for your time. [applause] theyll be signing copies afterwards if anybody wants to purchase one. [inaudible conversations] okay, thank you. [inaudible conversations] and youre watching booktvs live coverage of the gaithersburg book festival. That was a panel on political slang. Now, in a few minutes well be back with Mary Stockwell whose book is called the other trail of tears. This weekend the cspan cities tour has partnered with comcast to learn about the history and literary life of ft. Lauderdale, florida. So this was really cultural tourism. And so when theyd set up their villages along the way, along the trail really early a ones, sometimes only leantos, the buses would stop because here was a tourist attraction seminoles camping by the road. So when they came into the tourist attractions, they were getting food a weekly allotment of food and they were also getting sometimes like the rental of sewing machines where coppinger would rent and people used them when they lived in the tourist attraction. And theyd also sometimes get fabric because it behooved the tourist attraction people to supply them with fabric. So they were sitting there sewing and making things for a craft market. This is a little boys shirt belted shirt from the 1920s. This was an experimental time for patchwork, and you can see that on the bottom this is not a design, lets say thats made it down today. This is a little experimental design. The designs were bigger in the 20s and sometimes they werent used any longer than during that particular decade. Yeah. The thing about the devils triangle and the Bermuda Triangle theres always kinds of things that have happened. 519 was a regular Navigation Mission training mission. They would take off from the base and then flight 19s, they would go east out towards the bahamas. Just north theres an area they would drop bombs on, and then they would continue on another 70 miles or so, and then they were supposed to make a turn north and go 100 something miles and make a turn back west towards ft. Lauderdale. They never came back. Later at night after they were sure they were out of fuel, they had sent out these big rescue planes looking for them, and one of them disappeared and that had 13 men aboard. And the next day they started a fiveday search with hundreds and hundreds of planes and ships and never found anything. Watch all of our events from ft. Lauderdale today at 5 30 p. M. Eastern on cspan2s booktv and sunday afternoon at two on American History tv on cspan3. Lets say that ted cruz is the nominee for the republicans okay . And lets say that liberals are outraged by in the. And lets say that people for the american way which receives money from the Soros Foundation a corporation and other corporations profit and nonprofit decide that they want to make a documentary critical of him, and they want to air it during the election all right . Wonderful. Im all for that. Id give my money you know . Tell them if they do that documentary, check with me, im there my check is ready to go. Now, they want to air the documentary during the election, and they want something else. They want jamie, and theyre not going to pay him for it. People for the american way, you know these things they want to write a book, okay . Do you know that under the dissenting views in the very case that he criticized, the dissenting views of a case that he supported people for the american way, it would be a federal crime to air that documentary, and it would be a crime as evidenced by the oral arguments that both kagan and the previous assistant solicitor general conceded during oral arguments with justice alito, and i have the transcript ready to read it if we have any doubts about it, conceded that a book could be regulated. To me as someone who believes firmly in the First Amendment ladies and gentlemen, this is a nightmare scenario. Regulating planned parenthood and depriving it of its First Amendment and equal protection and Due Process Rights is a nightmare. And that is why, that is part of why i dont come to defend the fat cats. What im saying is im worried very worried and ill get to the constitutional amendment later oy vey again our bill of rights has never been amended. How dare anyone even call for that. And i was behind jamie on the day he pushed for that. Well get to that in a moment. But this is my concern, that sometimes, ladies and gentlemen the cure kills the patient and that as a liberal, as someone who defends Civil Liberties i simply cannot abide. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv television for serious readers. [inaudible conversations] and now more live coverage from the gaithersburg book festival. Up next is Mary Stockwell. Her book the other trail of tears. Live coverage on cspan2. Good morning and welcome to the sixth annual gaithers burg book festival. Gaithers burg is a wonderful city that supports the arts and humanities, and were pleased to bring you this event thanks in part to our sponsors and volunteers so when you see them please say hi. A few quick announcements before we get started, if you have any devices please silence them now before our author begins speaking. If youre tweeting today please use gbf15. We also need your feedback. There are paper surveys at the back of tent, plus online and via our mobile app. Please fill it out let the volunteers and organizers what you think. You get entered to win a free ipad. Mary will be signing books immediately after her presentation, and theyre available for sale in the politics prose tent. Even though this is a free event and we want to keep it that way, it really does help if you purchase books. It creates local jobs, it supports politics prose, and it supports the event. So if you you enjoy what you hear, please buy a book. Mary stockwell earned her ph. D. In American History from the university of toledo, my hometown [laughter] and was history professor and Department Chair at lords university. Shes currently an Earhart Foundation fellow at the university of michigan where shes researching her next book on anthony wayne. Marys the author of history books that are used by children throughout the United States including the ohio adventure and a journey through maine. And she was a past winner of a gold lamp award for best book from the association of educational publishers. Today shell be talking about her latest book, the other trail of tears the removal of the ohio indians. Please join me in welcoming author Mary Stockwell. [applause] oh, thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to gaithersburg. Its very beautiful here. Its an honor to be at this festival. Thank you, everybody in this hot tent today, for being here. And thank you to cspan for covering the gaithersburg festival. Its so wonderful. I have to say im glad you mentioned the fact that i am a teach or, at least i was a teacher. There was one name, if i said it to my student ises, it would cause a near riot in the room, and that name was Andrew Jackson. If i said Andrew Jackson to a room full of undergraduates, the waves of hatred that would come back at me, it was overwhelming. And nothing i could say about Andrew Jackson would change it. Nothing. If i said hes the hero of new orleans, if he if i would say he took on the corrupt bank, why if he was here today hed be on his white horse down on wall street occupying it. Isnt there something good i can say on Andrew Jackson, they would say absolutely not. I would ask why this allconsuming hatred of Andrew Jackson. Theyd always say doc the trail of tears. The trail of tears. Andrew jackson sent the cherokee west and for that reason, we despise him and nothing you can say is going to change our minds. Great way to start a class in Early National u. S. History of the 19th century. Whats tragic about this is that i finally learned theres something about this story that has seared itself into our collective imagination. Most people who know American History know about the trail of tears, and they know jackson sent the cherokee west. To me, its tragic because its way bigger story than that. It goes back in time all the way to the war of 1812. It goes back in space to where im from, where were from, the old ohio country. All that land north of the ohio river. And it goes through so many other tribes. Not just the cherokee, tribes we know in our colonial history, and then we forget them. What becomes of the delaware and the seneca and the shaw knee and the ottawa. What happens to them . They go down the other trail of tears. And theres an awful lot of responsibility to pass around for this not just to Andrew Jackson. I found that when i was writing this story is, if i had to start with one name to start the story of the other trail of tears i would not start with ann crew jackson Andrew Jackson, i would start with tecumseh, the great shaw knee warrior who came up with this plan to unite all the tribes and then to give them a homeland of their own in ohio indiana, illinois, in the great midwest the old ohio country. And his plan was rather simple and rather terrible. He said im going to pick a day and im going to alert all my warriors and theyre going to rise up, and theyre going to murder every american man woman and child and all their livestock west of the ap lay sans. And the americans will be so terrified after that attack, theyre going to run for their lives back across the appalachian mountains, and the ohio country, all that beautiful land out to the Mississippi River, will be ours forever. Hes a very admirable figure. Ive got to tell you all my students love tecumseh. I love tecum so but if he had won, id be pouring drinks in dublin right now. He would have won the great midwest. He comes close to winning it, but William Henry harrison discovers what hes up to and defeats his warriors at a place called tip a canoe in 1811. That doesnt stop tecumseh. He goes forward, and the war of 1812 breaks occupant, and the war of 1812 in the west is an indian war. And tecumseh and the british join together, and theyre going to win the old ohio country as an indian state, and theyre going to defeat the United States and dismember it on behalf of the indians. He almost wins. He comes very, very close to winning. But hes stopped in battle after battle and the british are stopped, and he dies. But even after his death the british go to dependent in belgium ghent in belgium to write a treaty and they try with all their might to do something nice for the indians who have fought for them for so many generations and gotten nothing out of it. And they tell the americans we will not sign the treaty unless you give an Indian Country to all the indians in the United States. The ohio country has got to become an indian nation. You can imagine what our negotiators are saying. John quincy adams is one of the negotiators, absolutely not. Absolutely not. They will not relent, and they tell the british no, well sign nothing like that. The british finally say, all right, we wont have an indian state, but they add a very important article in the treaty of ghent. Its called article ix. And in this article they say theres going to be peace forever between the americans, between the indians and between us the british. And then they put a year in. We are going to go back to 1811. We are going to go back to that year, and were going the act as if we never were at war, we were always at peace. And when henry clay saw the document he exploded. Hes one of the negotiators, and he says they mean to take us back before tip a canoe, back before tecumseh rose up and back before this war started, and John Quincy Adams was just as mad. And they told president madison, dont sign this awful treaty. Its a testament to what the indians wanted, that separate country. And James Madison who youll be hearing about today if you say senate James Michener tent, little James Madison had almost seen his country dismembered in the war of 1812. He took the treaty of ghent and it was like getting a reprieve on his way to be executed. He said this is a tremendous document. Our country is secure. Yes, lets have peace with the indians out west, and lets forget that a we ever fought on the western that we ever fought on the western frontier. So what he and his secretary of state did a man by the name of james monroe was to send negotiators out to meet all of tecumsehs tribes. Everybody who had fought with tecumseh, they were told to either come meet William Clark or William Henry harrison in 1815 and write treaties of peace. And they did it. Treaty after treaty tribe after tribe peace after peace were going to live in peace forever from 1815 onward. I have to ask you a question. Was there peace on the western frontier of the United States from 1815 onward . What would hollywood have done if there were no indian wars on the western frontier . They would have had to find another topic. In 1815 so Many Americans wanted to go out to this black soil of ohio and the far west that it was like a dam breaking. Nobody had gone west for so long. They were afraid of tecumseh and indians and war. And now an explosion of people going west. And british people who came here said my god people are walking through ohio 24 hours a day. Because in 1815 land meant what education means today its the way up. Youve got to get land. And land is very cheap, and this is a great opportunity. Im going to ask you a question. I promise theres no quiz later, but just think about this. Imagine youre president of the United States and you have just promised the indians youre going to have total peace. But you represent these people who just elected you, and they want that land. What would you do if you had to set policy for the far western countries . You see, i get to ask the questions which is really great and i dont have to answer these impossible questions. But i just want you to think about that. Because thats the position that james monroe was in when hes elected president. And james monroe is facing this disaster on western frontier so this is what he does. He says im coming up with a new indian policy. I agree with what weve been doing can. The indians own the land. We will buy it from them. Well give them yearly annuities. So im going to do Something Different can. Im going to let them stay on the country they sell. And im going to put them on reserves. Im going to use the land ordnance of 1785, and im going to draw township squares around them. Ill give them one square mile, six square miles twelve square miles, they can stay in ohio in the old country. They have to do something else. They have to become exactly like us. Overnight, they must become commercial farmers. Overnight they must dress like us walk like us, act like us, send their children to school. It sounds terrible, doesnt it . Were much more sensitive to diversity now. But this is what monroe said is. Im doing this for the indians so is that when the americans rush up to the edges of those reserves the indians will look so much like them, they wont destroy them, but just blend in, and therell be peace forever on the frontier. Sound good . Is this going to work . No . Im getting nos from the back. [laughter] monroe picks ohio as the place where hes going to implement this policy. And he tells all the indians to come to a place called the foot of the rapids. Under shadow of a fort where harrison and tecumseh fought many battles. And this treaty at the foot of the rapids is laid in front of them, and theyre told youll get these reserves, youve got to change, but at least youll be allowed to stay here and well be at peace. This is a skeptical group. Would you sign that document . No . What would you do . Think about it. What are the options that are left open for you . Its a crushing thing to study because you get a sense of how trapped these great tribes are. Theyre trapped in space. Because theyve got these township lines now drawn around them. Theres no boundary lines anymore between them and us. Theyre trapped on these little pieces of ground. But theyre trapped also in time because the u. S. Has set a clock. You have got to transform. You have got to be us overnight because were coming your way. Again, what would you do . I found something amazing. The tribes who are still in ohio dont agree on what to do. The great delaware nation, who has been pushed all the way from the atlantic. They say well keep one little reserve in ohio, one mile by one mile square but the rest of us are leaving. We have had it with the americans. We will exchange our land its 18 21 well exchange a our land in indiana primarily and were going to arkansas. Because guess what . We dont want to turn into little carbon copies of you. We want to be delaware forever. We will hunt, we will be warriors well farm, and you cant tell us what to do. And they leave on their own trail of tears. And when they get to arkansas, its a terrible trip but they say at least were ourselves. Not swept up into whatever it is you want us to be. The seneca this Great Western door of the Iroquois Confederation they get a 40,000acre reserve near what is now sandusky, ohio and they say we will become the greatest farmers, we will have the greatest orchards. Our property will be the envy of every settler who comes near us, but dont send us priests or ministers, dont send us lawyers dont send us politicians. We will remain iroquois in our heart and our souls. Second way to handle this. Shah knee are tecumsehs tribe and they say were going to be the best farmers well have orchards, livestock, well even let quakers come and teach our children how to add, multiply, subtract. Well look like you, well act like you we just dont want your religion. We dont trust you. Outside of the quakers, we havent met a christian who actually practices their faith. The ottawa who are living up along a river in the place called the black swamp they simply say nobody would want to live in the black swamp. We both are from the black swamp. People did want to live there. But the ottawa think we can just stay here forever and hunt and be ourselves. We dont have to change. And another tribe gets the prize. They get a place called the grand reserve. Its 12 miles by 12 miles square in the blackest flattest soil not just in ohio, but in the world, and they say well do anything you ask. We will have farms, we will have orchards well have beautiful homesteads well divide our land up, and well own it individually and you can send us missionaries. They converted to the methodist faith. We will become so much like you when you get up to the edge of this reserve, our grand reserve, well blend together as one people. I just gave you five options. What would you do now . Would you have taken any one of those options and said is, yes the great experiments being run, the United States is giving us a chance. Lets try and see if we can make it. When i study this story and when i discovered this i said if only these people had been given more time. This seems to be workable. At least youve got a lot of choices ahead of you. But a drum beat of opposition begins. Who do you think would oppose it more settlers or indians . Settlers . I would say settlers. Thats what i would have said when i and i said that when i went into this project. I said bet all those greedy americans just like me want all that land. No. No. The indians questioned it. Many shawnee rose up and said this is horrible. Is this why we followed tecumseh so we could turn into little americans . For men especially these proud warriors to say can to be told, oh youre going to give up that daring life, and now youre going to get behind an iron plow and youre going to follow the oxen, and youre going to be a farmer. No. Many of the shawnee said, were leaving. A man by the name of colonel lewis took people to arkansas. The prophet was still alive. He took people to kansas. We dont want any part of this. The seneca nation, who had that beautiful reserve where they were the best farmers in the world, said we cannot stand americans anymore. No matter what we do, you bring disease and drunkenness and violence, and you will not rest until you have every speck of territory. And they start writing to the president , send us west. Send us west. Send us west. Amazing. Amazing. Petition after petition. You can imagine my surprise down in the basement of the archives where historians hang out in the microfilm room e reading these we these petitions of the seneca send us west. Its youre going to get their wish eventually. Some frontier officials also begin to say people like William Clark of lewis and clark fame and louis cass whos the superintendent of indian affairs, they begin to say maybe indians and god himself are not meant to be little farmers. Maybe they are meant to be wild hunters and warriors. And they start telling the president s of the United States to send these people west. I asked you before what youd do if you were president in 1815. Were now about ten years down the road. What would you do if youre president in 1825 and youve got all these people, many of them indians demanding that you be sent that they be sent west . How would you maintain peace out on the frontier . James monroe at the end of his presidency says, i give up, go west. And he favors indian removal. John quincy adams is the next president , and he gets into office saying im going to send them west. Its hopeless. There is a collision of people on this frontier, and the indians are suffering. The voices are louder to save us and send us west than keep us here. He would have done it if not for the fact that a man by the name of james barber was appointed as the secretary of war, a name i never heard in all my studies. And james barber said why must we do one thing or other . Why as americans is it always stay or go . Today, tomorrow, fix things. He said why dont we go to all these individual bands and indians and ask them what do you want to do . Want to stay in well help you. Want to go, well help you. Want some interim thing . Well help you. Nobody listens to james barber. Because in 1828 Andrew Jackson, the man so hated by my students, is elected president. And he doesnt come up with indian removal on his own. Its like hes tipping the balance in favor of it. And jackson runs for office saying i will remove the indians. Ill take everybody in the east, and they will be sent west. And im doing it because they dont own the land, we own the land. And all those settlers who voted for me because they want economic opportunity, im giving them tens of millions of acres of indian land. And i dont want Little Indian states and nations rising up in the United States of america. You want to stay on this side of the Mississippi River . You have to be like us immediately. You want to retain any identity . Youve got to go. And he wins the day. The indian removal act passes. But my lord in heaven, what a debate rose up not just in congress but throughout the United States. Ten minutes, i can do this. [laughter] i cant believe i saw that sign with my very bad eyes. I used to do this to my students, and i would say i can do this in one minute. I swear to god they had stopwatches to see if i could actually stop talking. [laughter] indian removal is a fact. I can say that ohio fought indian removal. Our senators voted against it. Our representatives voted against it. Ladies from steubenville wrote these glorious petitions saying stop it, stop it, stop it. But it was too late. It was too late. The balance had been tipped. Im going to leave you with just a few final stories. I wish i could talk about what the actual removal was. Thats the second half of my book the other trail of tears. But let me tell you the order the tribes left and an image of their leaving that stays with me. Kind of haunts me to this day. The seneca leave in 1831, and when they get out to the west they tell William Clark what do we do with all our, the stuff that we brought from ohio . And clark says, you know, what could children of a forest and wild hunters be carrying all the way from ohio . He goes, go down along the Mississippi River. There should be a warehouse. Put your stuff there. And then the seneca go to the west of the city. Later that day clark goes to the warehouse, and he looks up, he cant believe it. The seneca have their stuff piled to the ceiling in crates. And he starts to open the crates, and he goes, its plows. Its spades. Its hoes. These are farmers. Then he reaches in and he grabs a bunch of peach pits, and he says my god they had orchards. They were everything that we wanted them to be, why are we pushing them west . Why did i recommend that they be pushed west . But it was too late. Shawnee leave in 1832, tecumsehs tribe. They go to kansas. And they tell Andrew Jackson, who wants them to go by water and save money, we are going by land, and we are taking our horses with us. Take that, Andrew Jackson. What do you suppose jackson did . It was the one time in jacksons life where he changed his mind. Hes told the shawnee they may go west on their own they may go west on horseback. He caved to the shawnee. 1837 1839 the ottawa leave. The one eye items thing you hear eye witness thing you hear all the time is when they were boarding on ships the sound of moaning and wailing and crying was heard they said, for miles. They were primarily children. When you look at the hundreds of ottawas who leave, the vast majority of them, many are under 10, under 20, under 25. Its children being sent west. The last group goes in 1843. They fight they fought it better than anybody and finally they gave up, and they left. They planned their own removal. Not one government agent sent them west. They sent their own people west. They picked the land, and they left with a warning. Heres warning they give. You sent us to kansas, where are you People Living right now . Missouri. What do you thinks going to happen within another ten years . Slave holders and slaves and people wanting free labor are going to be running over kansas. Well be pushed out but youll be in the midst of a civil war. And they warned the United States and thats exactly what happened. I have to say just in conclusion um, this story, again, right away it started to haunt people in ohio, especially the settlers, the pioneers the first and Second Generation who saw this happen. And they were very troubled by it. The indians took it much better. There was an indian chief by name of squire gray eyes, and squire gray eyes was a chief and when he was leaving and all the settlers around him were crying, he said why are you crying . Arent we christians . Is this the the end of our existence . Isnt our true home up in paradise . Maybe it comforted them for a little bit with. I think that was a dig. I think it was you dont just get into paradise without being judged. Dont worry, theyll be waiting for you guys on the other side. But they were haunted, and they felt very terrible about this. And if you go read frontier newspapers and county histories all the way up to id say about the beginning of the 20th century its the children and grandchildren of the pioneers who are haunted by this and feel bad about this and look back with nostalgia. And im convinced its because as those indians went west, it was people like my ancestors who filled in the country. Somebodys losing something and somebodys gaining something. My ancestors came from ireland. They had nothing. I had poor catholic poor catholic and jewish ancestors coming from poland. I had a group come from the tiny little town in bohemia coming looking for land. They came to ohio, and then they followed the shawnee, and they went west and got indian land in kansas. It haunts us to this day because im convinced its not just a story about the past, its a story about what its like to live in these huge democracies where we all want to fulfill our dream cans but we seem to our dreams, but we seem to only fulfill them at the expense of somebody else, and however do we live side by side with each other, not ruining somebody elses life . Tragedy remains. The suffering of a group of people like the delaware, Shawnee Seneca and wyandot gives rise to the triumph of another but the millions of farmers people were immigrants and city dwellers who filled the land in ohio left behind by the tribe. All americans to live side by side pursuing personal dreams for the future and never at the expense of someone elses life. We will be left wondering, there remains lie buried in the cemetery in kansas city as a consequence of the tragedies we bring into the life of one another will ever be resolved in time or e. Eternity. Thanks. No time for questions . Oh my goodness. I just want to say hello to kansas cspan is still on. I have never been there but i am excited to see where people went, look forward to seeing you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] that was rather Mary Stockwell talking about her book the other trail of tears. Next up live from the gaithersburg book festival, James Madison. The book is called becoming madison. It will start in just a few minutes, this is live coverage on booktv. The american Justice System is not designed to get to the truth. It is not a bad thing. It is the process is not designed to conduct investigations like the inquisitor system where the judge can order witnesss opinion and propose questions to figure out what happened. The american process is designed to year two different areas and see who makes it the most convincing case and the point is to apportion guilt and assign punishment. The debt that is not to get a comprehensive picture of what happened. That is the fbis job and they have not done this job. At the same time if you look at what the defense did we got a fairly simple narrative from them which is he did it. Their focus has been on disputing his guilt preventing him from being sentenced to death. Which was their job. It has been amazing to watch. It has also been amazing to watch the prosecution which was more of a surprise. Away vague selected witnesses, staged the case, the way they timed it to go from sort of mundane and the morning and incredibly devotional in the late afternoon, to have the jury go home at the end of the week pondering the worst of what happened. It was just like watching an incredible theater production and it was devastating. It was devastating not just for the people in the courtroom but the city of boston which is why you heard that the coming out against the Death Penalty and asking to have this thing over with because it is emotionally powerful. Why do i find it unsatisfying . There are questions that havent been answered and cant be answered to the court. One question they testified in court they dont know where the bombs were made. They were not made in the apartment for dorm room, they were made somewhere else who else was involved . Was this person unwittingly involved . Whoever rents space or was this a soul accomplice . We dont know. The biggest question is what was relationship between the fbi and tsarnaev they interviewed in 2011 as a terrorism risk . How come he was able to build a bomb and set it off . Janet napolitano review your book and said you were a conspiracy theorist for raising questions about the role of the fbi because from her point of view the fbi does thousands of assessments of people every year and that they didnt immediately recognize him is indicative from her point of view of nothing. Jenna paula, seems a little conspiracy minded about Conspiracy Theory is. All i did was raise the question. Here is what happened. The bombs went off monday afternoon. On tuesday morning, fbi tactical specialists isolated the likeliest of the brothers from a surveillance tapes enough that after he was killed they could not identify the brothers. I am assuming that even though the joint Terrorism Task force in boston isnt that large, the number of people who go out to interview real live terrorism suspects three days is the time to show those people the picture is they had isolated from videotapes. Is it conceivable . Absolutely. Is in a sign of incompetence . Incompetence may well be the biggest missing link the fbi is a not disclosing. You can watch this and other programs online on booktv. Org. The state Department Requires its Foreign Service officers to be well informed and knowledgeable across many disciplines. Heres a look at some of the books recommends to its employees. To start, Jared Diamond argues that geographical ended 5 mental factors shaped the modern world in guns, germs and steel. That is a look at the state departments recommended reading list to see the entire list visit state. Gov and serge suggested reading. [inaudible conversations] booktv live coverage of the gaithersburg book festival continues in a few minutes tour regular viewers of booktv know that we cover book festivals around the country all year long, we are in gaithersburg, maryland and in a couple weeks we will be at the chicago printers row bit festival. We will be live there with Pulitzer Prizewinning author Lawrence Wright will be doing a call in on our inDepth Program a couple weeks. If you are interested in finding our full schedule you can go to booktv. Org or follow the updates at the bottom of the screen. Live coverage from gaithersburg continues in a minute. President ial candidates are often released books to introduce a themselves to voters. Heres a look at some recent books written by declared and potential candidates for president. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton looks back on her time serving in the Obama Administration in hard choices. More potential president ial candidates with recent books include look for his book in june. This sunday night at 8 00 eastern on first ladies influence and image, we look into the personal lives of three first ladys door racial jackson, Emily Donaldson and anjelica van buren. Rachel jackson was called a bigamist and adulterer during Andrew Jacksons 1828 president ial campaign and died of an apparent heart attack before he took office. His niece Emily Donaldson becomes the white house hostess but it is later dismissed as fallout from a scandal and when Martin Van Buren becomes president his daughter in law is the white house hostess. Rachel jackson, Emily Donaldson and angelica of endurance sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans original series first ladies, influence and damage examining the public and private lives of the women who fill the position of first lady enduring fluids on the presidency from Martha Washington to Michele Obama sundays at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3. As a complement to the series cspans new book is available first ladies president ial historians on the lives of 45 iconic american women providing lively stories of these fascinating women, grading and eliminating entertaining and inspiring read. It is available as a hard cover or ebook through your favorite bookstore or online bookseller. [inaudible conversations] live coverage continues from the gaithersburg book festival, now a look l. A. Of James Madison. Michael signer is the author. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good morning. Welcome to the sixth annual gaithersburg book festival. I am the gaithersburg city attorney. Gaithersburg is a wonderful city that proudly support the arts and humanities. We are pleased to bring you the fabulous event as part of a generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. When you seasons please say thanks. A few announcements. For everyones consideration this morning please silence all of your devices. If you are tweeting today please use the hash tag cbs15. We need your feedback and surveys are available outside the table in the back. Also on our web site and our mobile apps by submitting the survey you are entered into a drawing for an ipad so please participate. Michael signer, the author today will sign books immediately after his presentation and copies of his book are for sale in the politics and prose tent. A quick word about buying the books. Even though this is a free event and we want to keep it that way it does tell book festival by buying public. The more books we sell more publishers will want to send their authors here to speak with us. Purchasing a book to my partner politics and prose does benefit the local economy supports local jobs and supports the book festival. Please enjoy the program. If you are in a position to buy a book please do so. The book we are talking about today becoming madison, the extraordinary origins of the least likely founding father, is Michael Signers second book. His first book, demagogue, the fight to save democracy from its worst enemies focus on the importance of constitutionalism, becoming madison examines concepts of leadership and statesmanship. Michael signer is a practicing attorney in virginia as well as an author advocate and the arrest. Here is his undergraduate degree from princeton university. He has a phd in Political Science from the university of california and a doctorate degree from the university of Virginia School of law. He has taught political theory and government at the university of virginia, Virginia Tech and also the university of california. In addition he was council to Virginia Governor mark warner. Senior policy adviser at the center for American Progress and candidate for Lieutenant Governor of regina in 2009. If that is not enough in addition to that his writings have appeared in the Washington Post, the new republic, usa today, and a book for the daily beast. For this book Michael Signer was inspired by what seemed like a loss of leadership in our current Political Climate and in examining this, he was drawn to the story of our fourth president , James Madison. Madisons role in crafting the u. S. Constitution advocating for adoption. And madison a man who was uncomfortable on the public stage, also on man who was brilliant and powerful be driven. At madisons true passion as a true statesman. And as a lawyer and public servant, found this a terrific, if those of us who aspire to serve in Public Office. Madison advocated what he thought was right and was best and not his selfserving interests. The message was a lot of politicians today need to hear an is an Important Message so please welcome Michael Signer. [applause] thank you for that kind introduction, thank you for being here and thanks to the gaithersburg book festival for this Public Service about books. It is wonderful to see so many people out celebrating books and i wholeheartedly agree with the injunction to buy them. Okay. I started this book off with a hypothesis. Many people have this picture of James Madison as the cool and calculating and somewhat removed character, may be more like a calculator than a live flesh and blood human beings. One book along those lines was titled James Madison and the hardness empire of reason. I started off with hypophysis. I think i thought James Madison just must have been more fierce and tenacious and passionate to have achieved his stunning impact on history and forged the very tight, warm friendships and the lionss that he did and i thought by examining his youth in close detail in the story of his coming of age we might at last be able to discover the of flesh and blood and beneath the myth. One early title of the book that i used was the passion of James Madison but i quickly was replaced by a much better title that my wife came up with which was becoming madison. As often happens in Book Research in the process of exploring that hypophysis i stumbled onto one hell of a story. The story goes back to the simplest archetype we have of stories which is an underdog phasing down and overboard or more simply than that david versus goliath. The story of James Madisons confrontation with Patrick Henry, david versus goliath of revolutionary and constitutional america also contains clues for the most classic problem leaders anywhere have in any organization not just politics how can reason defeat prejudice . How can complex longterm solutions effort retail over shortterm fiers . In a democracy how can the statesman defeat the demagogue . Beckoning back to my first book. Lets start in the new academy on richmond in 1788, this was the scene of vas convention called to ratify the constitution that emerged from philadelphia the year before. The new academy is the new building its cornerstone had been laid two years earlier. The auditorium still smells of freshly cut would and whig is and sweat and horses. Everything had a feeling of newness in this location in richmond. The auditoriums at a couple blocks away from vas new Capital Building which is under construction at this time. 170 delegates were roaming the womb. They fell into two camps, the federalist and anti federalist and they had the feel of armies preparing for battle. The federalists were led by an unlikely figure. James madison, who stood 5 foot 4 inches tall and weighed 100 pounds. I recently on a speech at James Madison university stood next to a lifesize statue of James Madison cast in bronze. I am bitterly twice his size. Madison had a week speaking police and a nervous and feverish manner but he had a quick sense of humor and surprising warmth that in deer him quickly to allies and friends, people he wanted to know him. Politics out of all professions and the young man could have chosen was the least likely. A close friend of his head once subjected to a plan Thomas Jefferson had cooked up for madison to run for governor of virginia, madisons soul was replete with good gentleness, humanity and every social virtue end he was too amiable in his dispositions to bear against the torrents of abuse. Madison was also raised by a father of strong but repressed emotions would describe vanity once as a vice i have always despised. His paternal grandfather was a slave master and a quite enterprising one and he was later at the height of his career setting of a realestate empire in a plantation empire, he was murdered by a three slave, two of whom he owned in a conspiracy of poisoning scheme. In punishment for that plot the two slaves his grandfather owned were not put to death. I argue in the book i suggest that that may have been the joy shall systems recognition of the brutality of his grandfather. This is part of what madison was raised in, recognize the brutality and inhumanity of some systems that came before him that he lived in. His mother was nurturing and smothering and left him with his grandmother to be raised for two of his earliest years. He was the eldest of seven siblings two of whom died from dysentery after madison returned home from college which madison feared would also kill him as well. This makes of experiences made madison despite his small stature and introversion and emotionally us to and strong leader with an intuitive grasp of the suffering of others. I was fascinated by an episode when he was serving as the new congressman in philadelphia in congress and he was financially dependent on his father and ran out of money and his father wasnt giving him more. He needed to resort to the services of the jewish moneylender and philadelphia at the time. Madisons friend Edmund Randolph and many others to use the services of solomon resorted to crude antisemitic stereotypes to talking about him but madison pointedly took the track to made friends with solomon, they be printed each other, he talked about him as his little friend. You wonder how little he was. It was interesting that he would have empathized with somebody who was really at the bottom of Philadelphia Society at the time. To the new academy the anti federalists looking at a federalists are generally a older and grayer. Patrick henry they included George Mason Benjamin harrison the governor of virginia, Patrick Henry, their leader was a robust 52 years old, lantern jaw and heavy brow and 6 feet tall and imposing. He walked with kind of a pronouncedst as if bearing a heavy load that he wanted everyone to know about. He had been famous for at least 13 years, probably longer, since he first made his mark in the debate in the virginia General Assembly about whether or not va should support more independence to the colony of jamaica. That somewhat obscure topic the year before the declaration of independence, then delegate Patrick Henry saw an opportunity to advance a more militant version of colonial freedom. He is sitting in the General Assembly and directly stands and introduces a resolutions declaring the right of virginians to a regulated militia and asking the conventions of the va to an immediate state of defense. Those resolutions sparked a firestorm in the chamber among the other delegates. The tory delegates rose and shouted that henrys ideas were too provocative for the british. Heroes in response and sarcastically asked, listen to this what have we to oppose them . Shall we try arguments . We have been trying that for the last ten years. So in that breath henry is attacking recent itself in politics. That is important for what comes later with madison. Gentleman may cry peace, peace but there is no peace. I know not what course others may take but as for me, give me liberty or give me death. That statement and the fame that would follow earned henry the title of the father of the american revolution. The question sitting at vas ratifying convention in 1788 was whether he could be father of the constitution as well. Many people were deeply concerned about how the revolutionary country could become a constitutional nation and they were worried about Patrick Henrys role in that quest. Thomas jefferson for instance, a great fan of america making this transition did not like Patrick Henry. The two men had been opposing lawyers in Central Virginia courts for several years, he knew him well and when the courts adjourned for winter jefferson satirically recalled that henry would make up a party of 4 hunters of his neighborhood and go off with them to declining woods and has weeks hunting deer of which he was passionately fond, sleeping under a tent before a fire wearing the same shirt the whole time and covering all the dirt of his dress with a hunting shirt. Jefferson found this everyman populist posed in authentic and egregiously so. Henry was deeply familiar with the lead Virginia Society even if he chose not to join it. Henrys father was a prosperous plantation owner and a colonel in the local militia beat tutored his son at home in latin, shakespeare, ancient history and mythology henry read vergil in latin when he was 15 years old, decades later he could read nero in his speeches wishy gradually adopted a severe persona. Contemporary describe his appearance as grave, penetrating and mark klystron liniments of deep reflection, one biographer said he had a rogan cast with piercing blue eyes that could change to a d gray, a high straight forehead, heavy brow long black eyelashes that made his eyes seem especially penetrating. He had the ability to hone in on peoples passions he could talk a jury into anything. One friend describes perfect command of a strong and musical voice which he raised or lowered at pleasure and modulated so as to fall with any given court of the human heart. Madison actually talked one time about how when henry would appear he would adjust his eyeglasses, cleared his throat and in that moment he had half of the room. Once a man watching henrys performance from an upper gallery became so much in shanty with his eloquence he accidentally spurted tobacco juice on the heads of the members of the house below. After henrys death jefferson would say i think he was the best humored man in society i almost ever knew and the greatest orator that ever lived and jeffersons view was henrys consummate knowledge of the human heart that about and to attain a degree of popularity with the people at the large never perhaps equal but even after death jefferson, this is conflicted, derided henry as avaricious and rotten hearted and possessed of two great passions the love of money and the love of fame. So the adversaries of this formidable american character in the new academy was James Madison who all said to be fair at this point was a celebrity in his own right. She achieved prominence in National Politics that was shocking considering the abilities he faced. Part of that stemmed from the extraordinary power of conscience that he unleashed in his home life in Public Service and parts of that went back to john witherspoon. John witherspoon was president of princeton, madison was a student there which is a key part of my book. You cant really tell , Asheville Green you can still the story of revolutionary america without talking about this man who was a scottish cleric who was a presbyterian and recruited across the atlantic to serve as president of princeton at this king motion in the notions history. One of the most bold decisions James Madisons father did was sending madison away to famously free thinking princeton as opposed to going to the Anglican College of william and mary. I argue in the book that that was really an investment because his parents saw madisons gift at a very wikipedia and wanted him to be a free thinker as well. The fifth president set about witherspoon, he had more of a quality presence he quality powerfully felt but not to be described in any other individual with whom the writer has ever known, washington accepted. As a young student witherspoon was described as having a disagreeable temper and awkward manner but also very sensible and shrewd. Also as a young cleric in scotland he despised bonnie prince charlies attempt to restore the monarchy in scotland and raised a militia of his known and tried once but failed to fight a battle. The next year he tried again and was awarded with imprisonment. There was an escape attempt at the castle where he and his helper four putin successfully climbed a row of knotted blankets to the ground. The fifth fell 70 feet and died. With this in remain in the castle, probably the right choice but was tortured and. She had severe anxiety attacks for years afterward and felt the need to keep the strictest check on himself. Another commonality with his Young Students of madison studied with with this unjust after arriving, tells witherspoon he wants to finish the standard three year curriculum in two years which would require taking early exams. He needed to hire horse, cicero, and passes the exam that approach is another student with a plan, they would Work Together to compress all that study. Witherspoon approved this plan and they begin to work over ten hours a day together studying. This was the first sign of madisons signal intensity. His ability to disappear totally in a task before him. 60 years later when he is writing an autobiography he recounted the experience in almost masochistic terms. His indiscrete experiment of the minimum of sleep and a maximum of application was a test of which the constitution, meaning his, would bear. He was always sleeping five hours a night for several weeks on end and the result was very in term health. What did madison actually learn while he was in the aging in this unique kind of study . The first was the passion. He taught his students the difference the twin selfish and benevolent passion. The selfish passion stemmed from gratification whereas the benevolent one came from the happiness of others. This went back to with distinction drawn thousands of years ago by aristotle between the general good and the private good which aristotle used to distinguish between pure and perverse regimes, an example being if you had the rule of the few, and aristocracy if they cared about the common good that would be an aristocracy, if they care about themselves that would be an oligarchy. He talked about the difference between public versus private passion, the public ones where fame, power and pleasure, private ones were family, friendship and patriotism. He taught that the noblest passions were those that were benevolent and public. That meant he wanted his students to and join up, grand ambition to the common good and for those brave souls had been willing to sacrifice their life. Was no clinton and almost all of his students went on to become revolutionary soldiers. With madison also learning about moral philosophy from witherspoon, he taught the students that conscience was a field which it was a real thing in the souls of men and he said it was much founded in the moral principle. He talked that those who neglected their conscience in life with great harm. They risk to misery and shameless madison also learned the crucial importance of government by studying its converse or the vacuum of it the state of nature. Agree topic if you take political theory classes. Witherspoon, this was amazing to me he taught that men could use no other weapons in the state of nature, this comes before people form a government that did in those furnished by nature meaning there arms, teeth, fists and feet furious their only guide, he taught. Most chilling of all the said to would endeavor to destroy, exterminate and even devour one another, exterminate and devouring. It is incredible. This is a much darker vision of the state of nature than even you finding Thomas Hobbes and this is what madison was learning. Finally learned about the idea of a nexus, with this and taught his students that every Good Government must be complex so that one principle or one part may check the other. He said they must be some balance that everyone to his own interests or inclination and plays upon the hole. That idea, nexus means to tie, blind or weve something together. Imperial means power and the binding of power something to make one necessary to each other, what came to mind to me was ropes tied together. That was the idea of government. Wait for the train. After returning home from all this education madison was stuck in life as a tutor. His father forced him to come home through the power of Purse Strings and made them become a tutor to his younger childrens. Great revolutionary movements were a foot and Patrick Henry is that the head of them. 1775, madison is 24 years old and at home, henry meanwhile leads a mission by his local and of from alisha to seize the colonial gun power, madison and his brother tried to join Patrick Henry in this confrontation but they were too late, he was so excited by this that he got a commendation wishes father ran commending Patrick Henrys and bravery. Madison himself began practicing firing his musket. He wanted to be a soldier. In 1775 he boasted to his College Friend William Bradford he was doing such a good job at muscat practice that he should not miss the target at 150 yards. His lifelong battle with anxiety got the better of him. As his father and the men looked on in the first firing drills with other men madison collapsed and had to be removed from the field. This was something that would happen periodically for the rest of his life and it is a major interest in this book. Because buffets that he experience, epileptic fits, lynne cheney wrote a book a year ago called James Madison where she concludes the experience of madison was organic, he basically had epilepsy he had a physical ailment. I totally disagree. Based on a careful reading of evidence that pieced together tells a different story. The modern diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorder contains nine criteria for diagnosing panic attacks. A patient who experiences four has panic attacks, madison routinely experience seven during all of these, palpitations, trembling choking chest pain, abdominal distress, painting and fear of going crazy. These are cited jenna and on epileptic seizures. Once psychology professor at the university of virginia said humiliation is the key risk factor for developing this disorder. You isolate yourself in order to avoid humiliating displays of panic. The cost of isolation is extreme loneliness its own kind of emotional hell. Many people suffer this agoraphobia, afraid to go in public. Madison overcame this anxiety to engage in politics. A lesson in courage. And next year madison, 25 years old, became a delegate to virginia and independence convention. Patrick henry was there, the great hero of a revolution and in a letter to john adams, the quality of leaders in the room, he wrote to adams i cannot count on one coadjutor of talent equal to the task. Madison the young and small and shy was making himself known. A draft of the constitutions religious freedom claus was introduced by george mason famously later of the bill of rights. Madison stood to object and suggest a replacement. This was his first real impact on public life. Nations clause stated all men should enjoy the full list toleration and exercise of religion. Madisons version said men should be equally entitled to the free exercise of religion. That was a fundamental shift because says the state was on the position of the creeping freedom that said men had freedom for the state had anything to say about it. Pat end ed up becoming our establishment of religion idea that became in the bill of rights many years later. After two months of work on a new constitution Patrick Henry was elected, revolutionary virginia first governor, madison became a delegate. The next spring madison suffered his first, his only of the coral defeat when he stood for reelection. He was a little cocky at this point, he was the head of wind and the custom in Orange County was for politicians to pay for voters to get drunk, to get voters strong, election day. It was hard to travel to votes of people hung out and frank all day and the candidates paid for it. May be something we should try today. Madison decided to buck that custom and not only that but he mocked openly in his campaign the corrupting influence of spirit slickers. Probably not the smartest decision because one of his opponents dont a cavern and madison lost not only to that opponent but another one. He blamed himself decades later he still stunned and criticize his own reserves that after he lost he was criticized for seemed to not care and to be all lou fan said it was respect for voters but instead he was hurt and it was selfdefense but he did decide never to allow a fickle public to control his destiny, never to seem like he was above people again. Later that year, vas delegates still favorably impressed by madison put madison back in office as one of five members of vas powerful council of states. This was a check on the governor set up in virginias constitution. All his major decisions had to be made after consultation and agreement with five other elected councilors. Madison became one of them. Overs the next couple of years he worked so closely with henry that many rumors of henrys words were in fact madisons. 1779 henrys term ended and Thomas Jefferson was elected governor, madison state on but that fall there was an opening in congress, congress was basically a disaster. There was a huge leadership deficit and madison seized on the opportunity to be one of four new congressman in philadelphia but instead of leaving immediately which was the custom to avoid the horrible winter roads madison decided to stay home and work on crafting a solution to vas inflation crisis. Yet gelatin inflation, several kinds of currency and no one figured out what to do with it so he spent several months studying on his own and he wrote a private as a for himself where he concluded the key problem was not the money supply itself but the publics confidence in whether the currency could be redeemed by a central government. He also said attacks on government were disparaging currency itself. He didnt published as a for 12 years, kind of remarkable. Is kind of a private blueprint for how he was going to go about his Public Service entering congress so after arriving in congress he wrote jefferson back immediately, took in the scene that the problem facing the country was, quote defects of that would statesman. That was considered so controversial that it was removed from his official letters until the 20th century. He spent his three year term in congress increasingly agitated by the need for more strong and robust federal government and brought the combined conscience and governing passions and the idea of nexus to a young revolutionary government. He became nationally famous in 1783 at the end of his term when he ran out a passionate speech arguing states must fund the federal government must be forced to through an impost. Through a series of logical fruity demonstrated the status quo where congress had a the states for occasional funds was not sustainable. He put his conscience behind the cause, the pride of the american experiment was the fight for wrights basic teenager. The revolutionary cause with required dignity and lester. The nation would known those favorable influence on the rights of mankind. He did fail to win a majority for the end post but the speech turned the First National audience, a was reprinted and sent to massachusetts, connecticut, new jersey, virginia and abroad in england and france. George washington wrote madison praising the address for so much dignity and energy that no real friend of the honor and dependency can hesitated single moment. With actions like this madison earned the title early during the leader of who would become known as the federalist but there was a dark side to that spring as well. Madison who had been single all this time didnt really have a job. He fills quickly in love with a 15yearold girl named kitty florida, the daughter of another congressman saying that this same boardinghouse where Thomas Jefferson who took a great interest in this romance and became madison and swingman. They were writing poetry backandforth, head and kitty brokawmadison became engaged to her bed kitty broke off the engagement very suddenly and abruptly and shattered madisons heart even when many decades later when he came upon the original letters he blotted out the lines referencing kitty. It was also vulnerable to him. He returns to virginia. He is now thoroughly radicalized on the issue of federal power. The ultimate cause of statesmanship is to reform the federal government and the next spring he is trying to become a lawyer and once again a very difficult time becoming a lawyer his whole life and never does become one. He gets a surprising letter from none other than Patrick Henry his old boss and henry tells madison he wants and to come back into government. He says the madison deserves some respite, is not the federal government on bad footing . Cell medicine is restless to return to politics and puts his name forward as state delegate. After he arrives in richmond in mid may one of his first orders of business is to sit down for coffee with Patrick Henry so madison has a plan in mind. He wants henry to support and overall virginia constitution that will serve as a precursor to what madison wants to do federalese. This is almost delusional because it is unlikely henry who had been signaling that he was against the new constitution it was unlikely but madison thought maybe he could pull this off so the planned to discuss the dysfunction of congress and the need for reform. Madison thought their minds met and he took a rare leap of faith afterwards telling jefferson that henry seemed strenuous for invigorating the federal government but that is not put him rebounded to end changed his mind. When he signaled madison, that was the first time the two start parting ways but there was a breach that happened between them that fall when Patrick Henry, opportunistic as ever former governor, saw political issue in the disintegration of a glut in churches happening as the economy in virginia was faltering. Henry proposed a new tax that would fund only anglican churches. Madison was appalled by this. It went deep to all his deeply held principles and he made a speech on the for the General Assembly containing 15 separate attacks, on the tax. Him floyd logic, history, studies of the establishment of religion to show that this would be disastrous not to mention grossly against the america he wanted to create. That speech became an anonymous letter meanwhile he did this stratagem where Patrick Henry was reelected governor which took him out of the voting for this and they delay the vote a year meanwhile madison could run a campaign against this idea. Up petition drive was sparked by madisons letter which gathered 10,000 signatures and kill henrys bill. Madisons letter became known as the memorial and bremen stearns against religious assessments, probably the western worlds most famous articulation of low wall between church and state. Madison then began his famous research on history of confederacy in the va plan which together became the intellectual blueprint for the constitution at the constitutional convention. At the convention itself in 1787 he placed himself at the very center of the room of the hall and recorded every word that was said which had the effect of making himself the authority and voice for history of everybody who was speaking there. When the constitution passed in philadelphia that was only the first battle. Patrick henry had boycotted the convention. When madison got to work with Alexander Hamilton in the beginning stage john jay and the federalist papers which were opeds designed to convince voters in new york and around the country to support to ratify the constitution henry van in virginia was fulminating against the constitution. Madison wrote much will depend on mr. Henry. The fall of 1787 looking toward 1788 when the ratifying convention was scheduled, he thought henry might be up in the air because there was difficulty in translation but he turned henry was indeed scheming that ends constitution and even threatening to the rebellion against the new nation if it were passed. Madisons friend Edmund Randolph told a story about running into henry on the street in richmond had become so physically agitated about the constitution the two men could not actually speak. Another front row that henry was so furious that his frame would shake and he was sweating at every pool. 1787, jefferson wrote from paris about henry what we have to do is devoutly pray for his death. Madison delayed his return to virginia not only for weeks but months he was focused on federalist papers and despised campaigning. He had to beg for a seat to the constitutional convention. It infuriated everybody around him but he finally made his way through to richmond to the ratifying convention, but the number of states that past the number remaining, everyone thought the constitution might not become law if virginia did not ratify. By this point the two men lows each other. In the three weeks that followed the ratifying convention they clashed over the future of virginia, the future of america, henry began the proceedings by describing himself as the servant of the people, of this commonwealth and a sentinel over air rights, liberty and happiness. He then sought to scare the delegates to invoke the terrors of tyranny to called the anti federalists the elitists and reclaim the status quo as safe and the anti federalists as radicals. He said no dangers, known insurrection or tumbled has happened. Everything has been calm and tranquil. He relentlessly exploited his revolutionary reputation. He mocked madisons constitution as having imaginary balances and wrote dancing king rattling ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances. Midway through the Convention Madison became so frustrated by these tactics that he told the delegates George Washington supported the constitution. Henry became furious. He said the constitution was irritating the avenging hand of heaven. Henry cut away at madisons allies with barely hidden contempt and is the middle and lower ranks of people laughed at the ideas the wellborn had anti mocked the microscopic eyes of modern states and for obsessing about an abundance of defects in old simpsons. Madison felt ill, isabel saltus stomach was turning, he thought he might go crazy. It was an attack of his old fit and he fled the debate all. He remained in bed. After two days he wrote a friend writing a scarcely practical and very injuries to me, we have not majority as yet but the other party ingenious and indefatigable. Madison the man was in revolt against James Madison the statement. When he returned to the new academy practice what i call in the book madisons method. This was a replacement for what he learned about in school about the socratic movement. Any lawyers will know how frustrating it is. Madison as a student called it factitious and insidious and even fought the socratic method helped kindle the hatred against socrates which put a violent period of his life because it was so condescending. Instead madisons method and nine elements find passion in your conscience focus on the idea, not the man and develop multiple independent lines of attack in greece and haitians, establish a competitive in vantage through corp. Concord bad ideas by dividing them, master your opponent as you master yourself, push the state to the highest version of self and govern the passions. When madison returned in named as is any vague this course as emir sport of fancy and named five grounds by which delegates could determine whether the constitution was in fact needed. And the most powerful and prevailing influence of states would undermine the union. And the amendment process could allow for a fix. Just as the nation would. They had to have faith that the nation could sustain itself. This is one passage in the book that method was maddening at best and infuriating at worst. As physically slight as it was madison seemed indefatigable, almost to burn with the intensity. He always knew more than you, anticipated most of your moves and seemed to plan out everything he would drag his audience through a series of choices, no option to make to the conclusions. If you respond to one point there was countless others to deal with as well. It was a socratic dialogue without a question marks, symphony of preparation, discipline and control. Every attempt to trick him more play to his ego would be avoided by returned to his plan and most importantly if you ever reveal yourself to be combating for any selfish or special interests that fact would become bearish in contrast to his self evident conscience. In contrast to the fact that he did seem to have the common good at heart. On the last day of debate, a man named zack arrive johnson wrote in an obvious reference to Patrick Henry, we never heard from this man again, he condemned the strain construction which was put by the gentleman on the other side on every word and suitable land endeavoring what would never happen. He would attempt to satisfy my conscience and announce my judgment for the safety and propriety of the system. And it was johnson of virginia and the country made the constitution become law. In the aftermath, the cruelest blow delivered to madison, madison designed the senate for legislating by experts which would leave it unchallenged. It is against fickleness and passion and impetuous councils. Might be one reason James Madison somewhat overlooked today. Imagine the career he could have had in the u. S. Senate and his gifts would have been prominent as opposed to secretary of state and the presidency. Why are there some many new books about madison . Is good for James Madison but not if you had one of four books that came out this spring. At the announcement for the ted Kennedy Museum the president barack obama said we did in a time of such great cynicism about all of our institutions we are cynical about government and washington, it is hard for our children to see in the noisy and too often trivial pursuit of todays politics, possibilities of our democracy and capacity to do big things. That corrosive effect of cynicism about leadership is probably one of the greatest dangers we have today but also one of the lessons we learn from James Madison by revisiting this extraordinary story of the obstacles madison overcame to change not only himself but the country and the world and history. We can restore one crucial new thought to democracy which is the leadership against the forces of cynicism and prejudice is actually possible. Madisons method can in the end destroyed bad ideas and build new good ones and statesmen will defeat the demagogue. Thank you very much. [applause]. I wonder if you might cant hear you. Speak a bit speak into the microphone. Microphone open . Can you hear me . Yes. Okay. Can you can you discuss madison and slavery . Sure. Wed be interested in hearing about that. Also you seem so well interested in henry, have you thought about writing a book about him . [laughter] well, theres a theres a great deal in this book about a slavery. I actually well, as i told the story about madisons grandfather and his brutality towards slaves i am fascinated by madisons relationship to the problem of slavery. And i think that it really contained all of his weaknesses and his strengths. So he, one of his lifelong slaves said madison would exceed the negroes around him in politeness. That was a key quote that described his demeanor and the way he seemed to relate. He also freed one of his slaves while he was in philadelphia, to the chagrin of his father. It was a man named billy who he told his father he just resists in every fiber of his being his status, and he took that so much to heart that he manumitted him. Well he sold him first under pennsylvania law and then he was freed and later on the madison family did business him. So he was capable of an act of rebellion like that. But then on the other side of the ledger, he refused to free his slaves, the rest of them, either during his life or in his will which was the subject of incredible agony for his closest men tee who was named Edward Cowles who went on to become the abolitionist governor of illinois. He did a tenyear campaign to try and get madison and his wife the free his slaves, and he wouldnt. Its infuriating to read. Meanwhile toward the end of his life, he became president of the American Colonization Society which was settling liberia. So he was groping for kind of an abstract structural solution, but he was unwilling, i think because he was a control freak in some ways, but he also felt that the slaves, that his enslaved people were better off under him. And its a very unsatisfying combination of things. And i dont think it contributes that well to his historical picture. [inaudible] the threefifths compromise . [inaudible] yeah. Well, he spoke, he was not he spoke with reluctance about it as a political compromise. So the part madison thought the threefifths compromise was necessary and he was very direct and transparent in describing and this is the part of him that many people have written about recently which was as a political tactician. He just thought it was necessary to keep the slave Holding States onboard. And that was how he described and rationalized it later on when it was being attacked by early opponents of slavery. He just said it was necessary. And, again thats somewhat unsatisfying for somebody who made the rest of his legacy was so much about conscience. Yes, sir. It seems to me it seems to me that it was a very poor move to press the war of 1812 without any preparation for it. It seemed like a very inconsistent philosophy. Yep. [laughter] do you discuss that in the book . I dont. The book primarily focuses on his, on his youth. So i talk very minimally about the war of 1812. But i would agree with your assessment. His strengths were not as an executive, and they were not as kind of a leader giving voice to a country looking for the presidency in america such a unique institution. We want the president s to be the mirror of the nation, we want them to you know, its very different from a prime minister. And i think one of the reasons that he just had a difficult time with his legacy theres an active battle now or a discussion about whether the war of 1812 was as badly conducted as we had thought for so long about him. But madison clearly made a lot of mistakes. And one of the i do talk in the book about how he was, he didnt give confidence through his conduct of it. He was very personally agonized making micromanaging some of the decisions. But he never he was criticized by people watching him for never seeming to realize nations hopes in the conduct of the war. He also had problems with his cabinet and with being a good executive manager of the federal government. So again, i dont think, you know it was strange because really he achieved his greatest purpose in life with the bringing home of the constitution. So he had different chapters in his life. I talk in the book about how many people in public life do. They have different chapters in their life and peaks and valleys, and this book tells the story of this peak. I think were i think we are out of time. Wed like to thank Michael Signer for being here today and he will be able available to sign books in the author signing area. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] and this is booktv on cspan2. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend. And book fairs throughout the year. Today were live in gaithersburg. This is in maryland. And in just a few minutes, well continue our live coverage with a look at the hidden costs of social media. Here are a few of the book festivals well be covering this spring on cspan 2s booktv. Well close out may at Bookexpo America in new york city where the Publishing Industry showcases their upcoming books. Then on the first week in june were live for the Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest including our three hour live in Depth Program with Pulitzer Prizewinning author Lawrence Wright and your phone calls. Thats this spring on cspan2s booktv. Well, 21 years ago i wrote a piece in the city journal that was titled the knife went in. And it referred to a curious phenomenon that ive noticed in the prison in which i worked. And that was that virtually all murderers who stabbed someone to death said of the relevant moment the knife went in. And i thought that this was a curious way of describing what had happened. [laughter] implying as it did that the knife had a volition of its own and that it was a knife that guided the hand rather than the hand that guided the knife. And my wife said, my wife thought who is also a doctor thought that i was exaggerating. And, of course, i absolutely never exaggerate. [laughter] but one day she was in her clinic, and she had a patient and it was a lady, and she said she asked about her husband and she said the knife went in. And she realized that i hadnt been exaggerating. Now, this way of putting it is significant, at least i thought it was significant, because it suggested that the perpetrator was by his rather peculiar locution distancing himself from his own act and from his responsibility for it. And he was turning it into some kind of natural event rather like an eruption of vesuvius for example rather than a motivated willed action with human intention behind it. But, of course its not only murderers who use this mental device. And im not going to ask for a show of hands but i doubt that there is anyone in this room who has never resorted to it. And certainly, the mind rarely the human mind rarely displays its flexibility so brilliantly as when it is finding excuses for bad behavior. [laughter] or rationalizations for having done what ought not to have been done. And even the dullest person who has never had an original idea in his life instantly becomes wonderfully inventive [laughter] the moment he is justly accused of having done something that he ought not to have done. And this is an important, if not necessarily creditable, fact or aspect of human psychology and nature that is surely available to anybody who will either Pay Attention to or think about the words and acts of others or to what dr. Johnson called the motions of his own mind. And its my contention that honest attention to the words and deeds of others and to our own thoughts and emotions reveals to us infinitely more about the human condition than the formal study of psychology has ever done or will ever do. And, in fact, its my contention in the book that psychological theory whether it be psychoanalytical, behaviorist, darwinist or neurochemical, whatever it is certainly any theory that claims to explain all or a very large part of our human existence and experience actually creates a barrier to human selfunderstanding rather than advancement of it. Insofar as it encourages people to think of both themselves and others as objects rather than as subjects. And this inevitably leads to an increase in intellectual and moral dishonesty and evasion, because try as we might, we cannot experience ourselves as objects rather than as subjects. So theres inevitably a tension that is created. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] and youre watching booktv on cspan2. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every Weekend Television for serious readers. And we are live at the gaithersburg book festival in gaithersburg maryland. Well return with more live coverage in just a minute. The library of congress is the Largest Library in the world. Here are a few history and biography books that the library suggests. First off the library of congress recommends the battle for america 2008, in which Washington Post veterans dan balz and Haines Johnson track the president ial campaigns of john mccain and barack obama. In the woman behind the new deal, key stint downey explores the life of frances perkins, the first woman appointed to a president s cabinet. Also on the list is the examination of the hemings family who were slaves to Thomas Jefferson and their role in early america. In american lion, jon meacham looks at the life of Andrew Jackson, his time in the white house and his role in shaping the executive branch. The library of Congress List of suggested reading in history and biography continues with simon shamas the american future, which attempts to place modern debates on war, religion, race and immigration into a historical context. In lift every voice, Patricia Sullivan provides a history of the Civil Rights Movement in america and the development of naacp. And finally, David Taylors soul of a people which tells the story of a group of journalists working on the federal writers project in the 1930s. Thats a look at some of the books on the library of Congress List of suggested reading. To see the full list, check their web site at www. Read. Gov booklists. And up next from the gaithersburg book festival, author Jacob Silverman. His book, terms of Service Social Media and the price of constant connection. This is live coverage on booktv on cspan2. Good afternoon. Welcome to the sixth annual gaithersburg book festival. My names matt hopkins, a local architect in the city of gaithersburg. Proudly supporting the arts and humanities were pleased to bring you this event thanks in part to the generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. A few announcements quick, hopefully for the consideration of everyone here, please silence your phones. If youre going to do any ironic tweeting please use the hash gbf15, hashtag. Also we do need your feedback. This is only our sixth year, were trying to grow the event so surveys are available here and at the tent in the back, on our web site and on our mobile app if you havent downloaded that already. If you submit a survey, well put you in a contest to win an ipad. Itll be your fourth one probably, but youll get a new one. Mr. Silverman will be signing books, copies on sale at the politics and prose tent. Even though this is a free event, it does help the book festival if you buy a book here. The more books we sell, the more publishers send their authors here to speak to us. So if you enjoy this program and youre in a position to do so, please buy a book. I certainly would recommend terms of service. And im going to im going to introduce our author by directly advocating for you to log into jacobs weekly posts. Im not going to do a thumbs up or retweet. Read his nuanced thoughtful analysis. While i admittedly revel in the momentary connection to this outstanding book far more importantly mr. Silverman has convinced me the discourse we need to have is obsessive sharers has reached a critical turning point. Stripping bare, all is voluntary and everything is fully approved by us users, mr. Silverman breaks down the way digital zealots have assumed our responsibility of determining not just our consumption needs but our social and emotional needs. The near religious faith we have in these companies ingenuity and caption of technology seems terrifyingly inescapable and maybe a replaceable fad given the increase of the internet of all things. Jacob silverman, for the celebritychasing crowd is a jeopardy champion. But for relevant to us today, hes a prolific freelance contributor to the New York Times, l. A. Times, slate, atlantic politico, many publy casings publicationings. Hes here to discuss his fantastic booker, terms of service, and joining us up here on the dais is carlos assad da, nonfiction at the Washington Post. Hes a former editor for Foreign Policy magazine, and hes here to help us engage in this conversation. Thank you very much, and welcome to both of you. Thank you. [applause] actually, jacobs a threetime jeopardy champion. Three times as impressive. Thank you for being here. Im thrill today talk to jacob about the thrills to talk to jacob about the book because im an avid user of social media. I communicate with it, i promote stuff i write with it, and then i come across jacobs argument which terrifies me to my very soul. So the first thing i wanted to ask about is the title of the book, right . Terms of service. It immediately makes me feel very guilty because if youre like me, you sign on to some new service or program, and you get this huge document that says if youve read it, click here. And, of course, no one reads it. I dont know anyone whos ever read it, and i just click here so i can continue. What are we giving up . What are we surrendering when we click and agree to the terms of service . Well usually the main thing youre giving up is any right to privacy and any right to have control over the data that might be collected during your time on web site. So these are often very broadlyworded agreements that are pretty much designed to protect the company more than anything. Against any future litigation or any future claims that theyve somehow violated your privacy or mishandled your data in a way that they didnt account for. I mean, its kind of like when you go into a parking lot and you see a sign that says theyre not responsible for any lost valuables. Its a pretty much similar attitude, i think. Not that i want to go line by line through your book, but the next thing that struck me is actually the first line of your introduction when you say that communication has become synonymous with surveillance, right . You dont say that communication involves surveillance or includes surveillance you create an identity there. You say its become the same thing, communications equals surveillance. How did that happen, right . If you had to point to one or two key innovations that led us to that identity, what would they be . Well i think there are a couple of key features. One is that the fact that about 15 years ago some Big Tech Companies decided that they would create something called a cookie which you could put on a users computer, and you could store a little bit of information about them so that you could learn where theyre visiting from, if they visited your web site before maybe some of their preferences for what they like to look at on your web site login information things like that. And that seemed like a very small beginning, but that really was the fist step to kind the first step the kind of turning Online Advertising which was the impetus for the cookie and turning online communication into something that was surveilled at all times. And so the cookie, id say, was the first kind of technology or example of how we started introducing a surveillance element to online communication. And it really just grew from there with this notion that given how these systems are set up and designed, were always producing a lot of information about ourselves when we visit sites and interact with apps and things like that. And theres this sort of assumption on the part of industry that all that datas potentially useful and can be turned into profiles and mined for insights about user behavior. And its not necessarily anything malicious behind it, there is this notion that the data is out there so we might as well collect it and process it and make decisions based on it. But the problem with that is that theres almost no end to what kind of data you can collect on individuals. And as more tracking technologies started being introduced as Online Advertising became more sophisticated and as Online Advertising became basically the principal way of funding digital media, it only sort of insured that various forms of surveillance would increase. So i guess if you mark the cookie down as one important innovation the other also id say free is the cost of doing anything online. Because everything we do online is free or mostly free, we have to pay in other ways. And the ways in which we pay are by submitting to this Data Collection and the surveillance that is supposed to serve us up more relevant ads but also helps kind of improve all these other systems that these companies are running. Youve written about the optin versus the optout culture of social media and of these different platforms. Could you explain that a little bit . Right. Well, i think theres a strong sense at the Big Tech Companies especially facebook seems to carry this belief and google and many others, which is that theres almost no reason why someone wouldnt want these products. And in a sense, they are you know, very remarkable in some cases. Some people assume that im sort of luddite or puritan, but i use a lot of these same tools and also enjoy them. But and so as a consequence of this attitude and sort of this great confidence in what theyre bringing to the world this supposed revolution in communications, there are very few possibilities to opt out to say no. And there are different ways in which this manifests itself. Facebook, for example, collects information on people all over the internet whether youre a facebook member or not. And this is why im talking about where you cant really opt out of that. If youre familiar with the little plugins or social widgets as theyre called that appear on millions of web sites all over the internet, youll see a like button or a share button or a plus one, any of those those are usually a way for someone who controls that button to collect information about who visits that web site. So say you go to New York Times. Com, but youre not a facebook member, but they have some like buttons or some sharing widgets on there thats like a little piece of facebook, a little piece of those other sites, and some information gets sent back to them. So you have Companies Like facebook forming profiles of people who arent even members of the site. And then the other way in which i think optout versus optin is a real problem is that theres a tendency almost across the board with these companies that when they introduce new features, theyre nearly always opt in their users immediately and you have to choose to opt out. And this is presented as a kind of choice and, of course, it is a choice but many of us either dont have the time to do this, we dont know whats going on, if youve ever tried to navigate the privacy settings on facebook theyre impossible. So its not really the kind of choice thats presented to us. And, again, i think this comes from the companys own belief that when they introduce new features, theyre kind of doing us a favor rather than the truth of things is often that new features are often introduced to get us to produce and reveal more personal data. What are some of the most sort of surprising or shocking ways in the course of reporting the book that you found about the way facebook or any other any other platform tracks your activity . Or gathers that data . Sure. Well one thing that really surprised me is that facebook if youre familiar with facebook, theres the status bar thats on every page where it often says Something Like what are you thinking about. And thats where you type in a post or a little message or post something. And facebook actually tracks when people start type anything that status bar and typing in that status bar and then delete it without posting a message, and they call this selfcensorship. In their minds if i start typing a them on facebook and then decide not to post and delete it, im somehow censoring myself which seems a little absurd to me. I think i can be the judge of whether or not im actually censoring myself. But it also shows not only kind of their world view, i think, but also this idea of selfcensorship for them is a problem. Theyre studying it because they want to know how to get people to stop censoring themselves. Now, i dont know if theyre going to implement some specific changes, but i wouldnt be surprised if, you know, if they made it more difficult or perhaps had a popup box that came up down the road that says are you sure you really want to delete this post . And then the other thing id mention is the amount of kind of monitoring of peoples behaviors thats going on, especially through apps. On a lot of web sites they monitor what you read, how long you stay on those pages where you click. If they could follow your eyes through the camera, they would but they cant really yet. But they do the next best thing which is they follow where your cursor goes which is kind to have substitute for your eyes. And then you have an even greater degree of this in many smartphone games and apps. What a number of smartphone games now do is they study your behavior and they can kind of track your Response Time to various stimuli to when you push a command or when you, you know click for the next card in a game of solitary. And what some of these companies do is if they think a players lagging behind or getting sleepy or tired of the game, they change the pace of the game to try to get you more involved. And theres so theres a real way in which kind of behavioral monitoring and testing is going on at all times, all to the degree all to the purpose of fine tuning your experience, but also so that you wont leave the platform. Because the longer you spend time on an app or a web site whether its facebook or even a smaller web site, that means youre more profitable for them. And their real goal is to get you to click on ads, of course but also just to never leave. What do they base that on . Do they draw on kind of behavioral economics or social science or do they is it just sort of comes from experiments to see how your behavior adapts . I think its all of the above. A lot of this stuff is kind of held close to the vest. But we know that the Big Tech Companies are hiring a lot of data scientists, also people with backgrounds in social science or behavioral economics. So a lot of it is whats called ab testing which is, you know and some of its pretty benign, lets adjust the font size on our main header here and see if people seem to click more on these links. Or lets change lets try out various color schemes and see how users seem to respond. Fine. But what youre really doing or what these companies are really doing and some of them have even admitted is theyre conducting behavioral experiments on people at a vast scale. And if you were to tune into the news last summer you may have heard about this facebook experiment where facebook experimented on 600,000 users without telling them. They either increased or decreased the amount of sad content that appeared in facebooks, in facebook users news feeds. Were going to wait for the train to go by, i think. [laughter] now, the question of whether this experiment was a success sorry, the trains still going by. Old technology. Yeah. A good one still. [laughter] anyways, so what they were doing was they wanted to see if they could adjust the amount of quote happy or sad content, which is also a pretty crude distinction and maybe not the right one. But adjust the amount of happy or sad content that appears in peoples feeds, and then they wanted to see if they could track something called emotional contagion. Basically are people who are receiving, are exposed to happier sadder content, do they then start feeling happier, sadder as expressed in their posts and do those feelings seem to spreld through the network to their friends and other contacts . And the study at least according to the study they thought that they did. And they released it, and the study and then there was this great outcry. And for a lot of people i think the outcry was less about the study itself, but just about the fact of secrecy, the lack of consent and also the fact that we now know that these kinds of studies are going on all the time. This is just one that we heard about. And for social scientists or people who come from academia the prospect of doing research on facebook is immensely enticing. Facebook has kind of the biggest data set of behavioral data thats ever been formed. So if you want to do research at a great scale, facebook is where you want to be. But it creates all these kinds of ethical conundrums, i think because sometimes its not just about exposing people to happy or sad content. It could also be exposing them to more political or less political content. Or facebook has also done experiments with encouraging people to vote around election day. And only by showing a little sort of sticker almost or button for a certain number of users encouraging them to vote and facebook actually found out that people who were shown that button did vote more on average. Is it like a shaming thing . Like you saw your friends voted, so therefore you felt you should vote. Right. And, again, thats a potentially positive thing. Wed all like more people to vote, but think about the sheer informational asymmetry of that, just in that theyre experimenting on us, and were always very transparent to them, but what theyre doing is very to pick to us. So opaque to us. How do we know facebook doesnt decide to encourage a lot of people to vote in a swing state or an important district in an upcoming election. Facebook does a lot of lobbying, just like google and other Tech Companies does. Maybe they decide they want to help one of their partners in congress get reelected to congress. Im not saying facebook is necessarily doing this, but when you have this kind of power to control a lot of information that people see and even to guide their behavior, theres a real concern. And when that same power is never really audited or exposed to public scrutiny, when we dont know how this informations filtered, thats a serious problem. One of the truisms when people talk about these technologies and platforms is that younger generations are far more comfortable, you know, sharing everything online. Theyre digital natives, they grew up this way. Right. Is that kind of crude distinction, does that make sense . Are there ways in which younger people are also maybe better equipped to navigate, more savvy about how they can protect themselves . Yeah. I think that, i think youre right. I often get told by people that young people dont value their privacy theyre all sending nude photos and posting ridiculous things online and that their future employers are going to find this stuff. In some ways thats true. A lot of young people are doing those kinds of things. And the other hand, i dont necessarily blame them for it. Theyre young people, theyre experimenting. When i was young the things i did, the stupid mistakes i made fortunately werent going to stick around forever. So really you have young people growing up in a system that was made for them and around them and kind of given to them. Say hey here are these cool tools and technologies. By way none of this ever goes away. Have fun with that. So young people are actually, i think, in a really hard position. And i would say that i think the conventional wisdom that they dont value their privacy is wrong. I mean despite the fact they do make their fair share of mistakes young people partly out of their facility with these technologies and devices are at times good at exploring privacy settings and things like that, and polls and Market Research kind of back that up. On the other hand you also have to keep in mind that young people are used to guarding their privacy against parents and Authority Figures all the time. So in some ways this isnt that much different. So while i kind of tell people that i think, you know, you need to educate tames and tell them, look theres no job youre going to get in the future where theyre not going to run some kind of background check on you or some google check thats become pretty standard. At the same time, they are in a tough position, and i dont think we should blame them too much when they make these kinds of mistakes. In the early days of the internet there was the famous new yorker cartoon where two dogs sitting in front of a screen and one confides to the other, on the internet no one knows youre a dog. Today they know your breed, theyve seen the inside of your doghouse, all the pictures you post. Are there your back is mainly about sort of the threats and the dangers of this lack of anonymity, right . Are there what are if youve ever looked at a web site and gone to the comments section and the comments are linked to facebook you see people posting horrible things under their facebook name at time. I dont know, id say perhaps there is something to the fact that people feel more comfortable being themselves online now. I think despite the kind of often hostile environment that people may face, especially women or minorities or people who have been discriminated against, i think a lot of people by sort of presenting themselves as who they are as Jacob Silverman with this set of interests that can often relate to people and form real friendships and relationships that were kind of hard to do in the 90s when most people were anonymous and when internet anonymity was really associated with something dangerous. And when meeting people online was considered really dangerous. Now meeting theres nothing unusual about meeting people online or dating online and ive met a number of friends through twitter, and i feel like a lot of that had been because i was myself on twitter rather than some, you know, pseudonym of this person. Over the last couple of years, weve heard a lot about government surveillance and in particular nsa surveillance in light of the documents revealed by Edward Snowden. Your book is much more about sort of corporate surveillance than government surveillance. But what are sort of the differences here and the points of intersection if they exist . Well, theres a lot in the common. They both are in the business of mass surveillance, of bulk Data Collection. The u. S. Government and of kind of processing and computing and mining that data. Theres sort of an unofficial mantra in the u. S. Intelligence Community Called collect it all and i think that and you see this enacted in the ways that not only do they have partnerships with google to fulfill legal warrant requests, they also are hacking into google data centers. Collect it all is really the goal of the u. S. Intelligence community. But the corporate and tech world is not really that far off. Because theres this widelyshared view, i think that all data is potentially useful. And that if its not useful now youll just find a use for it later. And i think thats also why facebook collects information about people who havent even joined the site. And theres, what goes along with that is the sense that you can, you know, find out insights about people or gain competitive advantages that might only, you know be a small competitive advantage, but that really counts. And the difference between, you know gaining that insight or not might be collecting a certain amount of data. And then i think another way you can look at it is that the main purpose of internet surveillance, of collecting all this information by the Tech Companies is to form profiles on us and target us for relevant advertisements and offers. Relevancy is always the commonlyinvoked term. And the u. S. Intelligence Community Wants all this data to form profiles on people and target them for counterterrorism purposes. Its obviously different because u. S. Intelligence community is kind of looking for dangerous people, for a limited number of people. But while the corporate world is really looking for everybody and looking to kind of form profiles on everyone which is why you have Companies Like axiom which is one of the huge data brokers, one of the biggest in the country, they claim to have profiles on hundreds of millions of people including most americans. So look at it that way, you might say that tech surveillance is even more extreme, because they really would like to have consumer profiles about everyone from where you live to what you do, how much money you make your hobbies, your medical conditions, all these sorts of things are being collected. There seems to have been more of a visceral reaction to government surveillance than to corporate surveillance. First, does that is that how you see it as well . But why, if thats the case, is it because we feel that one is voluntary one is not . Whats going on there . I think there are a couple reasons. One is that, you know, when it comes to government surveillance, people do have some legitimate fears about terrorism, though i think and im certainly far from alone on this, that the terrorism threat is not nearly as extreme as people on the Security Apparatus tell us. But i think people also are generally trusting towards Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community and feel that this is being done with a purpose, that we see terrorist attacks going on and so perhaps this can help keep us safe. And so theres less of a backlash for that. In terms even on the corporate side, though, i wonder i see more backlash over the last couple of years since i started working on this book, but its still not to the extent where i thought it might be. A lot of people i think just have the nothingtohide attitude which i think is totally wrong because everyone has something to hide whether its your Social Security number or some personal or something, you know some more dire secret or you dont want some marketer knowing you have a chronic disease so they can start pushing you products for that. I mean, everyone has information about themselves that they would like to have the choice to keep concealed. And the other reason why i think the corporate backlash still hasnt been very strong is that people see the lack of privacy and the giving up of personal information as the cost of doing business. Most of these products are free, and many of them are very useful and kind of charming and engaging to use and we might even feel like were addicted to them. And so if i had to fork over some personal information that might in some nebulous, unspecified way down the road well so be it. And that was actually kind of one of the goals of this book, is i wanted to try and show that there are very real types of harm that can happen. That when, you know, that when lists of peoples personal medical conditions or lists of Domestic Abuse survivors are being sold to companies that thats a real problem. Or that when companies are collecting data on you just so they can charge you a higher price based on your demographic information which a lot of companies are doing now thats a problem too. So part of the goal of the book is not only to show, look, all this datas being collected but this is a problem and this is why. And this is also how we should talk about it. Because we still need kind of find the discourse for this, find ways to talk about what this problem really is and kind of give shape to it. Theres a moment in the book where you talk about how some people sort of shame their friends into joining facebook or something. What do you mean youre not on facebook, you know . Its not uncommon to ask a friend why theyre not on twitter or why theyre on twitter but rarely tweet, but why she often likes facebook statuses but rarely posts her own . Why arent they busy accumulating social capital, right . Social capital is this great concept, right . Robert putnam has written about bowling alone and social capitalists thought of it as this cluster of civic and political and associational life. Whats social Media Capital . How do you accumulate social Media Capital . Well, social Media Capital is in some sense influence, which is a word thats used a lot. But its also metadata, how many followers you have or friends how many people like or retweet or favor your posts. I mean, said that way i think it all sounds kind of silly or a little shallow, but that is kind of how influence in capital is built on social media. And kind of to the first part of what you read, i think social medias also increasingly where the kind of work of friendship is done now. Its how we keep in touch its how we communicate with one another. Sometimes its how we maintain these weak ties that people who we might never see or see only once or twice a year but you see them every week on facebook and can still have a distant relationship and sense of whats going on. So i think on social media social capital is those things i mentioned earlier. But its also sort of almost a style or aesthetic because we all might have people who we say are good at facebook or good at twitter. And i think what that means is that they post interesting photos or funny stories, or perhaps they reveal a lot about themselves in a way that kind of attracts attention and kind of builds an audience. And in the end, i think attention is the thing that whether we like it or not is kind of what were seeking on social media. Attention is the great commodity thats being bought and sold by these companies. Its often our attention. So when were on there were trying to gain others attention. And that might be through being interesting or being dramatic or being confessional. And i think thats how you accumulate kinds of social media e equivalent of social capital. So do we all just shut down our Facebook Accounts and get off twitter and, you know . How do you strike the balance between using these platforms that have certain value and utility . My mom sees all the pictures of my kids through facebook. I dont have to send her photos anymore. And also protecting yourself. Sure. Yeah. Well i think its very difficult. And when we were talking about opt out versus opt in earlier, a very similar idea here which is that on these platforms you can either accept all of the Data Collection, lack of privacy and really lack of control over how to you relate toll the platform relate to the platform, so you either accept all that or you dont, and you cant use it. Of course you do have some choice about what you post but theres still a real limiting of choice. So thats why i sort of argue for more collective solutions for government regulation about Data Collection. I think people should have more rights to know what informations being collected about them, how long its stored what its used for. We should be able to Ask Companies to delete personal information about us. We also need to understand that data and personal data is not going away. I mean, some measure, i think of Data Collection and online surveillance is here to stay. But there are ways in which we can bring these policies kind of back into line and form a real like 21st century Regulatory Regime that looks out for peoples rights and makes sure that new kinds of database discrimination arent going on. I mean, this is what we did when we started when we started having credit reports or medical information. We have hipaa, we have the fair credit reporting act. You know, there are precedents for dealing with the collection of personal data which, you know 30 or 40 years ago when those things started people were very worried about how those would be used against us. And indeed, a lot of of people are even worried now because a lot of the companies that make credit reports are also in this industry and collecting a lot of this information. So theres a lot of information now sneaking into credit reports or other types of scoring systems that are kind of replacing credit reports and not even covered under existing legislation. So you know, i encourage people to educate themselves. If you want to close some of your accounts, ive done that. But its really not a great solution. And you also do miss out, you know . Theres a definitely social cost. And definite social cost. And i miss some of the interactions on some of these platforms even as i stay on a couple others. Thats why we need a more stable and sophisticated Regulatory Regime. If theres one thing that people do, that authors do on social media, its promote their books. How have you reconciled the subject matter of your book with the compulsion to let everyone know that its out there . Its been a little tough. [laughter] its a weird kind of method acting or something where im like criticizing this whole selfpromotional environment. I mean, a big theme of the book is advertising and the great influence and i think sometimes unacknowledged or underrecognized influence that advertising has had. Its not just that advertising above all else drive cans internet surveillance. The reason theyre collecting all this data, the first and main reason is to serve you up ads. But also i think advertisings really become part of the culture. And so thats why we often say that people are kind of branding themselves or are way too selfpromotional or speak in the language of pr. So i dont know, its been tough for me. Frankly, i think with like a firsttime writer like me, tweeting about my book a bunch i dont know if its going to do that much. [laughter] but i also think marketing anything is kind of tough. So ive tried to, my publisher may not like this but ive sort of tried to do the bare minimum at times. Im totally happy to write about my book and to do events like this and talk to people and to promote it in that sense, but in terms of, you know emphatically tweeting about it all the time or things like that, thats just thats kind of not really my style as a human being and its also kind of the part of the culture that this larger selfpromotional culture that really exists especially, i think, on twitter. I would like to see kind of tamped down in some way. Well, we have about ten minutes for questions if anyones interested. Theres a couple of mics there. Should folks get up or id like to ask you a question. The tools for opting out are really weak. Ill give you a for instance on a past technology of the donotcall register. Ah. Its violated day in, day out. And if you try to trace that telephone number even call the attorney general of your state nobody can help you okay . I know somebody knows the number of all these people who keep calling us. Im in your neighborhood, this is your credit card. We really need tools quickly to catch up with the industrys invasion of our privacy. And we dont seem to see em. I found one duck, duck go, okay . Yeah. Would you talk about that, how to keep google in line by switching out of google and into a nontracking site. Sure. Thanks for your question. So he brings up a good point which is that there arent as many tools whether sort of apps or modified hardware anything like that to help protect us in the ways that we might like. There are still some, and duck duck go is a good one that you mentioned. Thats a Search Engine that doesnt track you and thats its main claim. And its a pretty good one. I use it a lot. I find myself still going back to google sometimes for things and it is a pretty good one. Another reason why id recommend it is simply because the way google works no one ever goes beyond the first few search results. By diversifying the tools you use, you open yourself up to finding kind of new content and perhaps going different places on internet where you might not have gone before. I mean people worry about something that thes called the filter bubble thats called the filter bubble where we kind of are always shown information and media and opportunities that seem only directly relevant to us. And so you get, theres sort of a limiting of the amount of the range of content, especially political content that you might see. So there are things like that that you can do. You can start using a vpn or Virtual Private Network which helps disguise your traffic or Something Like the tour browser. Theres some good and bad here. Because data is this new be commodity and because weve basically had our privacy taken away from us, privacy is kind of returning as a market commodity, as something you need to pay for almost or that needs to be markettized. And so now you do have all these companies who are developing products like duck duck go or various other tools to kind of help you retain your privacy, to help you learn how to navigate the privacy settings of sites you do use. So there are a lot of those out there which i encourage people to seek out and kind of experiment with them. Thank you for the great talk. Quick question. Internet consumer advocates have had a lot of success lately on battling isps with the net neutral the city victory and stopping the neutrality victory and stopping the time Warner Comcast mergers and im wondering what do you think are the prospects of advocates lake that Holding Accountable some of these Large Companies or do you think the companies will because there is more competition in terms of content providers, do you think theyll just kind of mollify consumers in different ways . I dont know. I mean, i think that is a really necessary question though. Because you know, net neutrality, it did work to some extent the campaign surrounding it. Its certainly gotten us closer to where we need to be. So i would like to see, you know a Campaign Around specific issues of Data Collection and things like that. But the problem is this has become so central and so intrinsic to how these businesses run that theyre looking at some real costs of giving Something Like that up. The one thing i would say is like i said before, you do see these new companies coming up excuse me and using, you know privacy as a selling point. Duck duck go says right on their main page the Search Engine that doesnt track you. Fire fox made by mozilla, which is a nonprofit which i think is key, actually n this whole thing, has been very good at advocating for privacy rights and those sorts of issues. And mozillas kind of seen as a company thats within the industry that can also kind of lead perhaps help push the industry in a better direction. So i think its going to take a sustained advocacy campaign, but it might also need to start with some very specific demands about more transparency in Data Collection and more rights to delete it or perhaps, pardon me, just focusing on specific types of data. Perhaps people start saying, you know, we dont want our medical searches being collected because your Search History is incredibly revealing. Anytime youre searching for symptoms of a disease a number of Companies May be monitoring that. So it may have to start somewhere like that. [inaudible conversations] your last response, i think, touches on something i wanted to ask. If you were to look at an hiv web site, for example, because your son had hiv would your job prospects, would your medical history reflect that problem . Well you raise a good issue which is that theres this assumption on the internet that anything you do is relevant to who you are and to what youre interested in. So, i mean, for me as a journalist, ive looked at web, ive looked at terrorist web sites, you know . And a couple times talked to isis supporters online and stuff like that. Does that suddenly mean, um, you know i support those things or im somehow interested in them . Of course not. But in some database somewhere, especially with this is all kind of automated and without human supervision i may be flagged a little bit as someone who has gone to these pretty unsavory web sites. And the problem with these systems is that they dont discriminate based on intent. So if you are looking at an hiv web site because your son or even because of your own curiosity or for any particular reason thats not really reflected in how this datas collected. And i think thats a serious problem. I mean fortunately you cant be discriminated against for some things like health status, i believe, but the fact that all this datas being collected, it kind of introduces new possibilities for discrimination or getting around discrimination and of getting around traditional regulations and laws that bar discrimination. Okay, thank you. I had another question. You touched briefly on a couple of small, nefarious possibilities for this data. Could you elaborate on that . What other really bad things can happen . Sure. Well, as i kind of referred to earlier, you have companies that are putting together and most of them you and i have never heard of them. Theyre all over. Some of them deal with the big data brokers but what they do, theyll put together lists of people who are, who have chronic diseases, who have hiv or aids who are cancer survivors who are Domestic Abuse survivors, who are alcoholics and they categorize people into these lists, and then they sell those lists to whoever wants to buy them. Another example is they create these sort of very specific demographics like Senior Citizens who like to play the lottery or who are interested in sweepstakes. So then they sell these lists to companies that will target Senior Citizens with, you know, deals and offers to try to get them to fork over money. So there is a way in which when youre doing this kind of very specific granular profiling on people, it can really lead to possibilities of manipulation and abuse. Hall or you may have heard stories about the many terrorist databases collected and nofly lists, people put on these lists for no reason or long reasons and nearly impossible to get off of them. The problem my worry about his use end not being targeted whether it is by Government Watch list for an savory companies and there is no way to get off the list or break that relationship. How do you find out what has been collected that you want to correct and can you correct it . If not, legislation includes that idea . It has been proposed for some legislation. Theres almost nothing you can do. The company lets you look at some data they collect it and let you correct your data profile and that is another way to get you to forgo for more accurate data about yourself. We have time for one more question. One more question please . Under terms of service i have a question on facebook, when one posts information and pictures do you lose control of those accused you put on facebook . Does facebook have the ability to take your pictures and modify them in some way . Advertise them so when you put anything on there, no copyright . Most of the Major Social Networks except tumbler they retain copyright and everything you opposed. Not only that they are now doing king accompanies are scanning instagram posts to see what appears, if im wearing a cocacola tshirt companies cant that coach is appearing here, but more pernicious we what you have his posts being turned into ads on the network. If you bose on facebook or google plus that you love cocacola and franklin at gaithersburg city hall, coat may decide to turn your posts into an ad that will appear next to your feet saying your friend jacob gloves cocacola, why dont you get one today . That may seem benign to some people but some people dont want to be turned into advertising. Sometimes it has been horrific, turned out, there was a young woman who committed suicide is ended up in dating ads posted on facebook because her face book photos were used for dating adds. Friends and family saw her appearing after she was deceased in these dating ads. There are ways in which we dont control our image and that i find troubling. One last thought. What is next . Do you have the new book project . Will it be related to this field or something entirely different . I want to write more books. I am writing some fiction but it is too early to say what it is about. Journalism and writing articles and our relationships to it, and no issues of politics or economics or socializing later. I think labor is the next big sort of front year of tech reporting. We all know about well paid programmers. And some are overseas in the philippines, we are doing a lot of the essential work to keep them running and also the kind of agenda discrimination we have heard about in silicon valley. Pursuing those stories over the year. You write on your site, a weekly column or more often, do you have buttons where i can share them on facebook or tweet from now . I dont know. If i remove those, i am conflicted about this but i want to sell some books. I am happy to have people read my stuff. At the politics and prose tent, you can get them signed by jacob. [applause] [inaudible conversations] booktvs live coverage of the gaithersburg book festival in maryland will continue in just a few minutes. Next author you will hear from is still the surprise winner David Shipler discusses the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Booktvs live coverage on cspan2. This weekend the cspan city tour part and with congress has to hear about the history of literary life of Fort Lauderdale florida. This is cultural tourism and so when they set up their villages along the way really early ones sometimes only lean tos, the buses would stop because heres a tourist attraction. And they were getting food, weekly allotment of food and the rental of sewing machines and people use them when they lived in the tourist attraction. They sometimes get fabric because it be moved the tourist attraction people to supply them with fabric so theyre selling and making things for craft market. One little boys shirt from the 1920s. This was an experimental time for a patch work and on the bottom of this is not a design and that made it down today. This is a the 0 experimental design sometimes they bring not used in that pretty day. The thing about the devils triangle, a Bermuda Triangle, all kinds of things happened. A regular Navigation Training mission they would take off from the base and flight 19 would go east, there is an areathey would drop bombs and continue on another 70 miles or so and make it turn north and you go 170 miles and they could turn west towards Fort Lauderdale. They never came back. They said that rescue planes and one of them disappeared with 13 men on board. The next day they started a five day search, hundreds of planes and they did not find anything. Watch all of our events from Fort Lauderdale at 5 30 eastern on cspan2s booktv and sunday afternoon at 2 00 on American History tv on cspan3. Last three years on a journey into the world of american shame, have been to the houses of people who were destroyed on twitter, left their homes, a yearandahalf and depressed and traumatized, not forgetting who they were or heard from the shameless or ashamed, to make sense of that. Things started really well. Suddenly with social media the silence had a voice and was an eloquent voice, people were being funny and you would chat with strangers, shaming each other. With the powerful transgression, we realized they could do something about it, a racist or homophobic column, we could hurt them with a weapon they didnt understand, social media shaven. I would pass all these shamans about democratization of justice. But shaming at that time, windy sunday times and vanity fair columnist wrote a column about shutting the boom because like all of us he wondered what it would be like to shoot a person. I was the first person to alert twitter to this. I offered by the way in my book about psychopaths the psychopath test, wanted to issued a bad dude on safari because like all of us you wanted what it would be like to shoot a person, a classic psychopath plus giving my television documentary, classic. An Award Ceremony not long ago came bounding up to me, i would never sue another journalist. I sent you know how you wrote that column about shooting of baboon on safari, what it would be like to shoot a person. It is not a normal thing to think. It is just you. So he says you wouldnt understand, so i said i sell more books than you do. We were attacking people who were misusing that privilege and it was set up so much, but they without shaming felt like a day kicking fingernails and treading water. There wasnt anybody to shame. So we started attacking people who were misusing their privilege, if you close your eyes. You can share booktv. Org. Booktv on cspan2, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend and we are live at the gaithersburg book festival this weekend and coming up next former president obama advisor David Axelrod with his book believer. He will be starting in just a few minutes. Booktv on cspan2. Each year the chief of staff of the air force assembled a list of books he recommends for service men and women. Here is the 2015 list. To begin, Norwegian Air force colonel john olson explores the lives of 12 men who have shaped the history of air combat in air commanders. Next on the list is no place to hide, the story of retired air force neurosurgeon w. Lee warren who spent 120 days working in that tent hospital in iraq. In cybersecurity and cyberwar the development and future implications of cyberwarfare. That is a look at the air force chief of staffs book lists. Rain Forest Action Network on the sierra club looking at mountaintop removal in achalasia trying to work with local governments to get it stopped, failing that aspect failed so instead they were not able to go after the Coal Companies because consumers are not familiar with these companies but instead they traced financing to these companies to nine banks. And les nine bakes year after year and how they were financing at her what scale land that was in 2010. Last year was the fifth year of the campaign and wells fargo and jpmorgan announced they were cutting ties with the Coal Companies so this is not obviously stopping mountaintop removal entirely but it is halting the progress and making other banks very afraid of the way standards are kidding. Another example i like is green peas later they went after a bunch of big box retailers for selling and Sustainable Sea food and they would rank the retailers and year after year trader joes kept coming up in the bottom third of this ranking and they said that is strange because the consumer at trader joes really care. In 2009 they launched the trader joes campaign, traitor had many demonstrations across the nation and a cool internet platform where theyre volunteers could call managers around the nation and send a singing fish telegram beijing to stop selling and Sustainable Seafood. It was playful but it was all so intense exposure and as a result trader joes removed the campaign very much very obvious as a result from Something Like 19 on the list to 9 don imus and gave up a lot did that solvesolve the problem . No. After the stop get in a way and i dont see any evidence of guilt really working at that scale. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. The next author you are going to hear from today from gaithersburg, maryland is David Shipler his book, freedom of speech, about the First Amendment. Booktv on cspan2. [inaudible conversations] welcome to the sixth annual gaithersburg book festival. Politics and prose here at the festival. Gaithersburg all of you know is a terrific place for the city. Not just in Montgomery County but in the United States now. And also very importantly to todays event gaithersburg has become a great supporter of the arts and humanities. We are delighted to be part of this increasingly popular festival. It takes a lot of supporters and volunteers to give a lot of their time to make this festival possible and so when you see them a round in yellow tshirts today please say thanks to them. I know they will appreciate it. A few brief announcements. Now would be a good time to turn off your cellphones or any other devices that might go beep. If you are tweeting today please use the hash tag gbs15. We need and welcome your feedback. Surveys are available in here at the tinge on the festivals a website end of the mobile apps. By submitting a survey you will be entered into a drawing for and ipad. David shipler will be signing books immediately after this presentation. Copies of his new book freedom of speech are on sale in the politics and prose tent which is right over here. A quick word about buying books. Even though this is a free event and we want to keep the festival free, purchasing books here does help. The more books we sell at the festival the more publishers will want to send their authors here the next time and also purchasing books from politics and prose benefits the local economy and supports local jobs so if you enjoy this program and deposition to do so please buy the book. We had a terrific event for david a couple nights ago at the politics and prose bookstore on connecticut avenue so i know you are all in for real treat because david really knows when he focuses on a subject how to report and to write about it. He honed his reporting and writing skills for more than two decades with the New York Times where he rose from news claque to city Staff Reporter to Foreign Correspondent in southeast asia, the soviet union and israel. Already before he left the times in 1988 he published two books. His first in 1983 was a bestseller about russia and his second the few years later, arab and jew won appeal a surprise for nonfiction. He continues to turn out books on important aspects of American Life including race, the working poor and Civil Liberties establishing himself as a thoughtful social commentator. His latest book delves into recent freespeech controversies and shows that as a country we have a ways to go, a founding principle of Free Expression and demonstrating a willingness to listen to one another. In his new book david examines a number of clashes in detail offering less comprehensive history of free speech than a set of case studies reflecting ongoing challenges as americans in living up to our ideals. I am sure he could discuss the particulars in a minute. With the violent attack in france on Charlie Hebdo some weeks ago davids exploration less bloody but highly controversial and emotional confrontations over free speech in this country is all the more timely. One reviewer some updateds book, and a potent p on behalf of vigilant listening. Please join me in welcoming David Shipler. [applause] thank you, it is nice to be here. I was that the landscape which is quite fast, a landscape of free speech. We have a boisterous sometimes vitriolic, vibrant, territory of speech. To map that territory you need to draw the boundaries so although most of us never bump up against some they do exist and they exist in two basic ways. You can put two over l. A. S over this map, one is the legal over l. A. The other is the cultural overlay. The end overlay is defined by the First Amendment and case law surrounding it. The First Amendment as you know restricts what government can do, not what private entities can do. That is a pretty broad landscape legal landscape. It is hard to bump up against the limits. People do. It would be difficult for me to do it here. I have no classified information i am going to convey to you i dont intend to recruit you to give Material Support to a terrorist organization. This doesnt really look like a crowd i could incite to violence very easily so i am pretty safe and well within those limits. The cultural overlay has different boundaries, the two do not coincide and that over l. A. Contains some hidden tripwires. People trip over them without quite knowing they are doing it and suffer some consequences afterwards. Dont mean getting put in jail but perhaps being the victim of vilification or a program or even losing jobs, losing elections and some of these limits have to do with racial stereotyping ethnic stereotyping, different groups have Different Levels of protection you might say i think jews are highly protected in the United States from stereotyping that is acceptable. Africanamericans also, although less so. In the last years we have seen a tremendous revolution in the degree to which gays and lesbians come under this protection. Muslims are closer to the edge of that. In some ways they are protected and in some way is not. I could violate some of these various limits. I am not inclined to do that but i could do it if i made racist comments, homophobic remarks. If i vilify muslims for example i might damage my career and my reputation doing so also i might get a contract with fox news too you never know. Mapping these condors is interesting and complicated and in the course of doing that i began to understand something i guess we should all realize but it didnt become clear to me until i had done a lot of research and thinking about this which is this. Freedom of speech implies freedom to hear. Without a willing audience the speaker is speaking in a vacuum. Without people willing to listen speech really has no impact, no effect. In the soviet union when i covered it writers used to talk about writing for the 4 by which they meant putting manuscript safely in the drawer where nobody could read them, but what was the point really . When they try to smuggle them around once in awhile, make copies. In the United States ideas die differently. We dont have censorship but ideas can die in the midst of the clatter of confusing argument. They can die in enclaves of interest and affinity that people tend not to cross. We often tend to stay within the comfort zones. We watch the newscasts with which we agree. We read the newspapers and magazines and websites with which we agree. The previous speaker was talking about the internet creating these enclaves also when we go on line. The Search Engines recognize our interests and feed us later on websites that even stories from particular newspapers or other broadcasts media that are comfortable to us or seem to fit our interests. This has created a balkanization in america. And and and scalia, Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court gave an interview not too long ago to new York Magazine in which he said he no longer reads the Washington Post. It is too lefty for him, doesnt read the New York Times, he reads the washington times, he reads the wall street journal. In other words even a justice on the Supreme Court reads in the areas that are intellectually or ideologically comfortable to him. I traveled along the boundaries and looked at some struggles and conflicts i thought were interesting and i dont have time to time you about two of them, possibly three if i do this concisely. Before we have questions. In a suburb of the troy in the Plymouth Canton School District the couple years ago just before christmas vacation, Gretchen Miller who tossed 8 he english told her students to stop reading a novel they had been studying called waterland by the british author graham swift. Tell me if you cant hear me against the train. I will try to speak up. The students were stunned but what happened was a parent of a student in her class had seen one page, won passage in which there was a graphic description of two teenagerss sexual exploration. The parent had not read the book, told me later he had no intention of reading the book, xerox the page and took some pages from Toni Morrisons beloved, that great novel which was less next on the list to be read in this english course, took these pages to the superintendent who had not read the book see the, the superintendent was shocked and ordered the books immediately remove from the curriculum. The students told me later, a lot of them that they had found waterwhen and a bit honduras but now it was suddenly intriguing. The teacher told them into take it back to the book room, very few did. The local bookstore ran out of copies. The library had to order more. The best way to get somebody to read something is to tell them they cant. This particular incident divided the community. It turned out the few conservative parents talking conservative politically and culturally or socially conservative suddenly faced an overwhelming majority of parents who wanted their children to be Reading College level literature which was one this course was supposed to be they wanted their children to be challenged, trusted the teachers to lead them through difficult terrain in the classroom, perhaps a better place to do it than the Kitchen Table or their peers and so they mobilize went to the school board and campaigns and what happened was interesting the device were various. One was the political one, mostly Tea Party Activists who didnt want these books in the curriculum because of profanity and graphic sex. I think other political ideology and religious ideology and also another divide which i found quite interesting. A little hard to grab on to. Difference between people who value literature and the metaphor the allegory as a tool of understanding the human condition and those who read literature more literally and are not really tuned into the purposes or uses of fiction in opening peoples minds to elements of experience that they may not personally go through themselves but can identify with in some way, that is the particular character becoming universal and so forth. That was another divide in talking to the parents on both sides and finally among the conservative parents who objected in this district and other districts to certain books that were being used, a deep sense of alienation from the School Systems public School Systems which they felt were bastides of liberalism at usurping duties of parenting because some parents said to me why expose our kids to all this stuff so early . Why cant we wait as long as possible . As we know, teenagers are exposed to stuff through the internet, music videos and Everything Else, much more than through books, but book somehow you can grab on to. It is something tangible something you can fight over and when you have it assigned in a school curriculum, the School Provides approving this language. It was approving what many of them felt were demanded stories. In the end what happened was the superintendent convened review committees which he was supposed to do anyway instead of just summarily removing the books. The review committees approved both books and they went back into the curriculum but waterland, too late for it to be used in that school year which damage to the studentss ability to read beloved because one of the teachers explained to me that he used waters of the land first as an introduction to nonlinear narrative, out of Chronological Order and also to teach the method of criticism called new historicism. This is way after my time in school so i had to study upon this the you can read it in the book. I wont go into it here but what happened was the students who did have waterland which was more accessible found beloved very difficult whereas the next year the teachers told me when they had water land again the students appreciated beloved on of much deeper level having been introduced earlier on to that more accessible way of reading and thinking. Was a victory for the teachers who benefited from College Students who had their forces telling school board rather eloquently how beautiful the teaching had been and how informative and how enriching these english courses have been but there were even within the victories of this kind of thing there are defeat. One of the teachers told me recently, he told me and i could say this publicly brian reid is his name, you will be a lot about him. When he started suffering from sleeplessness during this book challenge, this developed into a depression which he had to go on medication for. He said education has become an unsafe place in Many School Districts and as a result he has stopped teaching a p courses. He has gone down to lower levels because of those levels the books are not particularly controversial. I know another school in texas, highland park, where my book the working poor was temporarily withdrawn and there was a Big Community fight about it and finally it was restored and two teachers have now resigned. They won but it was a highly politicized environment so two teachers have resigned and got jobs elsewhere and i have been told the other teachers are looking around because they dont want to teach in a situation where every book they choose has to be justified and rationalize and that district put through a committee of parents to judge whether it is fit for the curriculum and so forth so there is fallout there. I talked to librarians who said other librarians dont order books because they are afraid of the controversy. A couple librarians told me in the midwest but they have been vilified during a controversy about books for middle schoolers that have characters who are gay or lesbian or portrayed sympathetically who are marginalized in the closet, coming dow, dealing with their parents, conservative parents and Public Library and put into i dont know where, adult sections the kids go to right away. There was no restriction once you have a library card. The librarian said they dont go to the store without being vilified by townspeople. Could go to the gas station and so forth. Librarians hesitated it is 4 to 5 cases of overage challenges. And you dont know whether that is the tip of the iceberg or if there is hesitation or self censorship. Another frontier worth talking about right now, to the president ial Campaign Season. And president ial Campaign Season the hard truth in america that when it comes to the debate over public issues, money is speech and poverty is silence. Last year there were two big he issues affecting poor people quite dramatically and intimately in which they really had no ability to voice their views because they didnt have the money to buy their way into the marketplace of ideas. One was the expansion of medicaid provided under obamacare up where quite a few states, about half the states have republican governors republican legislatures early on opted not to expand medicaid although the federal government was going to pay for 100 for the first few years and 90 after and it was a big issue to people who were in near poverty or just above the poverty line who would be covered by medicaid with the expansion but they were unable to voice their views partly because they had no money themselves to organize lobbyists, to petition members of congress to put ads on tv and all of that. So on that issue they were pretty much silenced. The other issue was the Congressional Republican proposals to cut food stamps which also of course would affect people at that lower income level. These folks were afflicted by the same problem that they were suffering from in terms of participating, they silenced by it. They had to depend on the money classes to make their case and those included democratic would just later this liberal lobbyists, charitable organizations and sometimes the press would report on the grass roots on the impact of some of these Public Policy issues on ordinary folks. And that kind of dependence makes you feel pretty powerless. There are all kinds of psychological over l. A. S to that sense of power list this which i wrote about another book, the working poor which i mentioned earlier but here you have a conundrum because we have a Supreme Court decision, Citizens United and there will be more along the line with this Supreme Court, which basically reinforces the fact that the Political Landscape is marked by a hierarchy of class. It cannot be navigated very well by citizens of modest means. The Citizens United case was a First Amendment case the aclu supported the outcome. Interesting position for them but if money is an expression of your right under the constitution to speak than we have that fixture in our constitutional landscape so we have to deal with and work around. If we want to try to at least moved somewhat in the direction of leveling the political plainfield to give the less affluent as much of a voice or at least more of a voice has they have. I asked some nonprofits lobbyist organizations, and 500 organizations and so forth what they would do if they had a windfall of a few million bucks during an election campaign, but to my surprise they said they wouldnt advertisements they wouldnt do political advertising. They would do grassroots for denies it or as some of them called it grass tops organizing where you go to the local media should, legislators, local council and so forth to influence their policies. One guy had done a calculation and said it costs a lot less to register voters than to persuade voters. Interesting idea because the poor tend to vote at much lower percentages than the wealthy. I did a little calculation some years ago and found that if people earning low incomes had turned out in the bush gore president ial election at the same rate people earning higher incomes turned out and if you assume the exit polls are right the lower income people vote more democratic board would have won by even more than the 500,000 votes he won by. In florida that could have made a difference. But there was one case i came across where an election commercial actually made a difference. It was of all places in the Congressional District in texas where george w. Bushs Crawford Branch is located. The seventeenth Congressional District that had just been gerrymandered in 2004 to produce a very heavily republican quite conservative constituency and when bush ran against john kerry he was expected to win by a huge margin and he did. No surprise. The democratic incumbent congressman, chet edwards was also expected to lose to arlene walgemuth walgemuth, republican state legislator and she advertises herself by scouting and keep her leadership in putting the state budget by 1 billion. Somebody went out and did a poll to find out who was ahead at some point. She was four points ahead in that poll until the second part of polling questions were put to the voters and they were asked, what would you say if you knew that the 1 billion cut had come from dropping 17,000 pregnant women from medicaid, and 150,000 children from cit, the state Childrens Health Insurance Program . When that information was provided, 13 of the white republican women switched sides. Chet edwards went ahead by three points in the pole. Edwards noticed this and did an ad which i found on line you can probably find you can find anything on line. It is worth watching because it is very clever. He has a white mother with a rich texas accent saying i dont want welfare or government help but why should my daughter, theres a picture of this charming q 3yearold girl, be deprived of Health Insurance . Then they have a text with walg walgemuth walgemuths wind, and i , and iline , and i, and i will read this to you, cit has never been very important to me that had a huge impact on the election. At edwards the democrat won. He just won. Very heavily republican conservative district and was reelected two more times until the 2010 republican sweep that brought them control of the house and he lost in that election but i dont know how representative it is or how much of a model is that it was an interesting case where what happened was republican women expressed compassion for the low income people who were being hurt by walgemuths policies. I think theres more compassion in the United States than anybody appreciates and politicians dont appreciate it as well as they should but there you are. That is a thumbnail sketch of the issue there. What are the solutions . I dont have any Magic Solutions on how to reconcile the First Amendment with the desire to limit Campaign Financing but other people have come up with various ideas. One is dont try to cut back on speech try to expand it. Dont try to limit the amount of money corporations or individuals can spend try to somehow subsidize small contributions or do matching grants from a Government Fund of small contributions to enhance the voice of the less affluent. They want ideas to use something equivalent to the president ial Election Fund which candidates dont seem to draw on any more but it is that box you check off on the top of your tax return, 3 to the fund do something so that some every dollar under 150 contribution is matched by 5 or 6 which would expand at speech. Wouldnt contract it. There are problems with that we can all figure out what they would be but it would be nonpartisan. Anyone going to either party eat candidate, it is an idea that has been tossed around the doesnt seem to have legs that makes you think a little differently about this whole idea. Why try to restrict speech . Why not expand it and give people more opportunity to have their views . One of the other issues i deal with in the book which i found quite interesting is the use of the internet to democratize speech to give everyone who can make the web so it or use google, i have a blog doesnt cost me anything i get to sound off whenever i want. It doesnt have an editor which is really great for somebody who has spent his life under the thumb of editors, believe me. Anybody can do this and you can make slick websites and create links and maybe attract some kind of small audience especially people who are likeminded. At the same time the internet has become a vehicle for the spread of rumor, conspiracy furies and racial and ethnic stereotyping. So i took a look at racial stereotyping in particular because two things, racial stereotyping and the Cottage Industry of anti muslim activists who have very sophisticated and slick websites arguing that the Muslim Brotherhood is taking over america and i drill down into their sources and took them apart and so forth but on vote racial issue i was particularly interested because i did a book on Race Relations several years ago a dan to see patterns of stereotyping directed against africanamericans traditionally in the United States. L. A. Obama was criticized and characterized on the internet, in newscasts and thats sort of thing and found that many of the criticisms could be regarded as legitimate of a president many of them used some of the old racial stereotypes. By old i dont mean an anachronistic. They are here and alive. Sometimes very subtle with encrypted. The criticisms that have in their context some of these racial stereotypes have a resonance they wouldnt have otherwise i believe. So i looked at basically six traditional stereotypes that view many in this society have viewed africanamericans. As uppity in the old word and angry and violent, lazy different, not one of us, and sub human. Every one of these has applied to obama. Sometimes in very subtle ways. Sometimes in much more blatant waste. Is not easy to isolate praise from the other criticisms. It may be race, it may not be race. And we have views of this. Some people have called these the dog whistles that were heard at some level of consciousness who want or believe an africanamerican is inferior different, not quite part of us in some way. Lets take the first one, less intelligent. Pretty hard to do that against obama who comes across as extremely bright but remember the criticism for a while that he uses a teleprompter . I cant remember any other president who has used a teleprompter who has received that criticism. There is a subtle suggestion that he needs it. He is not quite bright enough to stand up and speak. He is in over his head, a job that is too much for him, and incompetent leader. His facilities words and tennis of substance, Rush Limbaugh does this all the time and says his blackness got him elected. A kind of political affirmative action. Because whites even in the polling booth fear being fought of as racist. A petty, arrogant is the word applied to obama very frequently. I found in my own research on race that it was quite common to regard people with undeserved power as arrogant and i found that happening against blacks in many situations. It is much less prevalent now with africanamericans having gained positions of authority in many spheres of life but it is still there is a residue of that still. If youd google obama arrogant you will come up with hundreds of thousands of hits. You will come up with pictures of obama raising his chin a middle in a kind of you see a lot of commentary in which the word arrogant is used. For example when he defended obamacare i heard pat buchanan conservative columnist say it is arrogance, of the speech, it is arrogant. It was really a smugness arrogance and self confidence. Tom delay called obama arrogant in chief. We have all watched obama for many years. Each of us can come to our own conclusions about whether he is arrogant. He doesnt strike me as arrogant. Does strike me as exasperated. I dont think he can be blamed for that there is a tone of voice sometimes like why dont you understand what i am saying . I dont know if a white person would be called arrogant if he did that. I dont know. Is something to think about. Next stereotyped, a greek and violent. This is tough to pin on obama. He has spent over backwards not to be the angry black man. And face a lot of criticism from some quarters for not being a angrier and displaying a legitimate temper but the idea that obama is a Muslim Muslim is codeword for violent now in our society. That is an element of that. It is it also used to the next stereotyped in a minute, Rush Limbaugh, to quote him he viewss the word chip as in chip on his shoulder a lot. Rush limbaugh said i think he is motivated by a painter. He has achieved on his shoulder. The days of them not having power are over and very angry and wants to use their power as a means of retribution. That is what nobody is about, gained, he is angry. Hes going to cut this country down to change, make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes. Notice how he uses a positive word as a negative. He is a master propagandist. I love listening to him just for that reason. He bothers me but i cant help that miring his skill. Multicultural mistakes it has made. Its mistreatment of minorities. I know exactly what is going on here. There are going to be raised riots i guarantee some years ago. Obamas plan is based on his inherent belief this country was immorally and allegedly founded by a very small minority of white europeans who screwed everybody else since the founding to get all the money and all the goodies and is about time the scales were made even. That kind of rhetoric makes obama look like of frightening figure. Lazy. Rush limbaugh. Let me focus on the lazy. Rush limbaugh is on his sixth vacation. He doesnt appear to work very hard. I dont think it is laziness which i think it is arrogance. I think obama thinks of himself as above the job. Otherness. Africanamericans said different, apart. Here we have the bursar movement wasnt born in the United States, he was of muslim a socialist, that is very unamerican. Rush limbaugh, he is more african in his roots than he is american. After the birth their Movement Began to die out the focus shifted a bit to his values, not so much his place of birth but is supposedly an american values. He is a socialist, he threatens the american way by favoring the redistribution of wealth. Mike kaufman, House Republican from colorado at a fundraiser in 2002, 2012 said this. I dont know whether barack obama was born in the United States or not but i do knows this. In his heart he is not an american. He is just not an american. The sub human character of African Americans has been with us for ever since slavery and you see it applied to obama all the time in photoshop pictures of him and michele as apes. There is someone that says has an ape faced obama headlined hail to the gym. Theres a tshirt that shows the chimp behind the lectern bearing the president ial seal. You can also get that as the babys pink onesy if you like. My wife went to get her our grandchildren some obama teachers and was stunned by how hard it was to get through the labyrinth of racist images that you should get on tshirts. The primate image was also used against george bush and so was the stupid idea used against. Who i think was a lot smarter than most people gave him credit for being but the connotation was different because it didnt come against that long legacy of stereotyping in the country. When people do this, i will finish here because i would love to hear your comments or questions. If you want to shoot me down that is fine. Freespeech. Different people who do this suffered different consequences. Rush limbaugh doesnt suffer consequences. He is sophisticated. I think glenn beck doesnt suffer consequences. They bring in lots of money lots of listeners and viewers. Smaller people can get punished. For example a Tea Party Member of the Republican Central Committee of Orange County, calif. Marilyn davenport forwarded a photo of two adult chimpanzees and their baby bearing the obamas face and the caption now you know why no birth certificate. She said she wasnt racist and didnt think of obama as the black man but the Committee Chairman demanded her resignation. She did get support from her constituencies and since she has been elected she was forced to step down and she remained in office. The republican mayor emailed a cartoon of the white house lawn as a watermelon patch with the caption no Easter Egg Hunt this year. He resigned but he was reelected councilman. A woman named denise helms posted on facebook a racist epithet about obama and the implication that he should be assassinated in she was immediately fired by the icecream store where she worked whose manager said when your community does not like you because of an employee, that is bad. We have a business to run. They own limits are various they shift, different for different people, they protect groups differently. And that is the nature of our landscape. There are other boundaries which i dont have time to go into but i will leave it there. And be happy to hear your questions or comments. I think you need to go to the mic to this. I want to thank you, your book on the working pour, the price of any quality, thank you. That gave me my dissertation. I am very curious about double standards. I dont hear the Birther Movement talking about ted cruz or the gop nomineees coming up with a law against Hillary Clinton, love her or hate her other than benghazi emails weiner you cant delete so stop saying you can delete emails with a double standard is capitulated. What Hillary Clinton brings is a gender components and i am wondering where the next round of stereotypeds will be. I realize that is three questions. That is a hard prediction to make but i think first of all gender stereotyping is going out of fashion it may be for politicians the recognition that a slight majority of voters are women. It really, i dont think has to do with where you were born or whether youre constitutionally qualified. It has to do with how much a part of the society you are and there are certainly people in the United States who do not regard africanamericans as part of the mainstream of america. Qmwe and i think that really was what was going on with obama more than anything else. n any other yes, sir. You talked about in the freedom of speech about the tea baggers and what not Getting Tea Party . Yeah. Into the Elementary Schools and high schools and censoring books essentially. Do you have any comments on our University System and the free speech thats touted to be sprussed in many suppressed in many cases overtly, and whats your opinion on that . Im almost an absolutist on free speech, and it seems to me that universities h all, places where all views should becge am i getting this right . Somebody can correct me if im wrong. I kind of have two minds about that. I l6n think she should be invited to speak atexp the campus, whether the university wants to honor her with a degree when they feel or many students and faculty feel that shes gone over a line and shes stereotypingo and c0d indulging in hate speech is a question, and itnm kf think therebyoyai0 are two different issues. ] uym now there are lines, you know . For example if im not mistaken, i may be, you know, there was a professor i think it was ward churchill, who made a comment right after 9 11 to a freshman class in colorado that while anybody can fly a plane into the pentagon has my vote. Now, it may not be ward churchill. I may be misremembering, but it was a professor somewhere who said that, and boy, did hi take it on the chin. And justifify my in my view. He had a brand new class of freshmen recently away from home. He had no idea whether they had family connections with people who were in the pentagon or what. I mean, so i think that is just tasteless. But its not i mean its just tasteless and it shouldnt be done. But other than that if youre talking about just political ideas and debate, you know, it should be a free, a free zone for people to, you know, say what they want and have it out in the open and debate it. Ive been teaching journalism in china the past 10, the years so i 10, 12 years, so i wonder if i can take you out of the United States for just a minute and ask if you noticed the export from china and some other countries of repression of freedom of the press . Im talking about things like confucius institutes, pressure because the nobel prize was awarded to a chinese dissident pressures on literary festivals that discuss other issues that the chinese dont particularly care for and so forth and so on. Its a very interesting question and its not one i have looked at, to be honest. Graham swift, the british author i mentioned at the beginning, told me that he had a book translated into chinese that had been mangled or censored, and he withdrew it. Because he didnt want that done. I dont know what the particulars were. I just had, was offered by a chinese publisher a contract to publish my book arab and jew which is coming out in a revised edition in november in chinese, and ive just had an exchange with my agent and the chinese agent about how can i make sure they dont do anything that would disrupt the evenhandedness that i feel that i obtained. Because its easy in that kind of situation to stereotype. The chinese agent said that really theres no problem unless you criticize the chinese government. I dont know if thats right or not. Maybe you can tell me. [laughter] we also have gone through that experience. So whats the answer, is that correct . The answer seems to be based on the individual doing the publishing and the fears that he or she might have in publishing a book. Some books seem to get through without any difficulty. Other books for sometimes what seems to be very simple reasons are denied. And its up to the author to wonder if you want to go through with the book or not to. I think you would find some difficulty. I mean, we my wife whos chinese just went through a session where she compared the chinese version of a friends book with the friends version to see what changes have been made, and some of the changes were considered to be commercial. For example a different title. But other other people have run into situations where, for example, not necessarily in Book Publishing but with interviews. Its extremely dangerous to give interviews to chinese journalists. Uhhuh. Because they will invariably twist whatever you have to say into something that accommodates their particular party line. Well, im getting the high sign that were out of time. We could go on, obviously, but thank you very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] and that was David Shipler live from the gaithersburg book festival. Everything you see today youll be able to watch online at booktv. Org. You can also get Schedule Information on our web site or keep an eye on the bottom of the screen. Youll see there that we have schedule updates. You can also follow us on twitter and facebook. And that will give you schedule updates as well. We will return to gaithersburg in just a few minutes. Youre watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv television for serious readers. President ial candidates often release books to introduce themselves to voters. Heres a look at some recent books written by declared and potential candidates for president. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton looks back on her time serving in the Obama Administration in hard choices. In american dreams, florida senator marco rubio outlines his plan to restore economic opportunity. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee gives his take on poll kicks politics and culture. And in blue collar conservatives, potential president ial candidate Rick Santorum argues the Republican Party must focus on the working class in order to retake the white house. In a fighting chance, massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren recounts the events in her life that shaped her career as an educator and politician. Wisconsin Governor Scott walker argues republicans must offer Bold Solutions to fix the country and have the courage to implement them in unintimidated. And kentucky senator rand paul, who recently declared his candidacy calls for Smaller Government and more bipartisanship in taking a stand. More potential president ial candidates with recent books include former governor jeb bush. In immigration wars he argues for new immigration policies. In stand for something, Ohio Governor john kasich calls for a return to traditional american values. Former virginia senator james webb looks back on his time serving in the military and in the senate in i heard my country calling. Independent vermont senator Bernie Sanders recently announced his intention to seek the democratic nomination for president. His book, the speech is a printing of his eighthourlong filibuster against tax cuts. And in promises to keep, Vice President joe biden looks back on his career in politics and explains his guiding principles. Neurosurgeon ben carson calls for greater individual responsibility to preserve americas future in one nation. In fed up, former Texas Governor rick perry explains government has become too intrusive and must get out of the way. Another politician who has expressed interest in running for president is former rye governor lincoln chafee. He recounts his time serving as a republican in the senate. Carly fiorina, former gee of hue let ceo of hewlettpackard, shares lessons in rising to the challenge. Louisiana governor bobby jindal criticizes the Obama Administration and explains why conservative solutions are needed in washington in leadership and crisis. And finally in a time for truth, another declared president ial candidate, texas senator ted cruz, recounts his journey to the u. S. Senate. Look for his book in june. [inaudible conversations] booktv on cspan2. 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors every weekend. And we are live at the gaithersburg book festival this weekend. Coming up next, former president obama adviser David Axlerod with his book, believer. Itll be starting in just a few minutes. Booktv on cspan2. The book is about why we shouldnt legalize marijuana. And we wrote it because we saw this train coming down the track, legalization. As we speak, alaska has just legalized general recreational use. And Public Opinion has shifted very much in that direction. Uhhuh. And pretty dramatically. Maybe even more dramatically than gay marriage this shift in Public Opinion to the favorable side. And, you know 20 years, 15, 20 years ago maybe 20 of the American People were in favor of legalization. Now Something Like 60 . And given the evidence, we thought it important to write this book, and no one else seemed to be writing it, and i dont think anyone has about why this is a bad idea. The other thing is, and this is very relevant, is as Public Opinion has softened on marijuana, maybe 60 in favor of legalization, the Scientific Evidence is overwhelming against it. I was drug czar, director of National Drug control policy, 8990. We didnt have this kind of research thenful we had some smattering but now it is overwhelming, the harm that marijuana does. And i just have to believe or want to believe the American People are not informed of these facts. And so the point of the book was to get these facts out so they can make a second judgment on this an informed decision. Let me get to the end of my story. I think in colorado which has been kind of ground zero here that they will reconsider at the end of the day and put this, try to put this genie back in the bottle and recriminallize. Because theyre starting to see the results. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] and starting now from the gaithersburg book festival, president obamas former advise or, David Axlerod, whose book believer came out earlier this year. Live coverage on booktv. Good afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the wonderful gaithersburg book festival. My name is lissa muscatine, im one of the can coowners of politics prose bookstore in washington d. C. This is [applause] thank you very much. This is our fourth year as a bookseller at the gaithersburg book festival and i just want to say that we think its Getting Better and better every year. I hope that youve had a chance to come for a few years and if not, that youll keep coming. Its really a fantastic event. Unless you live in gaithersburg or perhaps nearby, you may not know its a wonderful city that is very proudly and energetically supportive of the arts and humanities, and this event is just but one example of that cultural commitment locally. This festival is possible thanks to the generous support of sponsors and volunteers and i hope if you bump into any of them as you Wander Around the grounds, youll have a chance to express your thanks for making this possible. Before we get started just a few quick announcements. One is if you could silence any phones, that would be great. And if youre tweeting, please use the hashtag gbf15 hashtag. Also were really eager to get your feedback. There are surveys available in the tent here theyre also on the festival web site and on the festivals mobile app and if you submit a survey, you will be entered into a drawing for a free ipad. David axlerod will be happily signing books after the event and if you havent had chance to purchase his book yet, you can do so in our politics prose tent and there are plenty of copies available. And i just want to say one quick word about buying bookings. This is a free event this festival is. We really, really are determined to keep it that way but it really does help the festival if you do buy a book or multiple books. The more books that are sold at the event the more likely publishers are going to be in the years ahead to send their authors here knowing that they can draw wonderful crowds like the one in this extremely hot tent. [laughter] and authors will be more willing to come as well. And needless to say, we are work delighted of course delighted to make your purchases at a local independent bookstore, ours or any other. Weve been serving the Washington Area for more than 30 years. Were a local institution and were very proud to contribute to our local economy by creating jobs paying taxes and engaging in many Public Service activities that promote literacy and reading in our schools and larger communityings. So thank you in advance for considering all of that when you think about the next book youre going to buy. And its really convenient here because our tent is about 50 feet away, so no excuses. No excuses. [laughter] its such a pleasure to host David Axlerod here at gaithersburg for a discussion of his new book. Its called believer my 40 years in politics. I think most of you are here and this wonderful crowd has assembled because you know david is one of the most influential and successful Political Consultants in america. He began his career as a journalist, but it wasnt long before he went from being a passionate chronicler of politics to a practitioner of politics. Hes best known for steering Barack Obamas campaign for the senate in 2004 and the presidency in 2008 and 2012 and, of course, he served in the white house as Senior Adviser to the president. Even before those historic and transformational races that elected Barack Obama David had worked on behalf of a cast of leading ab to haves actors and its worth noting in some cases you might say colorful characterrings. Of course, he did start in chicago right . So in the theater of american politics. He began happening out pamphlets on corners of new york city as a 10yearold, graduated to Bobby Kennedys campaign at the age of 13 and over more than 40 years and 150 campaigns served as a political adviser to Democratic Candidates running for local, state and national office. Now, he does admit that occasionally hes picked some duds, and those are discussed in the book. But he really got into politics to help people he believed in and who themselves believed in Public Service. Hence the title of the book, believer. And hence i think his muchdeserved reputation in the political arena even after decades in the business as a man of Passion Principle and purpose. Let me just say also as a bookseller that political memoirs, and i have read a lot of them and even worked on a few, are very, very hard to write. They are seldom very good, but davids is really an exception to that rule. Its absolutely terrific. In addition to its honesty and clarity, it is most of all an uncynical reminder that the political process and Public Service are not only essential to fulfilling our democratic values, but can be noble and worthy pursuits indeed. In conversation with david we are very, very lucky to have an old friend of brads and mine, dan balz from the Washington Post. Hes been a political correspondent, National Editor and Political Editor at the paper for many, many years i think nearly 40 years since he covered his first president ial campaign. He was telling me earlier that he has covered every president ial campaign since 1978. Hes still excited about it, and hes still going to be out on the trail in 2016 which will be very interesting needless to say. Hes widely respected for his thoroughness and the very even hand with which he wields his reporters pen. Hes also the author of two books including the New York Times bestsell e the battle for america, it is such an honor and such a delight to welcome both David Axlerod and dan balz to gaithersburg. [applause] lissa, thank you. Is this on . Try that one. Try that one. Thats better. All right. Okay. Lissa, thank you for the introductions. Its great to be here. This is a wonderful festival. This is the second time ive been able to be here. It is a delight to be here with David Axlerod. This is a terrific book. I say that as a journalist and an author and as somebody whos known david for many, many years. It is passionately written in the same way that david approaches his politics and there is much in this that i learned even though i interviewed him probably 125 times over the last six years for various stories and books that ive done. He obviously held back on me. [laughter] so there is much to glean from this book. We dont have a lot of time. Theres a lot of ground to cover. We want to save a little time for questions, so let me david let me just kick it off with this question. What made you decide you wanted to write this book, and whats the story you wanted to tell in it . Well, now can you hear me . No. No. This is, well share. Well share. First of all i know we have very little time, id be remiss if i didnt thank lissa for that wonderful introduction and the organizers of the festival, this is a great event. And for all of you who are standing or sitting in the blazing heat, you say the sent is just 50 feet away, but thats hard when youre suffering from heat [laughter] and to be with dan balz who i say behind his back is the Gold Standard for american political journalism. [applause] and that is not meant in any way to influence the tone of his questions. [laughter] i, i wanted to write this book for two reasons. One, candidly, is that i wanted to you know, when you work for a president and particularly this president , everybody identifies you with that, and im proud to be identified with that. But i wasnt born in 2007. I actually had a long life and career before that that led to the, my association with barack obama and really was part and parcel of a larger story. And i wanted to reclaim my life. That was part of why i wrote this book. And the second reason was,as the title of the book implies, i believe in this. I know these are very difficult times in which to feel great about politics. And i know theres a great deal of cynicism out there. And, but my, you know, i wanted the subtitle of the book to be how my idealism survivorred 40 years in politics. [laughter] at the end of the day you know, when i run into people who say to me obamacare saved my life, or when i run into someone whos an auto worker, you know, whos working i mean i saw chrysler and fiat just added, they canceled their Summer Vacation and theyre keeping all their shifts running this summer to manufacture cars. That firm wouldnt be here but for actions that the president took in the two years that i was at the white house that were courageous and difficult. You know, ive seen throughout my life an affirmation of why this is important. This is the, you know, politics to me, dan, as you know you read the book it all started for me when i was 5 years old and john f. Kennedy came to stuyvesant, town where i grew up in new york. Maybe some of you are familiar with it. [applause] yeah, there you go. House toking built for returning war veterans and he came there to campaign for president ten days before the 1960 election. And it shows you how long ago it was that a democrat was actually campaign anything new york city ten days before [laughter] the election. And this woman who looked after me when i was a kid when my mother was at work, wonderful africanamerican woman named jesse berry who came up from the south, had very little formal education, lots of wisdom, thought it would be good for me to see this. And she put me on top of the a mailbox on 20th street where this rally took place and this guy jumped up on the platform this charismatic guy his voice booming off of the buildings and everybody paid rapt attention. It seemed very important. And i found out years later i wasnt precocious enough to take notes [laughter] or write, as a matter of fact, at that moment, but i saw, i recovered the speech from google. And kennedy said im not running on the platform that says if you elect me, everything will be good. He said being an american citizen in the 1960s is a hazardous occupation filled with peril but also hope, and well decide which direction we take. And thats what i think politics is all about. You grab the wheel of history, and you turn it in the direction that you feel is right. His brother said the futures not a gift his brother robert, the futures not a gift, its an achievement which is the end gram of my end by gram of my book. I firmly believe that. And politics is the way we do it. So i wanted to write a book that left people with a sense of possibility and a sense of, perhaps a responsibility around this process. Because i think its important and its vital, and we cant avert our eyes. We have to dig in. Let me ask you one other related question to the book writing process which you were obviously a very active journalist for many years, but it had been a long time since youd done anything long form like this. Like never. Like never. [laughter] through the process of thinking through this book and writing it, what did you learn about yourself . Oh, my goodness. I think that, you know, first of all, let me just say and i dont know how you felt dan, this campus is chock filled with authors. I think anyone who tells you what a joy it was to write is a liar. [laugher] okay . So its just that you should leave any tent youre in where a writer says that because writing is hard. Writing is difficult under any circumstance. I had only in my life written newspaper articles and the occasional magazine piece and 30 second ads and some speeches. The notion of a full project like this was kind of, was daunting. And it was hard, and it was agonizing. But i really did learn a lot about myself. The first thing i learned, and hopefully its reflected in the book is that my whole life has basically been about storytelling. I think a Good Campaign is about i mean, i was obviously a journalist. And campaigns themselves are really at their best, youre telling a story about who you are. Not a fable, but a real story about who you are and where you want to lead and what your values are and what you think the country is all about. And so as i wrote this book, i realized this is, theres a linkage between everything that ive done. I also had, there were painful lessons. I really had to think hard about the sacrifices that i imposed on my family. As you know, i have a child with a chronic illness, epilepsy, thats sort of dominated and defined our lives. And much of the early part of my career i left my wife to deal with some terribly difficult things as i was out pursuing campaigns and working on campaigns. And as a matter of fact i had my first grandchild last october, and i sent my son while my daughterinlaw was pregnant a few pages of my book with a note saying i send these to you in hopes that you wont do to your child what i ask of your child what i asked of you. And tellingly, he said his response was i have a lot to say about this, but im not ready to say it. [laughter] you know, so there were a lot of things i learned about myself. But in terms of the light motif of this book, i woke up in the middle of the summer of 2013 when i was starting to write this book, and i realized that this belief, this idea that politics and government is about steering the wheel of history, this is whats really, this is whats attracted me from the very beginning. When i think of the people who i most relished working for, that was a quality that hasnt come d paul simon was my first client out of journalism. And i managed his campaign for the senate in 1984 in illinois. And then i did, and then i started this firm, and i started doing ads. The first president ial race i worked on was his in 1988. And i went back and looked at the ads and the tagline on the ads was isnt it time to believe again . And i realized this has been a constant theme through a lot of my political life. So there are a lot of that is one of the virtues of writing a book as painful as it is, and even the selfrevelatory part of it is painful. But you do learn a lot about yourself. Heres a multipart question. As you reporters love to ask. [laughter] you got the spark from seeing kennedy in 1960. First question is why when you went to work did you go to work as a journalist and not in campaigns . Second related question is what made you leave journalism for politics . And third and related to both of those is, the culture of chicago is obviously special [laughter] how did it very delicate. Im an illinoisan. How did it shape you and prepare you for ultimately, the 2008 campaign . These are all really really good questions. You know i i worked in campaigns from the time i was 9 years old. I worked for Bobby Kennedy in 1964 when he ran for the senate in new york. I wasnt the strategist. [laughter] i was handing out leaflets. And i worked i broke with the democratic are party when i was 10 and worked for john lindsay as was mentioned a liberal republican. And if you want to know what that looks like, you can go down to the smithsonian they actually have some [laughter] [applause] have some on display. And i worked for bobby again when he ran for president in 1968. And i was really interested in politics. Thats why i went to chicago. I went to chicago for three reasons. One is university of chicago was a great university. Number two, it was more than 600 miles from new york so i knew my parents wouldnt surprise me with a visit. [laughter] and the third but the third and maybe most important was i knew chicago was this really interesting political town. It was the home of the last of the big city machines, richard j. Daley was still in charge. It had been host to this cataclysmic and historic Democratic Convention just a few years earlier and there was this budding black independent Political Movement that interested me all around the university of chicago area the hub of it. And, you know i went there planning to really study that. And at the university of chicago at the time, its different than it is today. I run an institute of politics there today now. Its different now. But back then it was hard to find anyone who wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year 1800. And so news of the world to satisfy my in order to satisfy my interest in politics, and my mother had been a journalist, so i was very fluent and engrossed in news. I started writing for a local newspaper there, the hyde park [inaudible] in fact i looked up yeah all right. Yes. My first yes, yes. Yes. Were going the talk after, right . Theres my first editor sit ising right there. [applause] cheryl. [inaudible] yes, thank you. [applause] my first column just as an aside, my first column in 1973 december of 1973, was about this battle between mayor daley and Ralph Metcalf who was a congressman who was sort of his lieutenant in the black community you started out as a columnist . Yeah, i did. Well, at the hyde park herald. But i was lucky man. [laughter] but the truth is it was improbable because they had just lost their Political Columnist who was going to work for the illinois attorney general. He had gotten his law degree, and i walked in just at that moment, and mervyn bohan who was the general manager a really great guy and i said im really he said do you think you could write this . I said is, sure. So we were both nuts both me and him. But the column was about the battle they were having over Police Brutality in the black community. So thank god thats in the past. [laughter] so i parlayed that i was a stringer for the Washington Post, time magazine, parlayed that into an internship at the Chicago Tribune parlayed that into a job at the tribune, and i was there for eight years. I was there two and a half years on nights when i came they said, well you know everything about politics but you dont know anything about being a reporter, so were going to put you on nights. For two and a half years i covered murder and mayhem which turned out to be great preparation for covering chicago politics. [laughter] and i loved it. And i after a few years i became a political writer. I became the City Hall Bureau chief. I covered jane burns election in mayor which was a really historic event in 1979, and i covered her systematically abrogating every promise she made. And then i covered Harold Washingtons historic election in 1983 and i loved it. But i didnt love the direction of the newspaper. About six years in, there was a change of management. The bottom line folks came in the green eye shade people, and a Different Team of editors. The editors who raised me there and they really did raise me they were, like the story was everything. They were as enthusiastic as i was. The next set of editors were a little more cynical, and i just thought the direction was not very encouraging. And paul simon came along. Paul simon, you know, was the Orville Redenbacher of illinois politics. [laughter] hornrimmed glasses, he had those big i dont know if you remember, he had those ears that made Barack Obamas ears look small. [laughter] we used to talk about paul simons plan for lobal domination. [laughter] but paul also was an incredibly courageous guy. He had started a newspaper himself when he was or bought one when he was 19. Used it to crusade against corruption in his area, ran against the Crime Syndicate for the legislature. He was from deep Southern Illinois youre a native and you know where he was from was closer to little rock than chicago and yet he campaigned he crusaded for civil rights in the legislature. Incredibly admirable person. And for political reform which is still dangerous to campaign for in the illinois legislature. And so i felt like paul would be a great guy to be to work for if i was going to work for anyone in politics. And i thought this was the next journey for me because i wanted to do i loved journalism, but i didnt know if i could continue doing it the way i wanted to do it. So thats a really longwinded answer to your first question. What were your other two . [laughter] well, i mean, part of it was why you decided to leave which youve already answered. Oh, thats right. The culture of chicago yes. Thats really important because when i was coming up in chicago journalism, all the sort of tensions of race and ethnic divisions were kind of a calderon that bubbled over. And i got a real education in that. And, you know, Harold Washingtons election was was as i said, a historic one. And then i ended up working for harold when he ran for reelection trying to navigate these forces. Jane burn withs came back and ran against him and was actually ahead for a lot of that race, and we finally won that primary. And i remember the day after that primary harold and the a bunch of us were sitting around getting ready for a press conference, and he said what percentage of the white vote did i get. Somebody said 21 and thats so much better than the 8 you got last time. He said, you know, i probably spend 70 of my time in those white neighborhoods, and we got 21 and were happy, and he said aint it a bitch to be a black man in the land of the free and the home of the brave . [laughter] but 20 years later barack obama got elected to the senate. And when harold was running for mayor and you may have been there, harold went to a church on the Northwest Side of chicago with Walter Mondale who was the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party for president. And they were greeted by crowds that were as ugly and as vicious as any of the crowds you saw down south. Shouting racial epithets and it was a terrible scene that became national news. 21 years later, barack obama, we were working on the senate race, barack obama carried a sevenperson by mare statewide he got 53 of the vote, surprised everyone. And he carried virtually every ward. I went up that night and i looked at, i looked at the precinct in which that church sat, and i saw that barack had won that precinct, and is i grabbed him and i said i think harolds smiling down on us tonight. So we made great progress. But i learned a lot of [applause] yeah, go ahead. I learned a lot of lessons about the challenges and about how to navigate the waters of race and ethnicity. Yeah. Youve given us the perfect segway to get to 2008, 2012. But i want to ask one other question about president obama before that. I think you write that you met him mostly as a favor to a friend. Right. Early on before he was famous in any way. But when he called you about doing the senate campaign, the 04 senate campaign, it seems to me that both of you were at a point in your lives and your careers when you were, you were not quite sure what the future had yeah. Can you talk a little bit absolutely. About that and what kind of conversations implicit or explicit were going on between the two of you about that . Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We were both going through kind of existential crises. His was more straightforward, he had run for congress in 2000 and had lost narrowly by 30 points [laughter] and, you know, he was broke, and, you know, a young family and, you know he had to decide whether politics was going to be his future. My crisis stemmed from a former client it was exacerbated by a lot of things, but the triggering event was a former client of mine was running for governor of illinois and some of you may know his name, rod blagojevich. [laughter] and trust me, it engenders the same response [laughter] wherever we go. And, you know i had worked for rod when he ran for congress. I looked him. I thought he was a pugnacious guy. In the years he was in congress, one of my kids was an unpaid intern in his office, and the kid was going through a lot of struggles. Rod was incredibly gracious to him. I liked him. But when he came to me and said he wanted to run for governor, i was concerned because i didnt see him in that light. I said well why do you want to be governor . He said, well, you can help me figure that out. I said look, if i have to help you figure it out, you shouldnt run. And that was the end of our professional association. But he hired another group that was very proficient. They ran a state of the art campaign and by the summer of 2002, it was clear to me that he was going to win. What i thought was a very cynical campaign, first of all he ran as a reformer which in retrospect, you know has its [laughter] irony. [laughter] our last governor had also gone to prison, george ryan, so im not painting a great picture of the land of lincoln here, your state. [laughter] but, so there was logic to running as a reformer, but it wasnt exactly it wasnt precisely who he was even then. And the other thing is he ran on a no tax pledge which was probably good advice but completely antithetical to what i mean, we have huge problems now that only grew under his leadership because he hued to that position. So i was really depressed about it. And i was wondering whether maybe the game had become too cynical. And its not game, but the politics, the business of politics had become too cynical, and maybe i should think about doing something else. And just at that moment barack called me and said im thinking about running for the senate, i told michelle ive got one race left in me, and its up or out. If i dont make it, then ill go out and make a living. And, you know, and he asked me if i would talk to him about it, maybe work with him. I had offers from other candidates. There were a lot of candidates in the field better funded, better known, but i said to my wife, susan, you know if i could help get barack obama elected to the senate, thatd be something i could be proud of for the rest of my life, and that would recharge my batteries. Thats how our professional association began. In late in late 2006 when he was thinking obviously, quite seriously about running you did what is now a famous memo of advice which, among other things urged him to run and not wait. You said at the time, you will never be hotter than you are at this moment, and the field is littered with people who waited too long rather than seize moment. You also had some tough words for him in that memo questioning how tough he would be as a candidate in a very difficult president ial race. Can you give us some insight into how he received that advice . I ask that because i i think it was by email. [laughter] no. I interviewed him at one point and asked him what was the best advice you got as you were making the decision to run and he said is, well, i think the best advice i got was the advice i gave myself. And so i wonder as an adviser as his Senior Adviser, closest adviser, how does he receive criticism advice, bad news that sort of thing . Well, i think every every leader probably ultimately gets the best advice from himself and your goal is to permeate his thinking so that when he gives himself advice, its the right advice. [laughter] but look, i did believe it was the right time for him. I thought first of all, i thought it was the right time for the country for him to run. Secondly, you know, my experience has been that marinating in the politics of washington for decades is not necessarily the best preparation preparation certainly not in that year in particular. And so there were a lot of reasons why it made sense for him to run. I did have concerns though. He had never really had a serious, you know, never experienced anything like what he was going to experience in the president ial race. The senate race we had for a variety of reasons turned out not to be that. In fact were here in the state of maryland. The Republican Party in 2004 in illinois imported their nominee ultimately, from state of maryland alan keyes. [laughter] so you guys reluctantly parted with him. [laughter] and he, and alan keyes, you know though we were ahead by 50 points, had an unerring instinct for getting under obamas skin. And to the point where i turned on the news one night and i see them and its clear that theyre about to get into a fistfight. Obamas, like, jabbing his finger and i called him that night and said what the hell was that . He said, guy just gets on my nerves, you know . And so when i wrote the memo i did say to him, you know and in debates keyes got under his skin and i said i dont know whether youre this is, boxing fans will appreciate this reference and it may be selfevident. I dont know if youre mohamed alley or Floyd Patterson mohamed ali. I dont know when you get hit how youll respond and, you know, well not know until you get into this. But its something that you need to to think about. And the truth is that he, you know you learn about your candidate in a president ial race. President ial races are gauntlets, and theyre filled with we have a ridiculous system. I mean, the campaigns are too long theyre clearly too expensive. Theres a lot wrong with the way we elect president s but one virtue of them is that you do learn who people are. I said in 2011 that president ial campaigns are mris for the soul. You do find out who people are. And i learned a lot about him during that campaign. And, yes, he could take a punch. And what i mostly learned is in the most pressurefilled situations we faced in that campaign, he was at his calmest and most focused. So, for example, when reverend wright that whole reverend wright controversy erupted, you know, he was remarkable. You know, he was the one who said were going to give a speech on race. I want to talk about this directly with people. Ive got to write it, you know, he wrote it it was half written the night before he gave it. And when we were about when he was about to go in, you know, all his closest friends and supporters were sitting out in the audience along with all of you guys who were swarming around like vultures wondering whether this was the end of the obama campaign. And the pressure was just unbelievable. And he said to me before he went out, he said, look he said im going to give this speech and either people will accept it or they wont, and if they dont then i wont be president of the United States. But at least ill have said what i think needs to be said. He said, and thats worth something. And, you know, so you learn about what a person might be like as president in situations like that. And the night before, three in the morning when the speech arrived on my blackberry, i emailed him back. I read through it, and i was so taken by the honesty and the power of it, and the pressure under which he wrote it, i emailed him back and said this is why you should be president. The 08 campaign was obviously, so aspirational in so many ways, and i know people look back on it as though it was kind of an easy trip to the oval office which it, obviously, wasnt as youre relating here. The 2012 campaign was a much Different Campaign grittier a very hard slog. As you look back on those in your own experience in them which one is the more satisfying . Another really good question. Obviously look 2008 when we started the 2008 campaign, i said to, i said to bah brach and all of us barack and all of us, all the team that we needed to do more than win an election we needed to rekindle an idealism and possibility about politics. I said we havent seen anything like the Kennedy Campaign of 68 since, and we need to the try. And we did. That was a once in a lifetime experience, to be part of that. And i still meet people every day who are part of that for whom it was a formative experience. And yes there have been a lot of disappointments about the quality of our politics since then, but a lot of good thats been done as well. 2012 was a more conventional campaign frankly. You know, we were in, we had governed through a very difficult period of time. We knew that this was going to be a more comparative race because we needed to focus people on the choice. You know, i was of the view, i said to a Group Earlier that i never really i didnt have doubts that we were going to win at the end of the day partly because i thought at the end of the 2010 election that the Republican Party was going to be dragged too far to the right to win a national election. I said to obama the day after the midterm elections, i always like to mention that we and roosevelt were in the same boat. And i said to him i think the seeds of resurrection have been planted. He look at me like this was nuts. He said, well, its rather well disguised. [laughter] i dont think obama saw the blessing. But i really felt like whoever was the republican nominee was now going to have to pass through this very expensive toll booth of the right, and thats what happened to mitt romney. I mean, i think his positioning on Immigration Reform in particular made it almost impossible for him to win election. There are a couple of moments in that campaign, i remember you and i had a conversation around labor day of 2011 after the debt ceiling debacle, and you were worried about whether the president had the passion that was necessary to really Carry Forward the campaign. And you write about a meeting that took place a couple of weeks after that in which he basically confront you basically confronted him with that. Can you talk about what your concerns were . Well, you know, the thing about the white house and particularly when youre governing in really difficult times is thatyou can get into a kind of programmatic kind of droning approach and kind of lose the higher meaning of what youre doing. You become kind of an announcer for the government instead of a as i said, advancing a story. And, you know, i looked at film of obama in 2004 and 2008, and then i looked at some of the film of him in 2011 and i put a presentation together, and i asked him to look at these two and look at the difference between his whole presentation his, his energy level the words and so on. And i said, you know youve got to be that guy. Youve got to be the guy from 2004 and 2008. Youve got to have passion for this. And that was a long meeting, and it was a difficult discussion. He, you know his initial response to that was look, i talk about the middle class and i talk about all this stuff but, you know, reporters get tired of writing it so, you know but i think it also, i think in his heart knew hes a super smart guy. He could see the difference between that, and it was an important discussion to have. I want to get to audience questions. I have one broad question to close out this part of it. Youve been a political practitioner now for a long time. Campaigns are very tough and the goal of any candidates strategist is to win that campaign. But step back as you obviously are doing in this book and now at the institute of politics. To what extent do you think the conduct of campaigns today contributes to the problems we are having as a society, governing and the polarization and the divide that now exists . Well, i think in a sense you know the answer to that. The, you know, at its sort of fundamental level the job of campaigns and candidates is to win elections. I mean, my view of politics is that there are two categories of politicians. The first category of people who run for Public Office in order to be something, and then theres a smaller more admirable can cohort of people who run for Public Office because they want to do something, and they view politics as an avenue to do, to do things. But you do have to win. And so in a cynical environment that, you know, the easiest thing to do is serve that cynicism. And i think that happens a lot. So do i think, you know the thing about the 2008 campaign that i loved and ill always relish is that it was an uplifting campaign. It was about it was about community and it was about what we could do together and it was about the positive. And, you know that always, to me s the most desirable way forward, but its not always the most realistic way to win an election. And, yes so answer is, yes. And i think the proliferation of money which has, you know, i mean i have stuff sympathy for people who such sympathy for people who live in those handful of battleground states who lose control of their Television Sets for years at a time and have to watch all of this, you know very dispiriting stuff, trying to persuade you not that your candidate is the best candidate but that the other candidate is the worst. Theres a lot to contemplate there, you know . Were in a, were in a as i said a dispiriting cycle. But we have to work, i mean, you know, democracy is we, i think we take so much for granted, you know . Its an offshoot of its a gift. You have to work at it. And so what we do is we tend to avert our eyes and then we, you know check in late and a lot of people dont vote. So i think, you know, we can be critical of our politicians, and theres plenty to be critical of, but we ought to be selfcritical as well and say what are our obligations as citizens to demand more and actually act on that . Lets turn it over to questions now. Please be at the mic speak loudly and fire away. [laughter] he cleared his voice so he took you seriously. Your organization worked on the winning side in the recent nigerian election no. You didnt . I thought it did. I sold that business six years ago okay. Because i was going to ask how the introduction of chicago techniques worked in nigeria and what it meant for the future of that country. Well ill pass your question along. Okay, thank you. [laughter] thank you so much for coming today. My name is christian, and i was a Neighborhood Team leader in philadelphia in 2008 and 2012. I just finished reading your book, and i feel like you are such a wonderful public servant, that you are just a model for all of us. [applause] im still very committed to this work yes. As a continuation and i wanted to ask you, ive been a little bit disappointed of the lack of focus recently, and i wanted to see if you had any ideas on maybe, i read list of the president ial accomplishment that he still is working on, and is there something that we can still be feeling the power and the passion that we did in the past . Yes. You know i just was with a group in bethesda, and a number of them were people like you who worked on the first and second campaigns. But they told me about all the other things theyve been involved in in the community as a result of that experience and thats a great byproduct, i mean thats a great legacy of which im proud the ofa i think, is uncharted waters, and you know, i think theres a whole lot of soul searching going on about what it should and can be, especially post presidency. But i know this, whatever president obama does after this, part of it is going to be to continue to try and encourage people to be involved. Not so much in partisan political campaigns, because thats not going to be his role. Hes not going to be chairman of a party. But to be involved in the work of trying to bring about constructive change through organizing. And so i think that that thinking is going on hopefully through ofa or other activities youll get clarity on that. But certainly this is something that we dont want to end with the end of a presidency. Thank you. Another ofaer. Both republicans and democrats have advantages. I want to get your assessment. I would say on the democratic side its demographics. Ofa, the database and the radicalized right on the republican side, big money particularly after Citizens United turnout, they turn out better and voter suppression. Whats your assessment . Well, i think turnout is a variable thing. They certainly have an advantage in offyear elections and thats one thing republicans do better than democrats. Your other observations i think, are fair. I would caution democrats not to though, take their demographic advantages too, too much to heart and assume too much. We need to, as a party now speaking as a democrat we need to be much more cognizant of that and invest a lot more. The only recent party leader i know who is really made that point was howard dean, and tellingly he had been a governor and not a member of congress. He wasnt a washington figure. So i think thats where a lot of the republican advantage generally is. They have been just more they have a lot of resources with which to do it. I want to know if you can you speak more directly into the microphone. Sure. The current flap can you hear . The current flap over Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, you know, when george h. W. Bush retired he joined the Carlisle Group to make a few more Million Dollars and when his son retired he went to hide and to paint. So clintons retired and they are building a Charitable Foundation which has helped thousands of people in haiti and hundreds of thousands of people in africa with hiv put all we hear about the Clinton Foundation is that its a slush fund nor clintons. Like its a bad thing. I havent seen one word in the popular press saying, the Clinton Foundation hays done some pretty good work. Im wonder if you agree or disagree. I love those kind of questions. [laughter] i actually think thats a question directly to dan paul, isnt it . No look, i think that the Clinton Foundation does do very important and admirable work. I do think that the Clinton Foundation also could have done a better job of over a long period of time promoting the good and valuable work it did so it wasnt so defined by these controversies now. So i afree it pains me to see good work demeaned in that way. That is what happens in our political process but you have to anticipate these things and act on them in advance so as to lessen the potential liability later. [applause] we are out of time. Thank you for your questions. Thank you for your participation. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you David Axelrod. David axelrod will be signing, so please follow him to his table. Thanks so much for coming. [inaudible conversations] that was David Axelrod talking about his book believer. Hell be the chicago book festival where book tv will be live. Hell be joined by longtime Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page. Now well be back in just a few minutes for a book called the partisan divide about how congress operates. What i did was i tried to assess each of the 17 crises on two axises the first was how bold the president s response was, cautious or bold, on the horizontal, and then whether it was successful in the long term or longterm failure and then plotted them based upon not just my analysis but assessments from experts throughout the Foreign Policy world. And sort of made aggregated grades and rather than giving them a. , b d. , c. , d ever, i tried to put them in the appropriate quadrant because none of us would agree exactly where this would go but would agree it would go in this quadrant meaning it was cautious and failure. And then up here, on the caution successes and then over here are the bold successes both 0 which of have an asterisk on them, and then these are the bold failures. And the bottom line is that caution succeeds more often than aggressive response. And so people that find obama to be feckless and timid are going against history in Crisis Management at the white house. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. President ial candidates often release books to introduce themselves to voters. Heres a look at some recent books written by declared and potential candidates for president former secretary of state Hillary Clinton looks back on her time serving in the Obama Administration in hard choices. An american dreams, florida senator marco rubio outlines his plan to restore economic opportunity. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee fifths his take on politics and culture in god, guts, grits and gravy, and potential president ial candidate rick sapper toum santorum argues the republicans must focus on the working class, and i in fighting chance Elizabeth Warren outlines her life. And scott walker unintimidated. And kentucky senator rand paul, who recently declared his candidacy, calls for Smaller Government and more bipartisanship in taking a stand. More potential candidates with recent books include former governor jeb bush in immigration wars arguing for new immigration policies. In stand for something. Ohio governor john kashich calls for a return to traditional american values. Former virginia senator james webb looks back on his time serving in the military the senate in i heard my country calling. Bernie sanders recently announces his intention to seek the democratic nomination for president. His book, the speech, is a printing of is a eighthour long filibusters against tax cuts. In promises to keep joe biden looks back on his career and politics and explains his guiding principles. Neurosurgeon ben carson calls for greater individual responsibility to preserve americas future in one nation. In fed up rick perry explains government has become too intrusive and must get another of the way in politics who expressed interest in running for president er is former Rhode Island Governor lincoln chafeey and against the tide. He recounsel his time in the senate. Carrie fiorina. Former ceo of hewlettpackard shares lessons she learn from her difficult dis and triumphs in rise together this will challenge. Bobby indan criticizes the Obama Administration and explains why conservative solutions are needed in washington in leadership in crisis. Finally in a time for truth texas senator ted cruz recounts his journey from a cuban immigrant son to the u. S. Senate. Look for his book in june. [inaudible conversations] back to tvs live coverage of gaithersburg book festival. In a couple weeks well be in chicago for the book festival, and well be live there with Pulitzer Prizewinning author Lawrence Wright, doing a callin on in depth. If youre interested in finding our full scud eel go to booktv. Org or follow the updates at the bottom of the screen. Live coverage continues in just a minute. [inaudible conversations] lawrence write wright is the author of nine books with topics ranging from modern religion, and the terror attack citizen camp david accords. His more recent titles including a look at man manwell noriega. A picture of his last years in power. He wrote the looming tower. An exemption of the rise of al qaeda, Osama Bin Laden and the fbi agents responsible for tracking their actions prior to september 11th. Lawrence wright also investigated scientology in guy going clear. Which became an hbo documentary. And his latest book is 13 days in september an account of the Peace Agreement between israel and egypt at camp david in 1978. His previous books covered topics such as growing up in the 60s and 70s os, prefiles of religious leaders and what identical twins tell us about inherited traits. Lawrence writhe, live on booktv on june 7th on in depth. You can participate via phone southern media or n person be Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. When i joined the army i assumed i would have to prove myself and exceed the standards to be accepted, and i strove to do just that. But what i realized during my journey is that all the good loader is served with held themselves to a higher standard and they consistently applied Leadership Principles meant to improve, not degrade or debase. In the army, we call it leading from the front. And the book, spent some time talking about the difference between leaders and soldiers who just met the standards and those who always tried to exceed the standards. And its kind of like the difference between being an a student and a c student. Except in the army, lives department on our performance and our leadership. The leader who satisfied with just meeting the standard never striving to a higher standard, will probably never lead a highperforming organization. Now, when i joined the army back in 1975, i joined the womens army corps. It was kind of like a separate proven women who desire to serve. And to be honest, never dreamed about joining the army. I always knew from the time i was at Elementary School i would be a coach in the physical education teacher. As a kid i was a tom boy. I dont know if they use that word anymore. But i loved sports. And i went to one of the top physical education colleges in the country courtland upstate new york. During my junior year in college, the army offered women 500 a emergency during their senior year in return for a twoyear commitment and a commission as a second lieutenant. 500 bucks is a lot of money back then. And even with four generations of west pointers in my family, the thought of joining the army had never crossed my mind. But it was an offer i couldnt refuse. So i joined and began my twoyear journey in the army, a twoyear journey that turned into five years ten years, 20 years, and yes, 38 years. So when people ask me if i always knew was going to be a general, i tell them north in my wildest dreams. When it happened, there was no one more surprised than i was. Except of course, my husband. And now you know why they say behind every successful woman is an astonished man. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] next up a panel of authors. This is two former comemen and a long time political reporter, tom davis and martin frost served many years in congress, and rich cohen has covered the capital city for many years and theyve written a book together called the partisan divide. About how congress operates. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon welcome to the gaithersburg book festival. I am here to introduce this esteemed team here. Gaithersburg is a terrific place and they are so wonderful in how they support their arts and humanities. Were really pleased to bring you this fabulous event. Thanks in large part to the generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. Please when you see them, say thanks would you . We got a few housekeeping items. Of course, turn off your cell phones and devices. Wed presenter that. If youre tweeting, which we encourage you to do, especially with a picture of the book cover maybe, please use the hash tag gbf15, and we need your feedback. Surveys are available at your tent and on the web site and on the mobile app for this operation, by submitting a survey youll be entered into a drawing for free ipad. So its worth your while to do that. Martin frost and Richard Cohen will be signing books immediately after this presentation and there are numerous copies of the books on sale in the politics and prose tent. Buy your books early buy them often. No doubt you have friends who want these books. Please buy a bunch. Our writers would appreciate. I. This race free event. We want to keep it that way. It really does help the book festival if youll be buying some books. The more books we sell, the more publishers will send their writers their speak with us, and purchasing books from our partner, politics and prose will help our local economy. It supports local jobs, supports the book festival, and supports independent book stores. Thats really important. They need your support. So if you enjoy this program please buy some books. Martin frost is here with us today. He spent 26 years as a member of congress representing dale dallasfort worth. He swept four years of the Democratic Congressional campaign and four years as chair of the House Democratic caucus. Richard cohen is not our Washington Post rich cohen. Im told hes the good richard co handbut has been write about politics for many years he started covering the North Hampton city council. Is that right . Yes. A couple years ago. This book by martin frost Richard Cohen and tom davis who couldnt be here today have written the partisan divide. A concept relatively unknown here in all democratic Montgomery County, maryland. We know we have republicans here but they have not elected anybody recently. Current count and state elects individuals are divided on scales of progressivism but not party scales. It makes our lives less contentious. We do have that in the state of maryland and we have plenty of conversations going on right now about party issues and the like. I personally feel very related to these authors here, and nat the one republican i have served with who served on the Montgomery County council howie dennis actually worked for tom davis. A great guy and this is important. I cast my first vote for president , George Mcgovern in the town of North Hampton massachusetts. When i was in college and that is mr. Cohens home town. So like were practically related. He was the president of massachusetts. He was he got massachusetts, that was it. Oh well. At least my vote counted that year. And in addition, my strict, which represents includes all million plus members of residents of Montgomery County is im not sure were proud of this or not were proud home to a portion of what has been called the United States least compact read most jerrymandered, Congressional District. District 3 which covers a portion of the eastern part of Montgomery County and was referred to in that book looks like a no one can come up with an animal that describes have to get in line to be the most gerrymandered. Were right up there and were proud of it. The authors will be glad to know were ahead of you on 0 couple of these issues. We just enacted a Public Campaign finance program for local elections some this week, we funded it to a tune of a Million Dollars. So we have much in common with the world of politics and action. Im sure we can do better and well learn more from these great leaders today. So this brings us to the main event, martin frost richard co hand, and the partisan divide. Our co are authorize tom davis couldnt be here because he its a Commencement Ceremony so he has good excuse. Let me tell you how this book came about. And then well give you time to answer questions itch was chairman over the Democratic Congressional cam pine committee in 1996 and 1998. Thats the committee that raises money for candidates and recruits candidates and plans strategy. Tom was chairman of the republican Congressional Campaign committee in 2000 and 2002. So we didnt good headtohead, and that way were friends. Tom and i beth have been out of congress for a while. Ive been out for ten years. My term ended in 2004. Tom has been out for a little bit less time. I served 26 years tom served 14 years. So that between us we served 40 years in congress, and we also saw, when things were different in congress, where im not saying everyone got along all the time but it was possible to get things done, and it was possible more possible than it is today to work across party lines. When i was first eelectricity to congress there was a congressman from Miami Florida bill layman. Bill had been a used car dealer before he was elected to congress and used to the all of us he didnt think he could fall any lower in public esteem and then he was elected to congress. That is at a time when congressional approval rates were in the 40s and 50s. There was a poll last year that showed only eight percent of the public approved of the job congress is doing. Thats family and friends and paid staff. And its not really good for our country, quite frankly that congress is held in such low esteem. Were a great country. We hope we have a legislative branch that can respond to the desires of the public, and it can Work Together and to that and that has not been the case in recent years. Tom and i after we both Left Congress we would appear on Cable Television sometimes in kind of a pointcounterpoint. We were first put together by chuck todd on msnbc on his show the daily rundown. And after that we were on cnn and bloomberg variety of cable shows, and we realized that even though we were partisans he was a partisan republican and im a partisan democrat weapon didnt agree on a lot of issues but we didier on the fundamental problems that faced the institution of congress and why congress doesnt function very well today. So we decided we would write a book. I will tell you for those in the audience who have ever written a book, this is hard. Id never done this before. And in writing books it is better sometimes just like it is in life, its better to be lucky than smart. And toms College Roommate amherst was an executive aft a Book Publishing company and i used to be a journalist. A journalism degree from the university of missouri, i covered congress for Congressional Quarterly before i went to law school and got in politics. So i write pretty fast, and tom had been thinking about this for three or four years and had published of the book in his head. Had part of the book in his head. So it took us a little less than a year from the time we started working to when it was published. Thats pretty fast. Time and i did an outline of 16 chapters and made a decision. Some of you have read books where there are cao authors and and the book is written in a blend voice youch dont to who said what. Tom and i decided we would each take half the chapters. Rich would work with us. In fact rich was the coauthor on a couple of chapters but he would be clear who wrote which chapter in the book, and then we would put our names on the beginning of the chapter and then we each were given the tub to comment on each others chop at thes to make opinion wes thought the other one may not have done fully or we might have a slightly different opinion. Not a bad way to write a book. Once the oak appeared, we started can do book events at president ial libraries. We have done five libraries so far. The Reagan Library the Nixon Library on the best coast, the Clinton Library in arkansas, lbj in austin, and we did the george w. Bush president ial center in dallas and we were on the west coast, we did stanford and usc we did rice while we were in texas. We have done some on the east coast. We did one at tufteds. Were going to am hurt at the end of the month and politics and prose the cosponsor of this book fair, had a very nice event for us at their store after the book came out. So this has been interesting. An interesting experience. I share that because its not something id ever done before, and i found that people are interested, they come and ask good questions. And this is not like one of those raucous town Hall Meetings you see sometimes. People actually come and want to know. They have things on their mind and want to know why this place doesnt work better, and we try to respond to that the best we can. Let me tell you some of the thing wes cover in the book. I want to give you that background. We really looked at this from three different perspectives. Theres 16 chapters and they deal with pieces of this. There are three fundamental reasons why there is so much partisan divide in congress today. And again this may not be the nice Montgomery County but this is the case in the country and you see that every day on television and the newspapers, when congress cant get its act together cant do things that people want done. One is the role of redistricting. This is just a house issue. There are three factors in redistricting. The first factor is that in recent years the Political Parties have made a real effort to take over state legislatures in the the two years right before an election so the republicans in 2010 they didnt do anything illegal. It was within the rules. They absolutely put a lot of money into elected people in state legislatures and electing governors particularfully states that had gone democratic for president. They took over michigan, they took over ohio, they took over pennsylvania. So obama carried those states for president but the Republican Party controlled those states when the district lines were redrawn in 2011. So you now have a situation in those three states alone where the majority of the vote for congress and for president is democratic but 70 of the Congressional Districts are republican. Now, democrats have done the same thing in previous years. Dont get me wrong. The republicans are not the only ones that have done this. But republicans have done it to a fair the well, so now in the 2012 election, republicans won control of the hoe house by 17 votes. So you have to ask how did his happen . Computers are wonderful thing youch them what you want and theyll draw a terrific jerrymandered district for you. It will give you the result you want. So most Congressional Redistricting is done by partisan legislatures. Ill talk about some alternatives to that. And thats how you got the kind of districts you got. And the result of that is that these are oneparty districts. Whoever wins the primary is the Congress Person, and the general election is almost irrelevant in 80 parts of the districtness the country. And so what that means is that the whole contest is in the primary, and that the Congress Person the man or woman who represents that district, has to be always looking over his or her shoulder as a wellorganized small group because primaries are small turnout elections that can take control of a primary. Republican congressmen are looking over their right shoulder to see if some far right winger is going to run against them in the primary and this influences their votes. Democrats likewise look over their left shoulder, worried that someone from the left might run against them in the primary low turnot, so theres no incentive to cooperate with the other side. In fact its exactly the opposite you dont want to be seen in public with somebody from the other side. Certainly dont walk to have your name on legislation with someone from the other side. Now, one of the other things thats contributed to this is something called residential sorting. My coauthor tom davis puts a lot more weight on this than i do but he makes a legitimate case that in many cases, people who live together think the same way. People move to Montgomery County want to be in a democratic county, and so people in center cities, people are democrats. Out in some of she suburban counties in thing midwest and southwest, those people are runs. Thats where the republicans live. So that influences the way districts turn out. A third thing is the Voting Rights act. Tom and i have a difference of opinion on this. Tom thinks it was inevitable that when the vote rights passed that the result would be africanamerican districts heavily africanamerican districts in the south would be represent bid black democrats and Everything Else would be represent bid white republicans itch think the republicans filed a careful strategy trying to make friend, trying to go to some black elected officials particularly early on and say look the democrats have discriminated against you. They havent drawn africanamerican districts in the past. Well make a deal. Well put as many blacks as possible into certain number of districts to guarantee that a black can be elected and it just so coincidentally all the surrounding districts will be bleached almost all white. So i didnt think that had to be the inevitable result and some key people in the Africanamerican Community john lewis, who said dont do that. Lets put enough africanamericans in the districtness the south where an africanamerican can be elected but lets have africanamericans in some of the surrounding districts where they can influence the outcome. That was not the case in many instances and now all you have in the deep south are black democrats and white republicans there are no more white republicans, with limited exception. Some in florida and those politics say the farther south you go, the farther north you get in florida so theyre not a typical southern state. Theres one in anyway a couple of anglo white congressmen in texas but they represent hispanic districts. Thats another matter. The hispanic turnout is lower so you have to have a higher forge guarantee a Hispanic Women bell elected. So the Voting Rights act arental shorting and intentional gerrymandering has led to safe districts where people dont talk to the other side and theyre worried they may lose the primary if they do talk to the other side. Another factor is what has gone on with campaign finance. Tom and i both were harsh critics of the Mccain Feingold law when it was passed about 15 years ago. Our view was that under prior to mccainfeingold, outside groups labor and corporations and wealthy individuals could contribute to Political Parties. That had to be disclosed. When i was children of the dccc we disclosed every money. Mccain fine gold took that away from Political Parties and we argued with the people who were authoring Mccain Feingold. The inevitable result the money will about to ideological groups on either frame wont go to the parties. We were right and they were wrong. And thats exactly what has happened. And now with the Supreme Court taking the position that money is a free speech issue and you cant put limits on what anybody can spend in politics. You can put limits on what they can give directly to a candidate but you cant put limits on and what they can give to a party but no limits on their able to have independent expenditures or give to groups on c4s, and the problem i the c4 groups dont have to report their contributors so large amounts of unreported money being dropped into races in the last minute and an incumbent congressman alives in mortal fear somebody will spend three or four Million Dollars against him in the last couple weeks of a race so you have this odd combination of safe districts where the challenge could be in the primary and Unlimited Money from the outside. We have some suggestions about that. And ill talk about that in a minute too. The other thing i dont mean to be overly critical of the media. I used to be a reporter. But we now have highly polarized media. When i was first elected there were no all news cable stations. Somebody figured out, some very smart people figured out roger ailes figured out for fox that there was money to be made by having a conservative talk channel, and that is exactly what they did. So the people on the right could know where to go to get their evening fix on what was going on and most of thats very partisan. And then msnbc figured out their making money on the right. Lets make money on the left so they started msnbc. Its not as extreme as fox is, but its pretty partisan. They dont cut much slack for the other side. Poor old cnn tried to go down the middle and theyve lagged in the polls so theyve lagged in the rate examination the other two have been more successful. Also the internet, of course, is a source of enormous amount of information. Some of which is not true. And the internet does nose have editors in many cases. So the public is being bombarded with all kinds of partisan highly partisan information and im not as a reporter, former reporter im not for censorship or putting restrictions on what people can say on the media or the internet but i think we have to understand the effect of all that on our political process. How can we solve this problem . The recommendation champ at the in our book makes several specific recommendations. One is that Congress Pass a law which it could do its empowered to do this, whether it would do it is another matter requiring states to have nonpartisan commissions to draw Congressional Districts. Not a bad idea. Five states decided to do that on their own. California arizona wisconsin. Washington and new jersey, and in many cases these are much less gerrymandered districts and fairfight districts either side can win. So thats worked, not perfect litsch but it has worked. The problem is legislatures arent going to do that on their own unless directed by come, and the question is, will congress directly to do that . Well the people in charge right now dont want to change the rules of the game. They dont necessarily want to have a fairer system. Democrats were in controlled we might take the same position and say, we like the system the way it is. So unless the public rises up and the public says, look, enough of this, lets have some more competitive districts in this country it may well not happen. Another recommendation we make, and again, this is as a result of the Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court has taken the position that money is a free speech issue and so you cant put limits, you cant pass a law putting limits on how much people can spend in a federal election. Maybe you can do that in the county election for local government but you cant do that, Supreme Court will not let you do that in a federal election, so i have to explain to people you dont like Citizens United . You cant override that with an act of congress. The only way you can override a Supreme Court decision is to have a constitutional amendment. And it is real hard to amend the constitution in this country. It takes a twothirds vote of each house and has to be peace bid threequarters of the states so the best is have disclosure. We suggested that congress out to possess a law requiring every organization of any kind that mentions a federal candidate by name anytime during a twoyear election cycle be required to disclose all their contributors to the federal Election Commission so at least we know where this money is coming from. That would be legal the courts would permit disclosure but wont permit limits on the total amount of spending. Now, we have also made in other recommendations, some of which are a little controversial. Some years ago congress permitted earmarks. Thats a where a member of congress or member of the senate could designate how money would be spent in an appropriations bill in their particular district of their particular state. Unfortunately, this was abused. One of my college classmates from the university of missouri, whom i did not know, Randy Duke Cunningham actually sold ear marks to defense contractors and took bribes, and he was sent to jail. Spent a little time as a guest of the government, as he should have. That should never happen. Other people used ear marks to fund some somewhat questionable projects. What we have suggested is that earmarks be returned but with the requirement that the members name has to be put on it in so in the Committee Report you know which house member or which senator ear marked the spending and it could only be spent in the senators district or state. The reason for this is, one this would give members of congress some skin in the game. They would have a reason to support appropriation bills. Right now the government operates on a continuing resolution. This is a crazy way to fund the government. You could never fund a business this way. You wouldnt know how much money to have for staff until half of the year was gone but bates the way congress rated. So re recommend going back to earmarks. Not everybody agrees with that. We understand that. This was a considered to be a reform but i think that going back to that system would be helpful. Also we have recommended having a National Primary day for all elections for the house and the senate. Not for presidency. States can do their president ial primaries and their caucuses whenever they wanted to, and but all primaries for the house and senate would be on the same day. The reason for this is that would hopefully have a larger turnout. The news media would pay typings what was going on focus attention on the fact this is primary day in the United States and that maybe wed get more people voting. One problem we have with prim marys is in some states you register by party and you can some states you can register as an independent but you cant vote if youre an independent you cant vote in the Party Primary of either party. Youre frozen out of the process. Even though in many cases the whole election is in the primary. Now in other cases independents choose not to involvement they dont want to be afailated with one party or the other but then they are conceding the outcome to a relatively small group of voters in many cases ideologically extreme to pick the candidates in their parties. California has an interesting wrinkle. Im not suggesting this be done in every state. It has met with some controversy in digs to going to a nonpartisan commission, california has an open primary where everybody can file regardless of party. So you can have multiple democrats and multipep republicans republicans and the top two are in a runoff, and the result of that in some cases you had two democrats in a runoff or two republicans in a runoff. The effect of that is, for example, if you have two democrats in a runoff, then they have to talk to the republicans in their strict. They have to get votes from the other side and conversely, if you have two republicans they have to talk to the democrats. Not every state is going to do that but its an interesting experiment and ought ought to be looked at. We i believe in ore country and we believe in our system of government. We just want it to work better, and we are our government is constantly renewing sit. Its not the same government set up by the found fathers. Africanamericans can vote now. Women can vote now. That wasnt what the Founding Fathers originally had in mind. So that we can improve our system. We can be better, and hopefully we can produce some results that people want and desire. Let me rich really did yeomans service on the book. Rich had covered us he was a reporter and had covered both tom and me so we knew each other. He asked tough questions and he was a reporter, and he asked us tough questions as we were working on the book, too rich. Thank you very much good to be here. I will just speak for a few minutes and then well invite your questions. I really ive written books in the past, actually get back to that in a second. This was a unique experience for me as martin just said. I had as a reporter martin frost was a very good and helpful source for me. Tom davis was the same. But this was a great opportunity for me to work directly with them and i think they the two of them i was glad to assist them. They were kind to help bring me along as coauthor but the two of them provided, with this book a real Public Service. Most members of congress, once they retire, they just disappear and they do various things, which is fine, but relatively this is a book i think is pretty unique in that these two former members who were real players at the time, each of them served in a leadership capacity, a respected legislator, they told the stories. They explained what the place was like, and they did it from as martin said, they each wrote separate chapters and separate pieces of chapters but there are common themes from the book. That theyre expressing. So i think they have done a great Public Service and i would add to that, not so much as a matter of age or number of years but the two of them maybe i would include myself as well were dinosaurs. We come from another era. Martin and in particular with martin and tom. Theyre dinosaurs because they were centrists in their parties. Martin a centrist democrat, tom a centrist republican. And they would each be able to work across the aisle. There just isnt very much of that anymore and thats unfortunate for the country and the book explains why. And ill take now follow up on the introduction, tom does refer in the book, tells the story about Connie Morella who many of you recall was there was a tame when republicans were elected in significant positions in Montgomery County, and as tom describes in at one point in the book, connie had in the late 90s and and was defeated in 2002, best Chris Van Allen doing well for himself since then but as tom describes in the book, he talked to connie and basically said to her at one point connie, this district Montgomery County, is changes and theres not much you can do about it. Obviously redistricting did become a factor but it was changing even apart from redistricting. So there are this book thats one brief example. Tom is talking about coby morella as one example of dozens or scores of cases kind of explanations of how politics were changing, including here in Montgomery County, quite frankly. My experience i enjoy i had more than 30 years of writing for a magazine, a couple magazines, but one in particular, National Journal covering congress and it was a great experience for me. I continue to write as a free lancer but its a different pace and thats fine for me at this point. But as a reporter covering congress what i particularly enjoyed what i tried to kind of capture for our readers is that congress always is changing. It changes from obviously from one congress to the next. It can change from one month to the next, one week to the next the schedule will change. And the challenge is for reporters and even for members in their own way to try to understand and to kind of keep on top of these cyclical changes. Sometimes members lose touch with the changes. Im thinking again real briefly wont give the details but tom describes here, both martin and tom talk about how their states, texas and virginia changed while they were here, and tom tells in particular the story of what happened to eric cantor in the form are majority leader, now out of congress because he didnt stay on top of the change. Having said that, yes there is change and its constant, and we can say right now in 2015, congress may be working a little bit better. Than it was last year. But i would submit to you this will be me main point for this discussion i would submit to you that the book that we wrote remains apt and relevant and timely, even though there may be congress may be working a little bit better now. Theres various a group called a Bipartisan Policy Center a first rate organization, and has members former members of congress from both parties. Bipartisan policy center has been issuing statements lately saying pointing out some of their facts are correct and relevant that congress is getting more done. To which i would say okay, but i would also then add that all the themes in this book, all the point that martin described for you in this presentation, they all remain valid. Namely theres problems in the country with polarization in our politics. Theres problems with the media. Changes in technology. Theres changes in demography. These theres changes about the role of money in politics. These are factors that, as a group, and kind of in terms of the interaction of these factors, helps to explain why it has become more and more difficult for congress to get anything done. Even if maybe on occasion now in may or the spring of 2015, perhaps they are passing a budget. They may pass a defense bill. They passed something on iran. But i would submit to you that the real problems that have led to the dysfunction remain in place. And its going to require again as the book describes, its going to require not only members of congress but really its going to require the public to demand change. To tell the members members of congress can kind of wring their hands and say that the place isnt working very well, but they have shown one skill all 535 members of congress have been able to get elected under this system. So they may not like the system but it works for them. If theres going to be change, i would submit to you its going to have to come from the grassroots. Im going to give you a couple of examples before we take questiones no one should get too cared we were with the fact there are one or two things that peaced in congress the last couple of months because theres some very, very tough decisions yet to be made and which congress may find itself back in the ditch fairly soon. Ill give you some examples. One is renewal of the exportimport bank. This is a Financing Facility that has been very important for American Businesses to be able to sell their products abroad. And you now have the tea party element of the Republican Party who thinks its terrible that were helping big business, and terrible that the government is in any way helping businesses in the country sell their own products it ought to be just a free market process. That may not be renewed. That may fail. Another example is the Highway Trust Fund. Our roadded and bridges are in terrible shape and congress cannot figure out how to come up with enough money to fund the Highway Trust Fund and still happen done it. It runs out thened of the month and theyre talk about maybe theyll fund enough money for two months. The problem is that some people, most mostly republicans but some democrats dont want to raise taxes in order to build better roads in this country and better bridges, and we may wind up with not being able to pass anything to fund the Highway Trust Fund because of the antitax movement. We have used had user fees in the past. We have had a gasoline tax. People dont want to raise the glen tax. Actually the price of gasoline is down now and so maybe if you could add a few peppies to the gasoline tax figure out how to rebuild our infrastructure, that would be good for the country. But people wont even consider that. The ice the trade vote. Something called fasttrack you. Read but the the paper, has to do with the pacific trade agreement with countries in the pacific rim. There are lot of people who feel like our country has been giving away our jobs, past trade agreements made it easier for American Business to move outside of the United States, and so even though that finally passed the senate, it is not at all clear that will pass the house, and the president may not have the authority to enter into negotiations just as past president s republican and democratic president s, have had this Fast Track Authority in the past. Theyve given us the ten minute sign do we need to give you a chance do ask questions. Im saying, dont get misled by the fact Congress Passed one or two things in the last couple of months. They have a lot of difficult issues yet to resolve particularly if the Supreme Court strikes down part of the funding mechanism for obamacare and congress doesnt have any idea how theyre going to take care of that. So be glad to take questions. Please go to the mic when you ask questions. One of the serious questions with respect to the trade bill, one of the implications for employment and i think there are lot of unanswered questions. The president has been proceeding somewhat and so i think that has to be revealed so that the act would be measured in a proper light. The other thing with respect to infrastructure seem like an article of faith. God for bid we be identified with the tax increase. The are very few politicians in my experience who have been prepared to say and i think one governor way back, of illinois said id rather be elect for one term and get something done, and but that is not typically the indicate with elected officials and i dont know what the answer to that is other than electing politicians who do not want to make it their career. Well, its an interesting point. In the past, congress of both parties has figured out how to fund the Highway Trust Fund. That is an area where theyve been whether they call it a tax or a user fund, there has been bipartisan agreement that we have to do something about the infrastructure in this country. Now, because the parties are so split and because of the influence of these outside forces who will scream bloody murder if you do anything with additional revenue congress cant even do that even though past congresses have done that. Let me speak to term limits. The u. S. Supreme court some years ago interesting held that term limits for federal office are unconstitutional. What was the reasoning . This is a republican court. Their reasoning was that the constitution requires that you have to be 25 years old and a result of the state to run for the house and 30 years old and a resident of the state run for the senate and you cannot add to those requirements for office. So the only way you could have term limits would be to amend the constitution. Could happen but its not easy to do and some people think term limits dont make a lot of sense because they empower the permanent class in washington who are there all the time and if members are rookies all the time they wont be very good at getting their job done. But you can make an argument. Richard . Let me talk just real briefly, somewhat personal way about president s. I wont talk directly about our current president but i will talk about some past president s ill mention the fact that i did ive done a couple of books in years past, and one of them was a book about how Congress Passed the 1990 clean air act. It was passed unanimously virtually unanimously the leadership wouldnt have happened unless the first president bush took the lead and did a very good job and worked with the democratic congress, and i and the legislation was passed and i wrote the book about how that happened. I wrote its year later. And seemed like bus the publisher asked me if i would. It never occurred to me that when i wrote that book in 1991, that 20 years later, it would be a piece of ancient history. That we simply have lost just a very few cases like that when now where a president takes the lead and the members of congress respond. And then ive also wrote another book about a guy named charm of the ways and Means Committee and he end up in jail. Wrote about what he did in congress. He enjoyed legislating but he the way he did it he was chairman for 13 years, 12 of those years was the presidencies of reagan and bush, and he wanted them to take the lead and then he would follow. We again that is the book, thats a story. Ross ten cow ski. Doesnt exist anymore. Credit you for reflecting on what chief executives or the legislators did that was profitable. With respect to first president bush unfortunately the apples fell far from the tree. Two other people who want to tuestion. Thank you. I want to address this question to mr. Cohen. Address it to him because mr. Davis is not here, and at least mr. Cohen id like you present what you think would be mr. Davis argument if he were. Well, i think you heard much of it a lot of it from martin frost. Well, what i have i have some very specific questions. Go ahead. The republicans in congress, in the house have made 50 attempts or more to take away health care from the 12 million new people who have it. The republicans in the house have voted against extending unemployment benefits. The republicans have voted against food stamps. Theyd like to cut that down. Politico has a big article even though mr. Barren said mr. Boehner said its stupid to ask if theirs relation between congress and amtraks troubles. A big article how republicans delayed for seven years fixing the very thing that would have avoided that, and mr. Toomey tells us, has very strongly voted against it, a republican senator from pennsylvania i can and no. We could go on. I could list a thousand things that republicans have done that are against ordinary people and against the public interest. Thats not the purpose of the discussion but i can ive heard tom speak enough and i know that tom would say is that he is an economic conservative. He believes in the free enter prize system but he dunce agree dismiss things the republicans have done recently. If he were here, thats what he would say. Other questions. What is your prediction for what is going to happen with the Highway Trust Fund in the next week . I dont know. Its an extraordinary situation. My wife and i were driving over here from virginia, and part of the road that we drove on had a lot of potholes and we were commenting on, when i they going to get tat that fixed . I dont know the answer to that. I hope that there are some options that congress is looking at. I was on the Budget Committee when i was in congress, and the chairman of the Budget Committee, bill gray, always had something in this back pocket he could pull out at the last minute to solve some of these really tough problems. Im not convinces the anymore charge right now have anything in their back pocket to solve the issue and they may just kind of do it one month at a time. There is something thats being looked at and thats letting american corporations repatriate some of the money they held out of the United States, let them bring that back and they would have to pay tax on it and there would be some revenue from that and that could be used for the Highway Trust Fund. That makes sense. The problem is the chairman of the ways and Means Committee wants to pull that back and use that money when theres tax reform. So theyre a turf fight between the people on the Infrastructure Committee and the ways and Means Committee, as well as that pot of money could the used use for the Highway Trust Fund. To be clear most members of congress both partyes want to have a highway program. The problem is that theres less and less money coming into the trust fund for various reasons having to do, for example with the fact that fewer people are driving fewer miles but richard the problem is theyre not willing to take courageous votes. I buy cars, me wife and i have car with good mileage now. One of the reasons we bought the car so wouldnt use as much gasoline but that alone is not the sole problem for the states. Its the Highway Trust Fund. So they can extend the program for a month or two at a time but theyre not willings, as were saying here to simply not willing to deal with the reality that continuing with the program as it is, need additional sources of revenue. You have somebody behind you that wants to ask a question. Thank you. No doubt about it, the big kahuna in partisan divide are the primaries and the gerrymandering and commuters awe you mentioned. But what do you think having been there about the work schedule of congress . Well in the sense it used to be congress would stay in town, the representatives would socialize with each other they would know each other the argument was that and they would have a relationship. Now they fly out on thursdays when i was elected in 1978 i moved my family to virginia. Three small children. So the only time id get to see my kids would about in the evenings after work because when i was in texas i had to meet with voters all the time. But people are concerned they will be accused of having gone to washington if they move their families to d. C. Lets hope that we can find a way to have a little longer work week and be more productive. Anyway, thank you very much. We have enjoyed it. Well be available in the book signing line. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] up next, christian page will begin talking about his most recent book called culture worrier. This i booktv z live coverage on cspan2 gaithersburg. A decision by irs bureaucrats to go after the growing tea party movement, and deny them 4501c4 status so bank account and really raise money and have one or two staffers and rent an office and grow into state institutions. Tea Party Started in 2009. Just a couple months into the Obama Administration, and i would have told you that at that time it couldnt happen. Nye from experience the American People will rise up against the tax increase. Proposition 13 against property taxes in california. Proposition two and a half, massachusetts, prop proposition 13 property tax revolt. They didnt revolt during the previous ten to 15 years when spending got out of hand and then taxes rows to taxes rhythms thought we would have to wait until obama would spend a lot of money and id go, hey look at that, and they would go, not a problem and then as soon as taxes ares raided, enough its a problem. The American People sensed that all that spending was going to lead to massive tax increases and didnt wait for the tax hikes. Tax hikes followed but the tea party came first. It was the first antispending movement in American History so thats a tax revolt. First antispending movement that i can find. They had of hundred to 1,000 rallies they can document around to country. A wonderful study put but by harvard and university of sweden i think its wonderful. And this was a very powerful it was a study that said heres where you had a Tea Party Really and you hat a rally and was rained out and what was at the difference in voter turnout and money raised and numbers of vons and future attendance at demonstrations, and they were estimating that between three and six million additional votes came out for republicans in 2010. Beyond which you weve have expected because of the rallies themselves. The left side was doing rallies. When i was young are i thought thats because they dont have jobs. You meet people at rallies and get appearance are so monthing and you realize im not alone. This is bigger than me. You have friends and you local friend you get together. It does i think one remarkable finding is indeed how local these are. Part of the narrative the left had about the tea Matter Movement was that it was astro turf organized from d. C. By evil billionaires. The local variation driven by rally turnout, drunk by local weather on a day that is scheduled, i think shows you how organic a lot of it was at first the Obama Administration poohpoohed it. He said he didnt know anything about it. I got calls from grownups in the media saying you and exxon are doing thissing are right . They thought i organized it with some fortune 500 company. Before the kochs. And that you say actually, no. Were trying to find all these guys because we reside love to work with them. Went osome of the early rallies and people would say how many have ever been to a political really before . And 10 force 15 people raids their hands. Youwam this and in fed up rick perry explains government has become too intruesive and must get out of the way another politics who expressed interest in running for president formerried Rhode Island Gov lincoln chafe fee. He recouchs his time serving as a republican in the senate. CarlyCarly Fiorina. Shares lessons she learned from the difficulties in and triumphs in red wings though challenge. Louisiana governor bobby jindal criticizes the Obama Administration and explains why conservative solutions are needed in washington in pie leadership in cries. Finally in a time for truth another declared president ial candidate, texas senator ted cruz recounts his journey from a cuban immigrant son to the u. S. Senate. Look for his book in june. On sunday, june 7th june 7th booktv is live from chicago with author Lawrence Wright on in depth, our live monthly callin show. Lawrence wright is the author hover nine book witches topic that range from modern religion to the september 11, 2001 terror attacks and the camp david accords. His more recent titles include a look at former panama dictator manual noriega a fictional account of the dictators last years in power before his capture, and he wrote the looming tower an examination of the rise of al qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, and the fbi agents responsible for tracking their actions prior to september 11th. Lawrence write also investigated scientology in going clear which became an hbo documentary and his latest book is 13 days in september. An account of the Peace Agreement between israel and egypt at camp david in 1978. His previous books were topics such as greg up in the 6s so and 70ss, Lawrence Wright, live on booktv in depth. You beginning now from gaithersburg a familiar face to cspan watcher, Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune columnist. His most recent back is called culture warrior. This is booktvs live coverage on cspan2. Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the sixth install gaithersburg book festival. I represent all of Montgomery County including gaithers burg, which is a wonderful city that proudly supports the arts and humanity. And were only able to put on this book festival thanks to the support of sponsors and volunteers. When you see them, say thank you and buy some books. So please silence your phones and if youre tweeting today theres a hash tag hash tag gbf15. We need your feedback, surveys are available here at the tent on the gaithersburg gook festival web site and the mobile app. If you submit a survey youll be entered into a drawing for an ipad and Clarence Page will be signing books mealsly after this presentation and you can purchase his book at the politics and prose ten. So please do buy some books. It helps to support the festival. Now, Clarence Page is a sin did indicated columnist a member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board. He is in 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner for commentary and has been a columnist since july of 1984. He began his journalism career has a free lance writer and photographer for the middle town ohio journal and cincinnati inquirer. He worked as chicagos cbs affiliate, wbbntv and worked the to tribunes news room in 1992 he was inductedded the chicago journalism hall of fame. Part of the Chicago Tribune Task Force Investigation on voter fraud and has won many other awards and his column is featured in more than 150 newspapers. His book culture worrier tackling a lot of issues, political and cultural, and is particularly interesting to get his views on the difference between hate speech and free speech and the difference between Political Correctness and good manners. So i enjoyed reading his book. I know you well as well and were eager to hear from Clarence Page. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. And delighted to see such a nice crowd out here today. Did any of you stop by david axle rods presentation earlier . He ice former intern on mine. True story. All great journalist you have to serve time in chicago to know what journalism is about elm he was a 24yearold kid fresh off the university of chicago campus when we met and he was back in those days before google, people asked me, was david always into politics . I was like, was he into politics . Back in those days before google when i was over at the assignment desk, if i wanted to know anything about our 50 wards in chicago, 50 wards, 50 alderman, id turn to david because he would know not mom who was the alderman put who whats ward committeeman, which is where where the real power is and making the trains run on time. But david it was a few years later when he decided to leave newspapers and go work in political campaigns. I was one of the few prophets there who was worried about him. I said are you sure you want to do this . You have such a great future in newspapers. Yes. I after david wound nip white house with obama was over at one of those off the record briefings youve heard about those one of those highly placed sources who looked a lot like David Axelrod and a side moment i said, hey david would you like to buy the tribune now . So things do change. Ive been through i came into journalism its been 50 years 50 years ago, from heaven sake. [applause] yes. I mean, 50 years ago summer of 65. Between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college. And id already decided that i wanted to be a newspaper columnist. So you ladies can imagine what kind of teen dweeb i was in high school. I didnt have much social life and the Student Newspaper was a way to meet people. This was during the this is between 64 and i was part of the sputnik generation and i wanted to be an engineer get into the space program. During that year when dr. King had his march on washington that summer. Earlier in the year. Some of us recall. There will the voting registration efforts down in birmingham with the police dogs and the fire hoses all over the evening news. Then that fall, those four little girls were killed in the Church Bombing there in birmingham. In november, john f. Kennedy was assays nate, and the evening news had already expanded to a half hour that fall. My son cant believe it when i tell him before the fall of 63 the evening news was 15 minutes long, fooled by 15minute prom called sports. And it was a big deal when the news expanded to a half hour. But after jfk was a sass nateed they were able to go 4 24 hours. Imagine that, 24 hours of tv news. What kind of notion . But it happened that weekend ask the cameras were rolling when Lee Harvey Oswald was assassinated and then a month or so later the four longhair fer fellows from england called the beatles hit the Ed Sullivan Show and that morning you couldnt by a copy of life or time or saturday evening post because they all had the beatles on the cover. Right then we i said mark ill be able to buy the magazines before anybody else gets to them. Magazines, for you youngsters, something that came out once a week. [laughter] life magazine only 25 cents. You must forgive me. Im in the stage of life that is called my anecdotage. Thats when you cant stop telling stories about the old days. So in that spirit, i woke up one day last year and realized ive been writing a column now for 30 years. For heaven sake. I wonder if i learned anything. So i win back and overall 30 years, and decided to collect them all into a book. Charles it was a very enlighting experience. I went back to dishes wade rag old columns and said, boy what a bright and vibrant and exciting young voice that wonder whatever happened to that kid. And i realize. That kid was me. But its funny how things can change over time. When bob dylan was said he is not busy being born is busy dying, you must also at another point a wonderful song, stay forever young. I can see what he means now. As i face yet another president ial race coming along im at that point where im saying oh, gosh, i got to drum up the old excitement again. And it aint that easy. How many times aim going cover a campaign where the opponents are named bush and clinton. Getting a little old folks. Right . I keep having all these people i dont know who is voting for these folks. Everybody i talked to said we dont want another bush and another clinton. Right . Even barbara bush said. So she changed her mind now but anyway everybody says they dont want to vote for another bush or another clinton. Must be somebody else and yet we keep voting for bushes and clintons. I think americans are really creatures of habits, or worse there arent more of them following the news so they dont know anybody but the bushes and clintons. At least its a familiar name and americans are brand conscious. That seems to be where we are. So for that i thank you all two times, throw times forks carrying enough about media and about what is going on in the media could tom out here today and talk about it and to even be interested in a book that revisits some of our past news. As i was the next question people ask me is, the title. Culture worrier. I ponder this for a moment. I have been covering politics and social commentary issues, et cetera, for what, obvious hi half a century but 30 years as a pundit. I like to say only took me 20 years to become an overnight success. But what is the difference between a commentator and a reporter is like murray kemp ton, the great new york Pulitzer Prize winning columnist said its like bag columnist leak coming down from the hill after the battle is over and shooting the wounded. You can tell here in d. C. We have many targets of opportunity to say the least. But i noticed that more and more im hearing the word culture used in all kinds of context when we talk about a variety of things whether were talking about straight politics, talking about a baltimore riot, whether were talking about income disparities, culture always comes up, and i think we dont give enough attention to it. What is culture . Culture is shared values. And what kind of value does we share . And values mean a lot. We make a mistake when we make thats partisan issue. There are certain things that my father used to call common sense. Meaning things that we all basically agree on. Its hard to imagine these days because quite frankly in news media, we dont get readers bit covering things that people agree on. Back in my early days, on the rewrite desk, i had an old mentor who said, news is what happens between things arent going the way theyre supposed to. In other words amtrak trains that arrive on time are not news. Young people whoa get throe through adolescence without joining a street gang or getting addicted to drugs are not news. What is news is the cam calamities of life. But the politics have become rather calamitous and they are so divided over things we should have some common sense about. Even when people say they advocate common sense listen and say whats so common about senate but there are certain things i mean, i my father used to talk about the difference between what he called book learning and common sense, and the difference kind of illustrated when i came holm from school after sociology lesson back there in high school, and i said, dad what class are we . And my father, who barely finished high school, turned to me without hesitation and said, son, wes po well said. He did notice say poor. We were po . Meaning we were too poor to aford the o and r but we were, as tread cruz would say rich in spirit. That meant when we while we were getting ready to goff to sunday school and my mother would give me a nickel or a dime parenthetically this is back when a nickel and a dime were worth something and would say remember this in the collection plate for the poor. I was in high school. I found out we were the poor. But they never let me know that. They instead taught me some great skills like being able to when getting dress for school in the morning being able to tuck the hole in my socks between the large toe and the second toe site what not be reeled when i pulled my shoe off in gym class. Or the senator from iowa, talked about putting the bread beings around their feet in the wintertime you. Saw the speech. The response to the state of the union address. That really took me back a was. Oh yes i grew up in southern ohio John Boehners district. I was born into ol politics. We had some pretty tough winters there, too and so my question was, i bet they were wonder bread bags. Know what it means to be able to afford wonderbread . I wanted wonderbread bags. All we had was tasty bread. That same color but not the same brand, and for kids this is when the hula hoop came out. In any case, i saw where as we were talking about culture warriors in todays politics i found a lot to worry about the i have seen so much in our politics that was dividing us as a nation and we are still remarkably polarized. I dont say we are the most polarized people asked me that you now. Have we ever been this polarized before invasive while there was something called the civil war. At least in ohio we called it that. I got down here this close to virginia and northern aggression, yes right. I have been in the Washington Area youre regardless of what you hear for 20 some odd years and we moved here during desert storm and there were yellow ribbons around the trees. I remember that and i thought coming from the land of lincoln i had been under the impression the civil war ended in 1865. [laughter] well yeah i was in virginia and this old fellow said oh no that wasnt the end. That was just intermission. And as politics progressed i have learned a lot. My buddy pat buchanan, and we are buddies. All people come together in washington and it was in the green room in fact that i learned pat had an ancestor who died at camp douglas in chicago. One of the great civil war stories you have probably never heard about but the biggest atrocity the biggest prison camp atrocity of the civil war happened in chicago actually camp douglas where the southern prisoners were not accustomed to the weather and the northern prison keepers did not do anything to assist them right on the shore of lake michigan, on the south side through a frigid, super frigid chicago winter. Several of them really hundreds died and it was a big moment in history. There is no maam monument to commemorate it. Theres only one monument at a cemetery where a number of the prisoners are buried. I didnt know about this until pat brought it up and now there is a history club in chicago that is working on building a monument. But it taught me something about how history is largely a matter of culture how we see history as a matter of shared culture. I mean we have many civil war reenactors and a lot more of them come from the south and from the north. And yet i like civil war reenactors. On the news hour i did an essay on the whole dispute over the Confederate Flag in south carolina. Some of you may remember back in 2000 with john mccain on the ballot running against george w. Max. And the issue came up over whether or not the civil war the southern flag should be hung officially everyday at the state capitol. It occurred to me that Southern Heritage fans and africanamericans have something very much in common. For one thing you talk about Civil War History as it was last week. We both agree that this should not be forgotten and we all have that kind of a logging loving and obsessive concern about conserving history the way we want to have it preserved as something that is living in the present. That great faulkner line about how the past is not dead and it hasnt even passed. We share this. So i feel like there is hope for black folks and southern conservatives to come together again and what is happening now . One of my columns here a while back i got into the issue of the incarceration explosion. And what do we see now in this current president ial race . We see there is rand paul, ted cruz and other conservatives are joining with senator durbin from illinois and cory booker from new jersey and a number of other liberal democrats to talk about alternative punishment because of the prison explosion that we have been having for the last 20 some odd years. This is an area where common minds can come together with common sense. On the liberal side in order to reduce the massive amount of humans lives wasted in the incarceration explosion and on the conservative side all the money that is wasted with types of incarceration that are so expensive in so many different ways that have no return for us even in texas and georgia two states not known for their liberalness are leading bush right now with alternative conservation or alternative punishment, which i find very hopeful. Yes, maam. We are going to have to go to questions now. If you dont mind. Okay. There is a thunderstorm approaching. No need to panic but we want to go right to questions right now so that we can save a little bit of time and i want to thank you very much once again. Who would like to break the ice . I brought my own lightning rod. [laughter] getting our first question is always an icebreaker. Yes maam. How did you and David Axelrod managed to survive the number of years with the Chicago Tribune . [laughter] well we both did well. David was there for about seven years or so before he moved on to a political consultancy but his book is very good by the way. Even though i have not mentioned it its probably just as well. I was amongst about 200 pages of his texts that was on the democratic room floor because it takes a journalist and while to write about his or her life but in any case we always have a good time. We came through the Earl Washington year so we got to see both sides of the chicago machine which seemed impregnable and unbeatable until it was beaten and then we got a lot of lessons in democracy in chicago. Without going into a lot of detail i did write the introduction for a book about Harold Washington a couple of years ago in my introduction. I compared the washington race for mayor in chicago with Barack Obamas race for president the parallels were astounding right down to Harold Washington running against a female income but mayor, jane byrne and a strong populist white male alternative richard m. Gale son of Richard Jacob or as we say in chicago richard the second and richard the first. In any case barack obama ran against Hillary Clinton whose name gave her something of a panache of incumbency and this fellow edwards this senator edwards from north carolina. Whatever happened to him . Anyway there were amazing parallels in both campaigns and how the first africanamerican in each of those jobs was elected, right up to sarah palin the entry of sarah palin into the race. There was no parallel to sarah palin in the chicago mayoral race or any other race that ive covered so far but thats why i love news because there is always something is happening. Im a longtime reader of the Chicago Tribune. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Why did you come here . Did you get tired of winter . Did you get tired of winter . Is that why you came here . Yes maam. I was wondering, because looking at the table of contents you have broken down your book you know into various categories but what category or what article speaks to you as showing you this is Clarence Page . Thank you for that question. Its a very good one and i probably answered a different way every day but as i was coming out today thinking about what should i read had i left enough time to read something to have them stuck out to me at least to but one was i have a column about mary kendall my High School Newspaper adviser and english teacher who talked me into considering journalism as a career path. She turned 100 last year and i went back and interviewed her and did a column. She was in wonderful shape the last time i checked and wonderful spirits. I said mrs. Kendall you always said i should get into journalism and back then i said well mrs. Kendall always tells everybody they ought to get into journalism. She said well thats true clearance but you are the only one that took me up on it. [laughter] so i pass this on to young people. Pay attention to what your teachers tell you. It might just come in handy. Another one is a column i did about the movie the kings speech about stuttering. I had a terrible stutter when i was a kid and the whole notion that i would ever be doing television let alone working at a newspaper would have been laughable to everybody including me but because of some really good people around me for one thing our Public School system provided Speech Therapists for me and for other kids with speech disabilities and that was a big difference. But also id love to talk, as you may have guessed, and when i was in junior high i heard about the Optimist Club speech contest. I entered the contest getting a lot of sidelong glances from a number of my classmates. Anyway, i was matched up with a local lawyer named fred ross and if he is watching cspan hi fred reid he was a wonderful guy who i found out later had stuttered all the way through law school and without the benefit of therapists and all that have been able to get enough control of his voice to be able to deal with it. I entered the contest and started through my entire speech and everyone gave me polite applause. I thought i had disgraced myself and fred in my family. Fred had a big smile on his face and he said that was great. Who are we going to start for next year . Hed invited me up to his office every week which meant a lot to me. To make a long story short although its too late for that, i got second prize the next year year. I would have gotten first except i forgot my speech halfway through. There was a long pause for 10 or 15 seconds and this classmate of mine Bruce Dominic who was an impeccable speaker, walked away with the firstplace trophy again great but i got the standing ovation when i finish my speech. It was something out of a disney movie but those two columns are really just kind of stick out with me. There are a few others. The obituary to Don Cornelius when he died, when he committed suicide actually hit me very hard and very personally. I wondered, does anyone else care about soul train like i do . E, a few hands appear. Sorry to interrupt again sorry this is happening to you. The thunderstorm is approaching. Its about 15 minutes away so we just wanted you to know that you can stay here and take cover in this tent or you may move to another building closer. The city Hall Building is just behind us or in the parking garage but you may stay here in this tent and take cover. I will be here to sign your books. Thank you very much. And up shop on that, i got letters come emails phonecalls from soul train fans around the country who are touched by that. Several cultural landmark. There is that world word culture again but theres so much to say about this. Everybody has something to say about it which makes for great dialogue. Thank you all very much. I will be here to sign books. Thank you for coming today and stay dry. [applause] cons [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] and that concludes booktvs live coverage of 2015 gaithersburg book festival and gaithersburg maryland. Watch everything you have seen today. Watch it again tonight at midnight or on line at booktv. Org. Booktv now continues. [inaudible conversations] its great to meet you. Thank you, maam. [laughter] reproducing racism is the name of the book is the name of the book how everyday choices locke and white advantage or a professor darya werthmeier is the author. It means that the racism reproduces itself over time even in the absence of intentional discrimination. The book is about feedback loops which is what the cover shows you. Feedback loops our processes that we take for granted every day. Despite her lack of intention in producing a quality so i discuss for different types of feedback loops and youll recognize the mall. Family wealth white wealth begets white wealth, social network, who you know into mattering a lot to the distribution of jobs, neighborhood networks, where you grow up determines where you go to school, which determines where you grow up and are where your kids grow up and institutional feedback loop. So the way in which we choose the people who attend our universities or work at our firms and reproducing the traits and qualities of the people who create the institution. Host professor how did you do your research on this . Guest guy with interested in this reinforcing racism for quite a while but i didnt have the vocabulary to talk about it. Its something we have been talking about for quite a while but we didnt have any way of theorizing it so i happened upon the framework, this notion of the feedback loop. When i picked up a book that was a friend of mines, just completely by chance and it was a book about something called complex systems theory and complex systems theory applies to lots of different things. Anything in a complex system. An ant colony is a complex system so i read this thing about and columns and monopolies and as i read it i had that ahha ahhah moment. This is the potential explanation for why racism and racial inequality reproduces itself even in the absence of ongoing intentional discrimination. If intentional discrimination were to end tomorrow the feedback loops that i just described would continue to reproduce Racial Disparity in the absence of governmental intervention. Host walk us through reallife examples. Guess. Guest let me step back for a minute and tell a little bit of a story, a metaphor to set up an example. The book that i read the one that i just mentioned talked about the way in which market monopolies, microsoft at t reproduce themselves even in the absence of ongoing illegal behavior so the classic example is the windows operating system. Microsoft engages in bad behavior for a short time in which they illegally excluded others from the operating Systems Market using a friday techniques, illegal bundling exclusive contracts and that small but Important Competitive advantage then became selfreinforcing. Software authors wanted to write for the most popular operating system which was windows and consumers who were shopping for an operating system wanted an operating system that have the widest range range of software. So each increase in software authors meant an increase in consumers. Each increase in consumers in turn meant an increase in software offers. The windows advantage snowballed and excluded all other competitors even in the absence of ongoing bad behavior. Some in the department of justice came to ask microsoft what was going on they said we stopped a long time ago. As a result of these feedback loops microsoft operating system was able to login and advantage for quite a while before the market moved on. So perhaps you can see now the comparison to racial inequality. The selfreinforcing feedback loop so for example to take it really easy to understand scenario that many people have an intuitive connection to neighborhoods. So in the wake of jim crow segregation, neighborhoods contained strong concentration of poor people of color and relatively better off whites and those neighborhoods are frequently the source of Public School funding so in many states to this day Public Schools are financed by way of local profit so the wealthier whiter neighborhoods are able to finance Public Schools that have stateoftheart equipment and graduate students who will go on to attend college and earn even more wealth while communities of color are under financing not through any fault of their own but because of the local property in the local property wealth are under financing of Public Schools and their graduates are more likely to go on to be under or unemployed. So Public Schools create wealth for the neighborhood and wealth for the neighborhoods in turn create wealth for the Public Schools and simply by way of financing Public Schools through local property taxes, our infrastructure ends up reproducing racial inequality. Host so we are 40 years or so after the Civil Rights Movement began culminated and we have had a black president since 2008. Are we still in his loop . I loop . I we locked it in your view into this racism with . Guest i think so. The Civil Rights Movement made a very definite decision. The lawyers who were in charge of the Movement Made the decision to focus on intentional discrimination but left on the table discrimination that couldnt be traced to intentional behavior. This book is about that Structural Racism that reproduces itself even in the absence of intentional discrimination. So yes we have a black president but president obama would be the first to tell you that his is an exceptional story that for too many of the country black and brown citizens and resident the story that i tell, the story of selfreinforcing inequality is far more likely to be a story that described their life. Host in your book you write the end of discrimination on the basis of race necessarily requires more than the end of intentional discrimination. Just go thats right and for reasons we have just been discussing. So in order to really address selfreinforcing racism government has to dismantle the feedback loop, has to figure out a way to stop the selfreinforcing cycle and to make sure that those feedback loops dont continue to reproduce racial inequality. One way that government might do that is through something as innovative as baby bonds. This is something the u. K. Did or three or four years. Every child that was born in the u. K. Received 500 pounds at birth 700 pounds if they were needy and then another infusion of cash when they reached the age of seven so another 500 or 700 pounds. That money was put into an account. Families could contribute and the government would match that parental contributions and that money stayed in the account until the child reaches the age of 18. And then the child could only access the account for three reasons for educational expenses, for housing purchases or for retirement. In effect this was the Childrens Trust fund meant to recreate the advantages the children of privilege and wealth had for years. Hillary clinton proposed baby bonds back when she was running for senate. Much smaller amounts to start the childrens savings account but the idea had some potential if we think about the wealth gap that separates black and brown students. Latinos and blacks earned 7 cents or 10 cents on the dollar with regard to wealth. Thats not income. Everyone is familiar with the 70cent 60 cents figure but when we talk about wealth which is really what we used to finance College Education and housing purchases and what really separates the haves from the havenots, the despair he bears the disparities are much different. A trust fund might equalize that gap and to move more people of color into the middle class. Host why did that experiment only last a couple of years . Guest the politics in the u. K. So when the politicians became more conservative the decision was made to discontinue the program but it showed some significant results. One can imagine that if you really fund such a program with significant initial resources that could it could end up having a significant effect on communities of color. Host have in court cases or legislative efforts been made to end this socalled lockin racism desegregation, busting . Guest so desegregation and busing was about integrating Public Schools and in many ways that was the first and best hope for the Civil Rights Movement. But Public Schools have resegregating. There was a court case is quite famous one in which the court said we are not going to allow nothing across district lines and because districts follow the segregation patterns of the neighborhoods they came out of jim crow, that decision to refuse to allow busing across district lines meant that there wasnt really the kind of combination between the very rich and the very poor that you would really need to integrate Public Schools. The other part of it is its not just the Public Schools, in terms of need neighborhood feedback loops. Its all sorts of wealth that comes with where you grow up. Who your neighbors are. Can they pressure you for a job . What kind of public goods is that neighborhood enjoyed in the way of security for example . So while the Civil Rights Movement made some inroads on intentional discrimination when it comes to Public Schools first of all does inroads have been rolled back as a result of the support for busing and second they didnt get at the structural feedback loop that we discussed. Host could the court do something to help break this in your few . Just go i think courts really arent necessarily the remedy here because courts are well positioned to attack intentional discrimination. They are prohibiting intentional discrimination. It policymakers other than courts are much better in a position legislators, community organizations, those policymakers who are responsible for the distribution of Family Wealth through inheritance taxes for example or the possibility of creating Something Like the Baby Bond Program that i was just discussing. They are in a much better position to discuss this structural disparity that we have been discussing and intentional discrimination is more the problem of courts. Host what are the racial cartels that you talked about . Guest remember we were talking about microsoft and the way that microsoft engaged in that bad behavior early on and in many ways thats the engine that fueled the feedback loop. The historical illegal behavior that microsoft engaged in. There is a counterpart with regard to our racial story and that is not quite short but quite long period of time in which this country saw an anticompetitive behavior that we were just describing between racial groups and i use t