very quickly the authors will be doing book signings in the book signing room. we have took signings scheduled in the room. all right? and finally the john oliver reading series is in the auditorium next or in the edison jackson auditorium next door and finally there are tickets left for the fund-raiser tonight. tickets left for the fund-raiser if you want to attend go to the front desk and they will let you know. thank you so much. next on booktv paul kengor. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. thank you ashley and andrew coffin eight gross city college graduate. think andrew was in my first class that i taught at state college. literally i think he was. thank you to pat coyle as well. ron robinson who is not here but the longtime executive director and thank you for all that you do for young people for campuses across the country and for conserving and preserving the reagan ranch ranch in the reagan legacy. ronald reagan and reagan conservatism was about conservative -- and more on that in a minute but thanks to c-span for being here. people often call c-span and they say thank god for c-span. i echo that. there are not many sources out there as objective as c-span. they just put it out there unedited no commentary and let it speak for itself and there are so many talks like this that go on around the country. thousands of times a year and often i say if there could just be a camera here to capture this and recorded and broadcast it. only c-span does that so much appreciated. my topic today what is a reagan conservative and is ashley said it's based on my new book "11 principles of a reagan conservative". this question what is a reagan conservative? if you do a google search right now for the last time i did a google search on the words reagan conservative they came up with 30 million hits of different people trying to define it and what exactly it means. a lot of that is because so many republican candidates statewide local races nationwide presidential candidates they will say over and over again what asks what they believed they say i'm a reagan conservative. but what is that? i think in many cases they say this not so much because maybe they necessarily totally know what a reagan conservative is that many of them want to emulate reagan's political success, reagan's political appeal. think about this. he here was a man in 19802144 out of 50 states against an incumbent president. 44 out of 50 states and one of the reasons i think jimmy carter does so much is this lingering sense of rejection that he must have from 1980. it's a good heart too and i don't want to belittle that but think about that. for an incumbent to lose 44 out of 50 states. reagan was reelected by winning 49 out of 50 states. the only state he did not win was minnesota which was the home state of his challenger walter mondale. so reagan twice won states that the republicans today can only dream of winning. one california twice in one new jersey twice and won massachusetts twice. you are laughing. it's ridiculous. my own state of pennsylvania he won twice. the second election he won the electoral college by a vote of 525-13 so there is no need to recount in that race. the combined electoral college margin in these two presidential races with 1014-62. so what republican wouldn't want to be like reagan in that sense? if you think about it were held reagan's presidency, it wasn't just that he got elected but he left office with the highest presidential proving -- approval rating since eisenhower. if you go before reagan so he replaces a president who fails to get reelected and the incumbent loses and that was jimmy carter. prior to carter was gerald ford who never won the presidential election. prior to that you have richard nixon who resigned in disgrace. prior to that lbj whose presidency went so bad that he declined to even pursue his parties renomination for president. lbj replaced the president who was killed in office. if you go back before eisenhower to harry truman who talked about the presidency like a great white jail a prisoner of the presidency. truman had the highest disapproval rating of any president basically until george w. bush. go back to the 20s. woodrow wilson and woodrow wilson's pregnancy -- presidency ended in despair. he had two or three strokes in the 18 to 24 months of this presidency. george h.w. bush got elected in 1998 largely because as anybody in here over 30 would remember largely because he he was the best people could do they thought to get it third term of reagan. he won one term. that was it. he lost in 1992 bill clinton. clinton wins with 43% of the vote roughly. that was it because of the third-party candidacy of who? ross perot. clinton in 96 didn't get over 50% of the vote. 2000 george w. bush gets in without even winning a majority of votes and 2004 the second bush term bush leaves office and bush around 2007 had the worst gallup approval numbers of any president since harry truman. barack obama. obama wins in 2008. 2012 obama actually is the first president in history but he was the first democrat i believe since lbj to get over 50% of the vote that in 2012 he was elected the first president to do this elected with less popular votes and electoral college votes in his re-election. reagan won 49 out of 50 states in his re-election. obama won 26. a bare majority. if you look at a map of counties under reagan it was a sea of red. under obama it was still a sea of red if you look at counties. and speaking of obama there was a poll done in 2013 after the 2013, after the second inaugural which asked americans if ronald reagan were to run today against barack obama who would you vote for? they said reagan by 58% over obama. that's right after obama's re-election in 2013. this is really fascinating. how is obama elected principally? the youth vote. that same poll they asked people ages 18 to 34 who would you vote for reagan or obama, they picked reagan. unlike the gallup -- gallup does a presidents' day poll every presidents' day. they have been doing this 13 times since 2001. reagan placed first among the american public as far as the question who is your all-time favorite president? reagan gutted in 2001, 2005, 2011 in 2012 and reagan usually finishes at the top. he typically beats lincoln. imagine that. there was in june 2005 a poll done by al well and time warner. aol on line which surveyed americans but they didn't give them a choice. they asked them to put in whatever name they wanted. who was the greatest american of all time? not who was the greatest president. who is the greatest american of all-time all time? 2.4 million people responded which any statistician will tell you is far and away a representative sample. reagan won. the greatest american of all time. so what republican wouldn't want to be like reagan? who wouldn't aspire to that success? we now have republican groups all over the country county state groups. they have been holding these annual lincoln day dinners for years. they have been changing the names of many of those to reagan day dinners because the lincoln day dinners for the month of presidents' day in february is also the month of ronald reagan's birthday so now many republican groups have in a sense reagan replacing lincoln of all things. all right so i get asked all the time by media people and others which candidate is the most like reagan? where would reagan stand on this issue or that issue and it begs the question then of what did ronald reagan believe? this poster boy this face of conservatism the standardbearer and icon of the republican party. what did he believe? what did he actually believe? so with that reagan never really gave the definition of conservatism. i think he was afraid to try. as soon as he tried to do this he would get all sorts of critics and so forth but february 6, 1977 which was the 66th birthday and he spoke at cpac the conservative political action compact. every year of his presidency reagan spoke to cpac. here in this particular address which in the back of the book i have the full february 1977 cpac it said jim -- it's a gem. he said conservative can mean different things to those who call themselves conservatives. the essence of conservatism if you want a definition from me and i will give you reagan's definition but conservatives seek to conserve and preserve the time-tested values and ideas that they believe best serve the country's citizens and people everywhere. the ideas that over time have proven to work and have proven to be the bust and in fact that could be a recommendation that's consistent with the definition given by russell kirk who is one of the philosophical spokesman for conservatism. his books the roots of american ordering american cause and some of the books he wrote in the 60s, 1970s. reagan said this at cpac in 1977. conservatives the common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women working out their own lives in their own way. this is the heart of american conservatism. conservative wisdom and principles have derived from a willingness to learn not just someone is going on now but from what has happened before. what has happened before? g.k. chesterton called it the democracy of the dead. the idea that our ancestors have something to say. we should stop and he didn't think about what they learned before us. which doesn't mean that everything that was done 200 or 400 or 500 years ago was right. remember the definition is the time-tested values that have endured over time. reagan contended the principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what and women have discovered through experience and not just one generation or it doesn't but in all the combined experience of mankind. this is our patrimony anyway. they don't just throw all this stuff out because you suddenly think right now you know better. reagan, when we conservatives say we know something about political affairs and that what we know can be stated as principles we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found through experience to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations. bound to the often bitter test of pain or sacrifice. it comes up all the time and i talked about it earlier to the students the issue of same-sex marriage is so dominant in these discussions but that's a case right there where the conservative position on that isn't to try to be mean and to deny people marriage rights and so forth or tell to people who love each other that they can come together. the conservative believes that there's something to learn from an institution that has been the way it has been for multiple thousands of years.