being on "the communicators." >> guest: thank you. >> and you can watch "the communicators" with blair levin again tonight at 8 p.m. eastern here on c-span2. >> while embedded with the u.s. air force in southern afghanistan, freelance video journalist david axe observed how the u.s. uses unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. >> there are two drone units, two american drone units in afghanistan. basically one handles the north and one handles the south, and the south is the bigger and busier of the two. the exact numbers are classified, but i don't know, i'd guess a hundred predator and reaper drones. the predators look like giant model airplanes, about the size of a small compact car. the reapers look about the the same, but they're about twice as big and look more like, you

know, honest to god fighter jets than they do model airplanes. and you can hang missiles and bombs on these things, and their noses they carry a bunch of different sensors. cameras, radars, things like that. and these things can stay in the air a long time the. the exact number depends on what you're carrying or flying, but a day. it's not impossible for one of these to orbit for a whole day just soaking up vast amounts of imagery and data, peering down looking at taking radar snapshots of terrain. the drones, you could think of them as manned aircraft except that the man in the aircraft is actually sitting on the ground. he's still talking to the ground troops. they actually use a chat program, it looks like instant messenger, to do a lot of the communication with the guys receiving the support from the droans. and the drones are fairly precise as far as these things

go. they don't carry large weapons, they don't fire a lot of them, so it's a far cry from a b1 bomber dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on a suspected taliban position, this is an mt1 predator, it's about a quarter of the size of the reaper. we've been flying this a long time, we've been flying these since bosnia. essentially, it's very efficient for what it does which is stay airborne for a long period of time. it's got a small engine in the back, runs on low-revel gas. the payload it can carry is much smaller, it can just carry two missiles. tip create we -- typically we don't even fly it with a full load of missiles because weight is fuel, and fuel is time aloft. we'd rather have the time in the sky being able to look down, help clear the roads, help support the troops if they're out on a convoy or perform some

strategic-level mission looking for the bad guys. the payload is a little smaller so the picture isn't as nice as the reapers, but at the same time it basically does the exact same mission. >> the drone units in afghanistan don't actually handle many attacks. reason being, the drone operations are bifurcated. most of the drone operators, the guys who actually steer them, they sit in these trailers, and they steer the drones and see what the drone sees. most of those guys are in las vegas. they work at air force bases in nevada. and the guys in afghanistan just launch and recover the drones, and they also are responsible for drone operations in certain small areas. usually around the air base. so what happens is it's like a 24-hour operation. there are these air force guys and contractors who are constantly dragging drones out to the airstrip, launching them

from their control trailers with their remote control, and then they sort of pass them off to the guys in las vegas. when the guys in las vegas, they will fly around for a day or so and return the drone to the guys in, return control to the guys in kandahar. and then those guys get to keep the drone for, like, an hour. so they'll fly around kandahar and look for roadside bombs or rockets or enemy activity. >> they took a plane and replaced, they took the pilot out of the cockpit and put a satellite dish and, but the pilot is still always controlling the aircraft. so just because there's nobody in the plane, it's always looking for that human input, that control-link think thing, what what am i doing? we did that because the missions can be so long that a regular person couldn't sit up there in the small, cramped space. but, two, it allows us to do the majority of the work back in the

u.s., so there's no need to deploy, no need to have a big footprint here, and the crew, you can also shift out. and sometimes that would work for four hours and maybe have a two hour break, then another four hours and then, you know, having that kind of flexibility allows you to do that. >> they have video cameras, looks like a tv camera, and they also have sort of high-fidelity radar that takes impressive snapshots of terrain. what you do is in the morning you take one snapshot, you come back in the evening and take another. if you see differences, like, that corner has been disturbed like somebody has chopped up the ground, then you might have spotted a roadside bomb. the taliban will bury it when you're not looking, but if you have those snapshots, you can

spot where it's been buried. that's a lot of what they do, they revisit areas and take these snapshots and then send in the ground teams to dig those things up or disable it. so this is a reaper. how is it different from the predator? >> they basically took the same design, and they just scaled it up. so bigger wings, more powerful engine, and that big significant difference is we get to carry more. so instead of just carrying two missiles, we could typically carry four missiles and two bombs to 500 pounds, and then the payload's actually different. we're standing in front of the payload right here. they were able to just put a larger, i mean, basically a telescope so be able to put better optics because you can carry up more weight. so it's a much better sensor payload. and because we could put a bigger engine on it, it can go higher, faster, it's tough to get the predator over 100 miles an hour. if you need to respond to some

kind of troops in contact on the ground, you can push the reaper up over to 200 knots and get there faster. >> you're also using the reaper to spot roadside bombs, correct? >> right. it has a radar up here under the nose, it's another sensor package that's on there, and basically it uses radio waves, but you get a nice image of the ground. we fly the same path over and over and over, we're certainly helping to keep the roads clear and keep those iuds from essentially impacting anyone. >> david axe was embedded with the u.s. air force at kandahar air force base in southern afghanistan in october and november. to watch this program again or to find other programs produced with his material, you can check out our web site at c-span.org. go to the search box in the upper right-hand corner and type the axe.

>> this thursday on c-span a day of tributes to u.s. and world leaders including the dalai lama, ted kennedy, ronald reagan, walter cronkite, colin powell and robert byrd. then new year's day a look at what's ahead for the new year. russian prime minister vladimir putin discusses his future from his annual call-in program, austin giewls by on the global economy, the co-founder of guitar hero on innovation and entrepreneurship, plus the art of political cartooning.

>> good morning. i don't love to spend time outside of the school district talking to large groups of people, but this one i was particularly interested in because people said that it was the economist, and i was going to be talking to a lot of economists, and i think that economists have indiana credibly -- incredibly interestingic sight into public education that we need to tap into more. right now in particular i believe that in this time of significant financial crisis in

this country with all of the talk about stimulus packages and bailouts and that sort of thing what's miss anything the conversation -- missing in the conversation is the need to focus on schools because i believe that in the long term we are never going to regain our positioning in the global marketplace until we fix the problems of public education in our country. if you look at any of the statistics and the 2006 the last result on indication of this, we were 23rd amongst oecd nations in terms of our mathematics achievement which was well below the oecd average, and in science we were 17th, again, below the the average. and if you look at those statistics and sort of what our trajectory has looked like over the past few decades, you can only determine from that that we have not solved our problems, that we are only further falling

behind the rest of the globe in terms of the quality of education that we're providing to our young people. so the question that a lot of people ask is, what do we do? how do we fix this? and i can tell you definitively one thing that is not the answer, which is let's throw more money at the problem. and the reason is because here in the washington, d.c. public schools we spend almost more money per child than almost any other jurisdiction, urban jurisdiction in the country, and our results are at the absolute bottom with. so when i took control of the school district in 2007 because the mayor got mayoral control, i inherited a district where we had a 70 percentage point achievement gap between our white students and our black students, 70 percentage points. of a all of the ninth graders

who began high school with us, only 9% of them would end up graduating from college within five years. we had a circumstance where, where we were the only school district in the country that was on high-risk status with the u.s. department of education, and we of all of the eighth graders in the district according to the naep assessment, only 8% of them were on grade level in mathematics which means that 92% of our young people did not have the skills and knowledge necessary to be productive members of society. and probably the most disheartening data that we've recently looked at in the system is about our little ones, and basically what that shows is that our children come into the system relatively on par with kids who look like them from other urban jurisdictions, so not with their suburban

counterparts. we already know by the time we get them in kindergarten they're well behind their counterparts in fairfax county, etc., but they're on par with kids that look like them in philadelphia, los angeles, memphis, places like that across the country. the problem is the longer they stay in our district, the worse off they are. by the time they're in third grade, they're far below their urban counterparts, and this is an interesting statistic which is the poor black fourth graders in new york city are operating two grade levels ahead of the poor black fourth graders in washington d.c. so for everyone who wants to blame the low achievement of the children in d.c. on poverty, on home environment, on the lack of health care and all those things, the last time i checked the poverty in harlem does not look all that different from the poverty in anacostia, but those children are operating two full grade levels ahead of ours. so, clearly, money is not the

answer. we can throw a lot of money into the school districts, which we have here in d.c., and those are the outcomes that we have produced. so if money's not the answer, the question is, what is? and my, my proposition has been that we need to radically alter the quality of, of human capital in the district. and so this is what i'm going to leaf you with. -- leave you with. eric is about to come out with a study that will show that if you were to take the bottom 6-10% of ineffective teachers in this country, that it would -- and replace them with just average teachers, so you're taking the worst 6-10% and you're replacing them with average teachers, not the highest performers, not the rock stars, we would literally

catapult this country in term thes of achievement levels to at least canada who, i believe, is about sixth, and potentially even to finland who's number two. that one action, removing the bottom 6-10% of ineffective teachers, could have that kind of an impact on this country. so the question is, why don't we actually do that? and what i'll say is this, i believe that part of the problem is that people don't like to talk about removing people, they want to just talk about -- and even if you look at eric's study, he talks about the deselection of teach thers. i thought that was a very interesting term. the obama administration and particularly secretary arne duncan are doing a tremendous amount about this, and i think in the race to the top initiative they've addressed this issue head on by saying

that states were going to be eligible for race to the top the funds only if they can meet certain assurances. and one to have assurances is about -- one of the assurances is about insuring that you can link teacher effectiveness, i mean, how well a teacher's doing, so their evaluation to their student-level data. in several states across the country there are actually laws, there's legislation that prohibit the linking of how your students are doing to how we evaluate you. that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. i mean, essentially what that means is that you can in lots of places across this country be a teacher who not just doesn't meet your goals in terms of how much growth we want to see a student makeover a given year, but you could actually be a teacher who every year your students go backwards, and you still remain employed year in and year out because there's no ability to look at how, how well

your students are achieving. so my prediction for 2010 is that i think we are going to be having a lot more incredibly difficult conversations about some difficult decisions that we need to make in this country as it pertains to teacher quality and making difficult decisions on behalf of children. because at the end of the day when you talk about, you know, moving out poor performers and that sorts of thing, you get lots of opposition. you get lots of pushback. people don't want to talk about those things. they want to talk about professional development, they don't want to talk about removing people. but at the end of the day in my opinion it's incredibly important for us as the adults in this country to the stop the process that's been going on for, now, decades which is that we are all too willing to turn a blind eye to what is happening to children in classrooms in the name of harmony amongst adult.

we all want to get along, we want to get along with the unions, we want to get along with this group, that group, so we all just sort of enable this kind of a system to continue on when, in fact, what it's producing is absolutely dismal outcomes for kids. so hopefully in 2010, particularly with the race to the top initiative, we're going to have many, many more meaningful conversation cans about how we move forward with these efforts. i'm going to take a couple questions. [applause] >> good morning, my name is ezra. i just had a question, in economics we have something called leading economic indicators, interest rates, unemployment rate and so on. what would be some of your leading education indicators? >> so we have a lot of them. we look at dropout rates, we

look at graduation rates, and we look a lot at proficiency rates. every state across the country, unfortunately, we have 50 different sets of standards and 50 different tests evaluating those standards, and i think one of the other things that duncan and the obama administration are moving toward that i think is incredibly important is a set of core, common national standards or and a national test. because at the end of the day the children this washington, d.c. when they become working age are not going to be competing for jobs with kids in nashville and in san francisco, they're going to be competing for jobs with kids in india and chi that. -- china. and so we have to be able to gauge how they are, how they're performing compared to their counterparts that they're going to be competing against. so a really clear movement towards national standards and a national assessment are

incredibly important. but for the most part here in d.c. we're looking very closely at proficiency rates, and we're also looking at the achievement gap. i told you earlier that i inherited a 70% racial achievement gap, so at both the district level and at the school level we're looking very closely at whether we're able to close that gap, and we're moving towards insuring that every child is getting a quality education and that the race and income level of our children and our students is not the determining factor for their educational attainment levels. >> hi, my name is pamela sorenson, and my mom is a teacher actually, and you said that in 2010 you'll be addressing the conversation can of the quality of teachers in america. when will you be addressing the payment of teachers in america? >> i am trying. [laughter]

not too long ago i, we introduced a proposal that would call for radically different compensation system near washington, d.c., and basically what -- it was very interesting. basically, what we called for is a two-tier compensation system. every teacher would have their choice of which one to go onto. you have the red tier and on the red tier you got about a 24% raise in base pay and your rights and privileges essentially stayed the same, or you could take a 45% raise in base pay, $10,000 in cash, and you would have bonus possibilities based on your student achievement level growth that were huge. so just as an example, a first-year teacher in d.c. right now makes $40,000 a year. we structured this so that that same teacher who decided to go on green who saw the greatest

achievement gains for their kids could make up to $78,000, and our most senior levels our teachers make a base of $68,000 a year. that same teacher who chose green who was seeing significant progress for their kids could make up to $131,000 a year. in this new structure by your seventh year of teaching you would make a guaranteed base salary of $100,000 a year. so this, i thought, when my staff brought it to me, i thought this was brilliant, right? everybody has a choice, everyone says that teachers don't make enough money, i'm going to pay teachers six-figure salaries, i'm going to be the hero of the washington, d.c. teachers. i could not have been more wrong. this thing went down like a lead balloon. why? because teachers had to give up their tenure in order to go on the green tier, and it caused a fire storm across the city and the nation of people saying you can't differentiate, you can't

can make people give up their -- you know, all these sorts of things. so it's interesting because we put something incredibly aggressive on the table to radically change the way that teachers are compensated away from input differentiation, right? whether you have your master's degree or national board certification or whatever to output differentials that were much, much greater in scale, and right now we've been in a, in ongoing negotiations with the union now for two years because we cannot move forward on this. >> amanda ellis from the world bank. quick question on the student-teacher ratios. i have a little boy who's in the first grade in the d.c. public system, big supporter of public schools, but there's 28 kids in the class, and the school has just put in a new playground at a cost of $is 1.2 million.

i understand budget allocations are coming from different areas, but think how many great teachers could have been hired to lower the ratio. the playground was pretty good before, it's fabulous now, but wondered if you could comment on that. >> yeah, i mean, i think that part of the reason why if you look over the last couple of decades the schools and the facilities came into such significant disrepair was exactly that calculation, people saying, well, let's put more of our money into people and not, you know, these sort of infrastructure issues. and i think that is what has led to the absolutely decrepit condition of many of our school facilities across the country. so i do think really significant investment in infrastructure at the front end now, which is going to last for years and years and years, you can't see it as a one-time ec pendture, it's going to be incredibly important. if you look at -- i know, i'm a

parent, so i know that all parents love the idea of smaller class size. you think your kids are getting individualized attention, but the data doesn't bear it out. it doesn't. it does cannot show that class size has, at all, a significant impact on student achievement levels, and particularly when you don't have effective teachers in the classroom. in some of our schools where we have the lowest student to teacher ratios, it's schools where the enrollment has declined precipitously over the last ten years because the schools are not doing well, and in those schools the student to teacher ratio is incredibly positive, but if you look at the student achievement levels, they're absolutely deplorable. >> hello, my name's katie from the u.s. chamber, and this whole topic, i know, is very complicated. one of my friends, former hbs

guy, real estate develop left his career and is now teaching in one of your schools, and the classroom, you know, he's probably going to kill me for bringing this up, but what he's facing, the classroom's falling apart, he's actually been abused by students, you know, he's teaching a class of what they're called repeaters, so kids who have gone through algebra i, failed, so all are going through it again. and one of the things that i don't have my hands around is how do we -- i would assume he's probably a very is effective teacher, but he has a lot of cards stacked against him of helping his kids because of so many different factors. so when you look at gaming a teacher's effectiveness, how do you take all that into account if -- i just don't understand that totally. >> yeah. so welcome to my world. [laughter] and i know teachers that you're talking about -- i think the first thing that we have to do, quite frankly, and we've been doing this more and more is to

set very clear expectations with the teachers on the front end about what responsibility they're accepting when they decide to come and teach at one of our schools. a lot of people come to me and they say, you know, we like what you're doing, but you are not going to be the able to be successful. and i always say, gee, thanks. why? and they say, because schools are a reflection of the communities that they're in, and as long as we have the economic disparities in this city and country that we have, you're always going to have the educational disparities. in wealthy neighborhoods you're going to have great schools and in poor neighborhoods you're going to have not so great schools. that's just the way that democracy and capitalism works. i actually disyee with that con -- disagree with that contention. how do i articulate why i believe that doesn't necessarily have to be the case? about a year ago i was fortunate enough to have dinner with warren buffett, so never in my

life, people, did i ever think i'd have a conversation with warren buffett, but there was i was in omaha at this steakhouse, and he is a d.c. public school graduate. and he said to me, you know, michelle, it is very easy to fix the problems in public education in america today. and i said, wonderful. please, tell me how to do it so i can run back to d.c. and start to implement that. and he said, all you have to do is make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by random lottery. so think about that for a minute. if we did that in d.c. which would mean that every ambassador's child, every ceo's child, every congressman's child and the president's children would all get assigned to a random dcps school by a lot lottery which would mean that a huge percentage would be going across the river to anacostia every day, you would never see a

faster movement of resources from one side of the city to another as you would in that circumstance. and i guarantee you that very, very quickly we would have a system of excellent schools. so in my mind it's not a matter of is it possible to insure a quality education for every child, it is possible. the more relevant question is, do we as the adults in this country have the wherewithal that it takes to make the incredibly difficult decisions that are necessary to make that a reality for every kid? and the answer to date has been absolutely not, we're not willing to make those decisions. so in the meantime because i can't close down private schools and i don't want to either, what it means is that our teachers have to take personal responsibility for insuring that despite every single one of the obstacles that our children are faced with every single day that they believe that it is absolutely possible to overcome those obstacles to insure that students are successful. and if we have people in the system who don't believe, who

believe that the obstacles are too difficult and that sort of thing which, you know, i -- if you look at some of what our kids face every day, i mean, those are real challenges. they cannot be ignored. but if you believe that those challenges are too difficult to overcome, then i always tell people, look, go teach out in fairfax county. and that east okay, i mean, that doesn't make you a bad person, but there you don't have to deal with the same issues we do here. you can do good things for those kids, but if you're going to teach my children in this city then tough wake up -- you have to wake up every day feeling a personal mission that we're going to the say regardless of your income level, race, personal home circumstances we're going to provide you with a great public school education so you can live the american dream. there's no other way that we are going to be able to succeed unless we have people who have that mind set, and we have schools and individual classrooms around the city that show that it is absolutely

possible. so we have these islands of excellence and these success stories around, and what we need to do is proliferate those across the city. .. d.c. because there's so many different economic and race issues, too, abound. to open up something like -- or does it exist right now like a town hall open discussion where people, the unions, the parents

inasmuch you can to help assist you because it's so dynamic, the issue all around? >> we have lots of open community forums. lots of opportunities for people to yell at me about various things. and interestingly enough, what i found is that when we have open sort of town hall-type forums, we don't get a tremendous amount of participation in those. the meetings that there is the greatest amount of participation in is when somebody -- when people are very unhappy with a decision i'm making. i'm closing a school, i'm removing a principal, you know, something like that, then we get a lot of people to show up. so what i would say is, you know, this idea that generally let's come together and talk about education and how we can improve education in the city is a little too nebulous for people to understand and really kind of get engaged with. it happens much more successfully on an issue by issue, school by school level. all right. thank you. [applause]

>> and we're going to take you live now to american university in washington, d.c. where their annual campaign management institute just getting underway a moment ago. it's an all-day event of consulting firms and we'll take a look ahead -- they will at the key senate races and the senior pollster of obama democratic primary campaign and we'll talk the importance of polling. live coverage on c-span2. >> it's been in place for three years. part of that for seven years i did direct mail with bates neiman and 11 years in the direct mail business and part of that i used to run around the country doing races. i am originally from houston, texas. glad to see you all here. this is the biggest group i've ever been involved in since my involvement with cmi so this is going to be a fun one. >> okay. this is the 27th year that cmi has been offered. it's a bipartisan training program. it was started by a graduate of

a.u., bill sweeney, and they said it may be interesting to do this and they came to jim who's the director for senate and congressional presidential studies here at a.u. and jim said that sounds like a great idea and we've been going ever since. a number of the people who have been through this program are now principals in their own firm, one of neil's partners, glenn bolger was in one of the first cmi cases and they are in the republican strategies which is the leading republican research firms. why don't we have you all go around and introduce yourselves, tell us your name, where you're from and why you're taking the class and any campaign experienced that you've had and whether you're an d and r or i or whatever else. [inaudible] >> i'm from delaware.

i have a strong interest in campaigns and i heard nothing but excellent things at cmi. i worked in the few campaigns in 2006, and i helped out in 2008 for mccain. >> brooks keefre a senior here in ohio and i have no campaign experience and i'm hopefully to change that and get a paid job when may rolls around and i'm here representing the rs as well. >> okay. >> i'm dave. i live in a lot of places but i lived in tennessee for 10 years. i guess i canvassed for the obama campaign once so there's my campaign experience. i'm a d when it's convenient and i heard it was a great class so i decided to take it. >> oak. okay. great. >> i'm aaron and i'm from new jersey. i'm taking cmi because i've heard it's a great experience and also looking forward to

taking four classes in the spring as opposed to five. and i'm a democrat and have interned for rush holt and bob menendez in new jersey. >> okay. >> i'm michelle lockwood and i'm from new york. i'm a first -- now second-term graduate student. and i've been on a number of campaigns in the past. a bunch of local races in new york and i figured this would be helpful to, you know, boost my strategies. i'm glad to be here. >> and you're a d or an r? >> oh, d. >> that's not always obvious. >> and neil newhouse. i'm your first speaker for today. >> in an half hour. >> i'm joe and i'm a senior from new york. i'm a democrat. no campaign experience. and i guess -- again, i've heard

nothing but good things about cmi. >> i'm tim murphy and i'm from massachusetts. i'm a senior at a.u. i have very little campaign experience, mostly volunteering for small local stuff. i heard the class was great and i'm a d. >> whereabouts in massachusetts? >> south shore marshfield. >> i went to wheaton undergraduate. >> i'm marsha hannah and i'm a democrat from buffalo, new york. i interned at a opposition research firm and they suggested i get some campaign experience. >> okay. >> i'm mike mccarthy from new jersey. a democrat. i worked on senate warner's campaign in virginia. and i also took elections in voting behavior and i enjoyed it. >> which is a great class. [laughter] >> i'm jackie. i'm morris, minnesota. i'm a democrat. i don't have a lot of campaign experience, just a little volunteering and i'm in this class 'cause i've heard great things about that and i also took that class.

>> i'm from vienna us a trayia and i'm a grad student and i focus on political communications. that's why i'm here and i'm a d in american terms. [laughter] >> i'm derek. i'm a graduate student in the public policy program. and the last campaign i worked on was romney for president. and i'm taking this class because i hope to make a career out of it. >> my name is michael. i'm a senior here at a.u. i'm a democrat. and my campaign experience are when i was 15 and it's gone all the way to being a precinct captain in iowa city, but i'm from florida. so i've been all over the country campaigning, i guess. and i'm taking out this class to complete my a.u. political education. >> i'm joe and i'm from a small town in upstate new york. i'm a democrat. i have interned with a small consulting firm who raised money for jamie webb and senator chuck

schumer and i'm taking this because it's good experience and a great class. >> my name is jonathan baker and wooirnl from right outside boston, massachusetts. >> where at? >> needham. i'm a junior here at american and i don't have any campaign experience which is partially why i'm taking this class because i want to sort of dive into it. and i also like everyone else heard great things. >> i'm from massachusetts. i grew up in winchester. my mother still lives there. >> my name is brad. i'm a junior at a.u. right now i'm working at a consulting firm called catalyst but in terms of on-hands political experience i've done a bunch of field work for america in obama and right now i'm working for a campaign in kansas. >> bob from catalyst will be in here tomorrow. >> i'm ben and i'm from sharon,

massachusetts. i'm a democrat. i guess i volunteered for the obama campaign through the afl-cio. and i've had a congressional internship and i'm taking this class because i enjoyed taking your last class in campaigns and elections and i'm hoping to get some practical experience when i graduate. >> i'm jordan and i'm from southern california. i'm a democrat. and i'm taking this class 'cause i heard it was a great experience. >> okay. >> my name is carolyn jefferson. i'm a second year master's student. i'm from martinsburg, west virginia. i have some volunteer experience, state and local elections. i'm a d. and i'm taking this class because i've heard good things about you. and i need the credits to graduate. [laughter] >> honesty at last. >> i'm maggie. i'm a second year master's student.

i'm from andover, virginia. i'm also a d. and i've taken the other two institutes so i'm just rounding out the third. >> great. >> my name is gerald from long island, new york. a democrat. i interned in then-senator clinton's office last year then did some field work for the obama campaign. and heard nothing but good things. >> my name is gretchen foul. i'm a first year applied politics master's student. i'm from st. paul, minnesota. i've worked a few campaigns in minnesota and then i helped with a campaign to replace rahm emanuel in the fifth district and i'm here because i hope to be managing campaigns at some point. >> i'm from loudon county, virginia. i'm a first year grad student and i worked for mcdonald for governor and huckabee and john mccain for president last year and i'm a republican.

>> i'm stephanie slade. i am also a first year grad student from tampa, florida. no campaign experience. i would consider myself an open-minded r. i'm here out of interest in political communications. >> my name is amy. i'm a first year master student. no campaign experience. i consider myself a leaning democrat. and i took cmi just because of its reputation. >> my name is dan. i'm from san francisco. i'm a first-year master student. i'm a democrat. and, yeah, i'm here for cmi's reputation. it seemed like fun. >> okay. >> my name is adam levy. i'm a senior at american university. as far as -- i originally hail from princeton, new jersey but i live in virginia and i took

every clasp a.u. takes on campaignses and elections and the most recent one was rob engel's voting class in which he instructed me to take this class if i wanted to live. and i consider myself a very he closed-minded independent. and when i -- i currently work for an organization called upt strategies based out of new jersey that have campaign managers for hire which i do speechwriters. >> rob engel was the first instructors of cmi and he knows this class very well. [laughter] >> i'm colin. i'm from massachusetts. i'm a republican. not a lot of campaign experience. i took elections and voting behavior with you and i took a lot of one-credits and i'm really interested in this one. >> i'm alyssa. i'm from des moines, iowa. i'm a first year graduate students in applied politics and i'm taking this course for its reputation and it was very interesting to me. and i interned on the kerry for

president campaign in iowa as assistant to the volunteer coordinator. >> i'm an r. i am from florida. and this sounds very he fun. >> my name's chase meyer. i'm from temple, texas, a democrat. i've worked on a congressional election in my home state and also volunteered on the obama campaign and i'm taking this class because i've heard great things about it. [inaudible] >> i'm a first year master student. [inaudible] >> mary beth harold in texas, 31. >> my name is allison. i'm from portland, oregon. i don't have any campaign experience but i'm hoping this class will help me change that and i am a democrat. >> i'm katlin miller. i'm from indianapolis, indiana. i'm a senior at a.u. in the political science department. and i'm taking this class -- i've been wanting to take it

since i'm a freshman and i'm taking it for its reputation. i worked on the obama campaign through the primary and the general election and i'm hoping to get more experience. >> i'm dawn dawn. -- dawn. i'm originally from cincinnati ohio. i volunteered for obama's presidential campaign and i've also earned at both the democratic national committee and the ohio democratic party. and i'm just taking this class because i'm very interested in possibly working on campaigns after graduation. >> my name is cody singleton. i'm a senior here at a.u. i'm a democrat from richmond, virginia. as far as campaign experience, i volunteered a handful of times for the ill fated judy fater campaign and also volunteered extensively for the even more ill-fated cree deeds campaign in this election cycle. >> okay.

did we get everybody? great, welcome. we're going to spend a very interesting two weeks together. i think you'll learn a lot during the course of the next two weeks. the course is set up -- we will work in groups. you will write campaign plans for real candidates who are running in 2010. for this session we're going to do senate races in missouri, pennsylvania and illinois. bob carpenter will be here to talk about senate races and then this afternoon at the end of the day we'll let you put yourselves in groups and pick the candidates that you want to work for. this course is taught over two weeks to try and simulate a campaign. those of you who worked on campaigns know it's not something you do twice a week for an hour and 15 minutes. so this will be pretty much all day every day for the next two weeks. but at the end of that, i will predict that you will know more about these races than the actual candidates who are running in the races in the fall. as i said at the beginning, it's a bipartisan class. we will have equal numbers of democrats and republicans

speaking. it may not seem that way from day-to-day. i mean, today there are more rs than ds speaking but it will balance out so get used to it. the speakers are both good at what they do and good at teaching what they do. so that's important. some of what you'll be taught you will need to write in your campaign plans. other things like talking voter files, for example, that we will talk about tomorrow you are not going to have to do a voter file for your campaign plan. so it's information you need to know so when you go and work on a real campaign you can understand what should be done. okay. everyone has a copy of the syllabus. all of our contact information is on there. it's important if you have questions to get in touch with us. for example, if something comes up saturday night, we're not going to have class on sunday, don't wait until monday morning if you have a question. email us, you know, and we'll get back to you pretty quickly. carol and i are more morning people, liz is more of an

evening person but we pretty much have it covered 24/7 except for 2:00 and 6:00. but time as on a campaign time is your enemy so you want to take advantage of things. we'll start -- the course will progress pretty much the way a campaign would progress. neil is going to talk firsthand about the political environment going into 2010. bob will be in to talk about senate races. david winston will be in this afternoon to talk about strategy and message. and then we'll round out the day by talking about survey research. and then tomorrow we'll continue talking about research and how to use issues to frame a message. then tomorrow afternoon we'll talk about targeting and voter files and those are really the things -- the building blocks of any campaign. you know, what is the political environment, how do you develop a strategy, who are you going to talk to? then we'll get into more of the tactics. we'll talk about budgeting on wednesday.

management and organization. we'll spend a good part of really wednesday talking about money. and into thursday, you're going to get out of here around noon on new year's eve, which is pretty early actually. [inaudible] >> i know it was nice of us. [laughter] >> there will be no class on new year's day. that won't be say you won't be thinking about what you're doing on new year's day and then on saturday we'll do pretty much media for a good part of saturday. you'll have sunday off. monday we'll talk about managing the candidate and ann will be in to talk about that and she's a graduate of cmi and she's gone on to do amazing things in a very short period of time. absentee and early voting on monday. we'll get into volunteers and fields as we get into next week. a little bit more on fundraising and then we'll wrap up on thursday. a former congresswoman from

maryland just over the border here will be in to talk about what it's like to be a candidate. so that's sort of how the course will proceed. there may be changes in the syllabus as we go along. if there are changes, we'll let you know as soon as we know it. and if there are changes at the end of the course, you'll get an updated syllabus so you'll have an accurate reflection of who spoke. let me talk about some of the expectations. be prompt to class. the speakers are here. neil is here ready to speak. so be prompt. if c-span is here and you're late, they will watch you come in. because that's what they like to do. so you know your parents who are watching will say, oh, colin is not there. where is he? oh, here he comes. class attendance is mandatory unless there's some reason you need to be excused. if you do need to be excused, speak to us and make sure chris knows. chris is the keeper of the class attendance.

everything is off the record except obviously when c-span is here. one of the reasons that our speakerhrs are willing to come back because they know what they say will stay in the room and it won't be shared with friends or people on the hill or anything else. if you decide to get in touch with the campaign you're working on, honest with them. don't be sneaky and, you know, try to talk to the other campaign. if you need information about the institute, speak to chris. we can, you know, email them information about it if they want to know what's going on. take notes on everything. just not on your part of the plan. there is a tendency particularly in the second week to get tunnel vision and to think, well, i'm working on the paid media section so i don't have take notes on the field. well, that's not really you want to approach this because there's good chance that when you graduate, you may not be doing paid media right away. if any of you read anything about the 2008 election, most of

the people that were higher up on the obama campaign started out doing field. and many of them starting out doing field in iowa which is why they did so well in iowa 'cause they knew the state. so take notes on everything. laptops need to be closed during presentations. all other electronic devices i just got off a plane last night so i'm used to this language. need to be turned off. no tweeting, no email, no blackberries, nothing. and if you're doing it, we'll know. and when our friends from c-span are here, they will know. if you want to look at past campaign plans you can check them out for the next couple days, see chris. they're up in the office. you won't know if they are good or bad. you'll just have a sense of what they look like. some of the sayings, excuse me, the answer to almost every question is it depends. just get used to it. and if we teach you well on presentation day, a week from sunday, that will be your answer back to us sometimes.

second thing you need to understand is you are not normal. most college students are not spending two weeks starting three days after christmas in a classroom talking about campaigns. and that's important because when you go out in the real world you need to understand that most people are not thinking about who's going to run in 2012 for president on the republican side. we're all obsessed with it. will it be huckabee, palin. but, you know, you're different. and that's good for all of us but you have to understand that one when dealing with real people. third thing, excuse me, if it's not in writing, it doesn't exist. so you need to write stuff down. and there have been too many examples of campaigns, even at the presidential level when something happens to a key operative and he or she had a big part of the campaign plan in his or her head and people are trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

so it's important as you -- excuse me -- as you start getting information for your campaign plan, put it in writing. figure out how you're going to, you know, make that information available to your group. so if you're doing the budget, that's not a secret from the rest of the campaign. everybody needs to know. some is not a number. soon is not a time. how many people are we going to have a lot of people canvassing on sunday. a lot. no, that's not a number. so keep that in mind. sorry. and finally, we need to know how many days there are to election day because the three resources on a campaign are people, time and money. which is the one you can't get more of. time. right. if you don't have enough money, maybe you can get more people. if you don't have enough people,

maybe you can hire more but time is not what you can get more of so you need to understand how many days to the election day and work backwards. okay. any questions at the moment that you have of us? for us? okay, chris, why don't you come up here. >> good morning. i'm chris. i'm the assistant director here at cmi. you know, just like candy said, you're more than welcomed?& to contact me with any questions you have. email or call my cell phone. i just found out this morning that my desk phone isn't working. and i'm not there anyway. [laughter] >> i guess in fairness i should let you know he i am a democrat. most of my volunteer stuff is online contributing to blogs and stuff like that. i'm originally from pennsylvania and i spent a lot of years in the newspaper business before coming back to grad school. so i know pennsylvania very well. whoever is doing the pennsylvania races you might want to become good friends with

me. you're doing your campaign plans we'll go over this a lot more, i guess, later. one of the things you will have to do, though, is have it printed up. and i made some arrangements that will cut your printing costs at least in half from what i had to experience. this is my third time going through here so i've done this before. you're welcomed to give me a call with any questions you might have. the only other thing i have is i will be passing out cards. i need you to put your name, address, and -- yeah, cell phone number. and the reason i need this -- i won't be sharing with anybody. but when you get done with this, you get a nice certificate. i just need to know where to send it. so i'll be passing these out and i guess we can -- >> as we're working through the campaign plans, as you're writing them, feel free to share them with us, drafts. this is not a turn it in the end and hope you get it right kind of thing.

it's a much more an indirect class. am i putting in enough, not enough. you can email it to us or show it to us, you know, in between breaks in between the class or anything like that. liz, any other things you think i should mention? okay. questions? all right. there will be them. all right. our first speaker at the campaign management institute at american university is neil newhouse. neil is the cofounder of public opinion strategies, which is one of the premier republican survey research firms in the country. neil worked on the mccain campaign; correct? [inaudible] >> right, yeah. but they worked not only at the presidential level but senate, congressional, gubernatorial -- i mean, at every level. as i said it's one of the really outstanding survey research firms.

we're very thrilled that neil is willing to come in first thing and speak to us. and so i'm going to turn it over to neil new house. -- newhouse. so thank you. >> you can hold your applause till later. >> one other thing, if you have questions, wait for the boom before you ask them so that people can hear them. >> and, chris, i've got a remote for this thing. okay. cool. let me give you a little bit of background about where i came from and kind of like -- 'cause it's very similar to you you guys. i heard a couple of people taking voter behavior courses in college. that's what got me started. i went to duke university and graduated a long, long, long time ago. and what really got me -- i mean, i'm from kansas. i never was interested in politics until i went to college and i took a couple of courses.

first a sociology course then a voting behavior course in 1972. and that really whetted my appetite and in 1972 in the fall we had two pollsters come down to duke to speak about what they do for a living. and it was pat and peter hart. i know. and i was just like -- this was fascinating. it was really cool stuff 'cause i'm an old -- i'm a frustrated high school athlete. i loved the competition. the reason why i was kind of drawn to this is because of the competitive nature of politics. and so i kept taking courses. and then went to uva for grad school and then kind of migrated to washington. i had never been to d.c. before in my life. before i came here to work. well, came here trying to find work. ended up as an intern in survey research at the republican national committee. while i was working the phones at the rnc, i worked the phones 40 hours a week. and then worked 20 hours -- no,

the internship 40 hours a week and worked the phones 20 hours a week. raising money for the republican national committee in 1974 or so, which was immediately after watergate. it was a little tough. and then my internship and my intern coordinator was a guy named karl rove. so it was an interesting experience. i then decided you know what? i wanted to go work on a congressional campaign. and i finished my grad school stuff and then went through a seven-day, 18 hour a day campaign manage program. they teach you everything you need to know about running a campaign and the anything i'd done at duke was i handed out buttons for george mcgovern. i was a college kid in the '70s. everybody was a democrat. the only thing i'd ever done.

i went through campaign management college and lo and behold i was wandering through the nrcc one day, the republican congressional campaign committee and talking to a guy who saido= heard you did really well and i have a candidate in new jersey who needs to campaign manager. i said great. i'd been to new jersey before. driven through it on the way to new york city. and so -- and i went up and interviewed for the job.wl÷ one of the guys in my campaign management class was doing a neighboring campaign. and, of course,, you know, he called -- he had his candidate call up my candidate and give me a glowing recommendation and then my candidate called my buddy and said well, how much money do you make? and my buddy lied and increased it 100 bucks a week so i got $350 a week instead of $250 a week. so i was -- this was -- this was great. i was in this campaign. it was june of 1976. and we had our entire budget for the campaign was $100,000.

but we had some things going for us and things, you know, cutting against us. my candidate didn't live in the district. no big deal. he didn't work in the district. those are minor details, guys, minor details. and his opponent, the six-term democrat opponent -- remember the house ways and means committee had been my candidate's seventh grade english teacher. now, okay, it's easier for you to think about to seventh grade he and think about your seventh grade english teacher.>n for me it was mrs. walker. the last person i would ever want to debate was mrs. walker. well, indeed that was the last person my candidate ever wanted to debate. we had -- he refused to debate the incumbent. the incumbent was willing. my candidate refused to debate him. i debate him. i'm 23 years old. i was taller. i had more hair. i debated the incumbent congressman three times. the first time was like before a

joint conference and i thought ultimately pretty good. i went in my regular spiel and i did pretty well. the next time was before bergenfield junior high schools. it's one of the junior high schools that had a lower balcony and a higher balcony. and my opponent is sitting back there and there's a woman college -- a photographer over here and the next day in the newspaper i'm standing here and the congressman looking at me like he could just killed me because i had gone in my regular spiel it's time we had a congressman to be proud of. he missed 169 straight votes in the house and i went on and on. the crowd went back and forth and, you know, i'm thinking this is great stuff. i should run for office some day. i mean, this is really -- forget the candidate. it's about me.

so the final debate was new jersey and i'm jewish, i figure this is going to be a snap for me. i go into my usual thing and some woman in that crowd raised her hand and said well, aren't you, in effect, you're a surrogate for your candidate and what makes him different that missed 160 straight vote et cetera, et cetera. my debating career went down in a hurry. the congressman who just hated me put his arm around me and said, told me that's all right, son. so that was -- that was my debating career. i figured after that no more. election day came and we had -- we got everybody together in the headquarters and went to mcdonalds for dinner. seriously. i sent everybody -- and everybody was six people -- to the key precincts. dumont, and bergenfield and just to get the info back in. so when the polls closed on election day in englewood, new jersey, in 1976, i was alone in

the campaign headquarters with a woman college radio reporter because her mother -- with -- who was there with her mother because her mother wouldn't let her come along, just the three of us at campaign headquarters. the numbers started coming in and you know what, it looked pretty good. i'd done all the targeting stuff. i knew where we had to be and, you know, this is jimmy carter is winning the presidency but you know what? it was going pretty well so i called my mom back in kansas city who has no clue what the heck i do for a living and said, hey, mom, i think we're doing pretty good. and then comes back even more. i was like oh, my god, it's really getting good, you know, so i call my mom again and then they declared us the winner with 54% of the vote. i mean, it was a stunning -- the newspaper described our headquarters as in stunned disbelief that we'd won the race, which is absolutely true. so here i am -- i mean, i've got my green dodge colt, my kansas -- kansas license tags,

i'm from kansas, my bumper sticker and, man, within two days i'm coming back down to d.c. to celebrate with all my friends. we go in the capitol hill club. there are only 20 republican freshmen that year. only a handful beat democrats. my buddy who helped me get the job, nbc news had declared his campaign the winner and then they retracted and he lost. he's sleeping on my coach hoping for a job in our office. so we go to the most logical place you'd go to as you win the election which is the capitol hill club and my head is so big. and everybody is congratulating me. and i was explaining the campaign and how we beat these -- the fair campaign practices, you know, hit that was against us. we put the tabloid out. i debated. i mean, it was just -- it was great stuff and then some guy -- one of my buddies said, neil, don't you think, just for a second here, don't you think the

fact that the incumbent had been indicted had something to do with your victory? it's just the ignorance of these people. [laughter] >> in new jersey, some of you are from new jersey. new jersey indictments work for you not against you, right? [laughter] >> truthfully the incumbent had been indicted on ten counts of bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice. it wasn't political. it was only 10 days before the democratic primary. it turned out to be very close. and then they had -- they had -- they did a recount in the democratic primary they found 1100 absentee ballot in the same hang. -- handwriting. they reran the democratic primary from june to september 28th. best we could do was call for best 2 out of 3. and anyway we ended up winning. my guy won the race. came down to washington. i became his chief of staff at 2 years old, something like that. i was horrible. just horrible 'cause you know what? i was really good at campaigns. i was terrible at like administration.

so when candy -- when you start talking about all the little details stuff that you go through before you get to the media stuff, that's stuff to pay attention to in a campaign. anyway, so i decided the campaigns were me and i kept working for the national republican committee and organizations. and i worked from city council races in cincinnati, ohio, to state legislative races to presidential campaigns in ukraine to races -- the first democratic poll down in south africa. i've done work all over the world and over the country. i worked in every single state but one and i haven't worked in wyoming yet. anyway, this experience you're going to go through is incredible. this is how i got started. this is how my partner glenn bulger got started. it's really terrific that all of you were here. i wish there were more republicans, but, you know, i can understand.

first thing i want to do here is -- i'll give you a little quiz. i'll give you a little quiz. everybody take out a piece of paper or pencil and it will be graded my me, it doesn't count as a real grade, just to see how you do. so national political environment quiz. okay, the first question is, what percent of americans own an ipod or other type of mp3 player. this is a telephone survey, 800 americans across the country. what percent of americans. is it under 10, 10 to 19, 20 to 39, 50 plus. everybody put down your answer. i'm just going to call on people. what number. >> 20 to 29. >> 50 plus. >> 40 to 49. >> 40 to 49. >> okay, the actual answer is. 47% of americans own an ipod or

other type of mp3 player. three years ago, it was 13%. three years ago it was 13%. okay. give yourself a point if you got that one. next, what percent of likely voters in california think marijuana should be legalized to help solve california's fiscal problems? anybody here from california? okay. what's your answer? what do you think? >> i'm going to say 40 to 49. >> fiscal problems that bad there? >> yes. >> who else? other guesses? 50, 59. >> 40, 49. >> oh, 60 plus. >> young lady? >> 30-39. >> before i give you an answer to this one, different survey, what percent of adult americans say they have actually tried marijuana? what percent of adult americans have actually tried marijuana? >> i say like 80%.

>> oh, my god! [laughter] >> 80%. >> i think so. >> okay. indianapolis, where are you? what percent? >> on this once? >> what percent of adult americans say they tried marijuana. >> well, method they actually tried? >> that's exactly right. on a telephone survey to an unnamed questioner, yes. >> i think it's less than 50%. >> okay. how about you? >> i'd say about 40%. >> one-third of americans will admit on a telephone call that they actually tried marijuana. this questioner, you're right the budget problems in california are so serious 54% of california voters say that they -- that marijuana should be legalized to help solve california's problems. now, i'm not sure if that says more about marijuana or the budget problems. okay. third, what percent of adult americans would rather -- with home computers, with home computers would rather give up

their tv than their computer, would give up their tv than their computer. if you had to give up one of them, what percent would give up their tv rather than their computer. >> 30-39. >> you guys? >> 40-49. >> 60 plus. 30-39. right answer here is 56% of americans with home computers would rather give up their tvs than their computers. so now think -- you know, backing up for a second, think of what that means for political campaigns down the road. think about how that means to how to commute to people and reach out to people if you really can't reach them by tv. question four, what percent of americans say they have a gun in their homes? again, will admit to a stranger on the phone they have a gun in

their homes. the answer is 20. how many people say he's right. he's not. >> new jersey. >> that could be. what percent? >> 40-49. >> let's see. you in the back. 30-39. who is here from the rural midwest? young, lady, you. >> 30-39. >> 44%. 44% americans say they have a gun in their house. the nra's image in this country is better than the republican party and the democratic party. come on now. and the final question is, what percent of americans say that a ufo crashed in roswell, new mexico in 1947. this is probably before most of you were born. [laughter] >> what percent of adult americans?

all right. who wants to venture a guess? yes. hoping under 20. is he right? is he right? no. what else? 40-49. anybody here -- who here is like from far west besides -- not california. where are you from? >> california. >> california, okay. the answer here is 65%. 65% of -- the government is keeping this a secret, folks, come on, now. all right. this gives you a little attest of public opinion and it may be a little different from what you may have imagined. how many people got all five right? right. okay. four? three? okay. stand up. you guys got three right. i know you're republican. [laughter] >> stay standing up. okay. all right. we're going to have -- we have a prize for the one who got the

most right so we have to do a little kind of question-off here. let's see. okay. what percent of americans consider themselves evangelical christians? what percent of americans. you need to pick a number. [inaudible] >> pardon me? just get a number. >> 65. >> 65. >> 47. >> 47. >> 32. >> 24. this guy gets it. the correct number is 42% of americans consider themselves evangelical christians. now there's a prize for you. you are a democrat, though, unfortunately? well, we have -- [inaudible] >> i know. public opinion strategies t-shirt but the most important is what's on the back. it's enough that i win, all others must lose. [laughter] >> and you probably didn't wear this but this is a quote from attila the hun as it says right there. and you believe everything that's written, right? congratulations.

okay. now let's go to the actual numbers, all right? national political environment, what's going on in the country, the first question we ask in all our surveys is a question is, do you think things are generally going in the right direction or they've gotten off the wrong track. not surprisingly this is the right -- when americans think are going well and they reelect incumbents and if things are going poorly, they kick them out of office. it's as simple as that. in the 2008 election, 12% right directions, 78 wrong track. i've done polling in bulgaria than we had better numbers than that. there's an incredibly negative political environment, much more negative than it was in 2006. 2006 it was 31-54. this is 12 to 78. this was a change electorate. i mean, status quo, you know, didn't cut it in 2008.

voters became much more optimistic after obama took office. and do you know what's interesting? everything flipped. republicans were more -- who are more optimistic before obama got in are pessimistic and democrats who were pessimistic became optimistic, optimistic because their guy was in and there's hope for the futures. -- future. see the first number, 31-54. similar to 2006. the mood in the country has slipped back to where it was in the 2006 election as the major changes that people were hoping would take place. so the mood in the country is negative now, as negative it was in '06, and not as negative as '08. that's key how that impacts the political environment and how it impacts races across the country. do you feel confident or not confident that life for our children's generation will be better than it's been for us?

27% say yes they're confident. 66% say they aren't. there's a real concern about the future, about the future for our children not being as good as it is for ourselves. and that's been a real pessimism kind of underlying american attitudes right now. yeah. [inaudible] >> that's a good question. we don't really specify on that. right now everything is being driven more by the economy than anything else. i would have to think in the current political environment that would be more economic. because of just the situation the country is in. obama's approval rating. february at 60 to 26. april 61 -- i mean, the april numbers -- this is what nbc/"wall street journal" poll. our firm does the republican side of that poll. i borrow a lot from their

polling. 61-30. and then you look at the far right-hand side the most current data 47-46 so it's dead even. what's most interesting it's not the numbers but the it's the intensity and you need to pay attention to your own individual races. 25% strongly approve 34% strongly disapprove. what does that tell you? what's that tell you? anybody? [inaudible] >> no. part. if there's intensity, where the hell is the intensity, guys? on the anti side. they are moving against the president because that 25% strong approval, do you know where that was here, that was at 42%. the intensity of his approval rating has fallen by half.

the intensity of his disapproval has gone up. the intensity now -- the energy as you saw in virginia and new jersey, the energy is now anti-obama. it is on the republican side. everybody see that? so look at the left-hand side, september, his approval -- obama's approval rating among republicans 16-76. among democrats, 86-9. independents 41-46. his approval rating among independents is 50-40. 50 approve 40 disapprove. these are the key to winning a election. we got 40% of the sample being democrat. 34% being republican so the country is still tilted democrat but these independents are a key to winning elections. that's how you win elections. by appealing to these votes and appealing to the middle. [inaudible]

>> in this poll they do include leaners. and what's interesting is, republicans in the past, in the last election in the mccain election, there was a real softening of the republican base because of the george w. bush years and his unpopularity. and so republicans lost support -- those voters went to independents and soft independents went to democrats. so you had kind of like a three-way cuts and some of the democrats showed as much as a 10 to 12-point lead in the partisanship. which is an incredibly difficult job for a republican candidate to overcome. americans are no longer confident obama has the right set of goals and policies to become president. what you're looking here -- whether you agree or disagree the way the question is worded, that's really not relevant in some of these cases. what you look at here this question has been asked for a year.

and you look at the trend of the data. the question is, and how confident are you that barack obama has the right set of goals and policies to be president of the united states? extremely confident, quite confident, somewhat, not at all confident. he's gone from in december, before he'd taken office, 54-45 plus 9 to now minus 22. wow! that's a huge difference. and you see it's been a gradual falloff since july. so there's -- there are growing doubts about obama that are reflected not just in the approval rating but in a question like this. here's why this is important for 2010 elections. dating back to even before when i was involved in politics, 1962, what we did is we tracked here the president's job

approval rating in midterm elections and then correlated that with the gain or loss in the house of the president's party. so that this box up here in the right-hand side, when the president's job approval rating is at 60-plus, his party generally has an average pickup of a seat. if it's 50 to 59, average loss of 12 seats it was under 50. average loss of 41 seats. so what's that tell you about 2010? those of you who are leaning who are independent and leaning one way or the other, it would be a good time to run a republican campaign, wouldn't it? it's really very interesting data. i'll give you an example. i lived through the 1982 campaign. i was very involved in that campaign. we lost -- we, republicans, lost

26 seats in the house. we actually lost 26 republican incumbents. each of those incumbents outspent their challengers by an average of $150,000 a race which in 1982 was a heck of a lot of money. and do you know what? do you know what difference it made? nada. nothing. it didn't make a darn bit of difference. we outspent them and we still got beat. only one republican challenger in the country won in 1982. anybody have an idea who that might be? john casey. for those working the ohio campaigns, he's governor in ohio. president job approval will play a huge role in this campaign. the republican's image he will say yes, they still don't like the republican party and that may be true. the image of the republican party hadn't really changed throughout the year. 28% positive, four 3% negative. minus -- it's been minus 21 to

minus 13. it hasn't changed. it hasn't changed a bit. what has changed, though -- what has changed the image of the democratic party from in february plus 18 positive/negative 31, 41 and look at what it's happened. really as a result of the healthcare debate. the image of the democratic party is now more negative than it had been all yearlong. still more positive than the republicans. but republicans haven't moved. it's voters souring on the democratic party which ought to give people hope, democrats hope, that you know what? we did it to ourselves. we can turn it around. it's the highest negative rating the democratic party has ever received in these nbc news wall street polls since the question was first asked in 1990. wow! you know, other candidates you have to look out for in 2010 are

the tea party candidates. this is a perfect political environment for a third-party to be formed and potentially have some traction with voters. it reminds me a lot of kind of the 1992 ross perot movement. so on the economy, approve or disapprove how obama is handling the economy. again, and this is -- it's going to be repetitive after a while but some plus 25 in february which is probably, you know, those are too optimistic, too positive to now now minus 9. 42 to 51. a majority of americans now disapprove of the job obama is doing as president. okay. now keep in mind for you democrats in the room, i'm not trying to depress you. you know, i'm not trying to do that on purpose. it does feel good but i'm not trying to do that. keep in mind for the last two election cycles as a republican pollster i have been by far the depressing person in the room. cocktail parties are not fun. but you need to understand how this political environment affects your individual campaigns. and it affects your strategy.

it changes what you're going to do. you're not going to run the same campaign you ran in '08. and '10. i promise you're not going to do that. if you do, you lose. i'm going to read i two statements about the role government and i would like to know what's closer to your view. government should do more to solve problems and meet the needs of people or the government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals. in february voters said government should do more to help solve problems of people. what happened after february government began to do that. and people said, i wasn't really serious about that. you know, it's a little too far. now it's a minus 3. so you've begun from plus 11 to minus 3, a 14-point shift in voters attitude. people saying whoa, wait a second. you're going too fast, too far, spending too much money and you know what i'm not seeing any benefit of it. in fact, when we do focus groups in ohio, what voters are saying you know what? they're bailing out those

bankers in wall street. where's my money? where are my jobs? where are my jobs in parma, ohio, right outside of cleveland which is a key swing area? you know when am i going to get mine? which do you think would do more to help create jobs right now? is it cutting taxes on individuals and small businesses or is it passing a new government stimulus plan focused on job creation? wow! 50% say tax cuts, 38% new economic stimulus plan. as a democrat, you know, you might be cross-pressured on that. republicans, it might be easy. 69-22. independents 59-26. democrats say stimulus. democrats on the wrong side of the issue. and it's going downhill.

congress, people hate congress, love their congressman, right? it's really -- for the longest period of time, you know, they really didn't hate congress. they were lukewarm to congress. now i do think they hate it. and now they really don't love their congressman anymore. it's really a different kind of relationship. so voters are now more lukewarm indeed to their own member of congress. in the next election for u.s. congress do you feel your representative deserves to be re-elected or is it time to elect a new person to do a better job. the anti-incumbent sentiment, 79% reelect. it's the lowest we've seen in midterm elections since 1994. what happened again in 1994? refresh me. oh, yeah. but the good thing is numbers do change. so there's a sense out there that a the mood of congress is

changing and obama is overreaching and pull him back, checks and balances and now you're having people, new person. i'm not sure i like these guys. interesting question. here's a question, i'm going to describe three types of candidates for congress. for each one please tell me whether it would be more likely or less likely to vote for this type of candidate for congress or whether it wouldn't make a difference. left-hand side the candidate who supported the candidate positions? is .. pelosi.

that is a significant way around democrat candidacy in 2010. what is your preference for the outcome in the next year's election? congress controlled by republicans or democrats? what did we learn so far? how should we analyze this? how should i analyze that? how should i analyze that?

>> the biggest thing is look at the changes. >> the trend! you say republicans are still behind my people, yes, but look how far they have come. this is -- there is really something going on here. attitudes are changing. republicans are -- margin of error is usually plus or minus 3-1/2 points. the next congressional election, 2010, are you more likely to vote for the republican seconding obama's power or democrats to pass his policies and programs? check 42-49. gives you a real -- looked at the trend here.

15 point shift. this is telling the same story. something is going on here. this is a much different political environment. in 2006-2008, from my -- they were still trying to send a message in both elections to change policies and express frustration. with republicans. running campaigns and those two years on the republican side would like campaigning up hill. going into a strong wind. you had to be much more aggressive in this campaign and you knew you were likely not to succeed. this can't be much different. republicans hold a significant enthusiasm advantage. think about new jersey and virginia. in new jersey the public polls

showed corzine winning by 5 points and he lost by five. in virginia and no one saw mcdonnell winning 60% of the vote. in a survey done just recently, a you going to vote republican or democrat? among those who voted republican, 37% voted democrat. one point margin for democrats. then they asked how enthusiastic are you about this coming collection. 50% of republicans were enthusiastic. what does that mean in terms of turnout? that helps the environment of who -- you can't simply contact those obama 2008 voters and say come back out in 2010 because we

need your vote. it is not as easy as that. we lost too many seats. look at the independents. 35% voting republican 56-22 advantage for republicans. there's something going on here if this continues next year will give republicans the day. how interested are you in the upcoming election? this is a question we ask closer to election day. absolutely interested in the vote, great indicator of who is most likely to vote. 56% of republicans, 46-10. we saw exactly the same number as two went four years ago but they had different labels. democrats had the higher interest. republicans for the lower.

even data from the liberal bloggers showed partisan intensity had the generic ballot relatively close. and definitely voting 39% definitely voting republican. the generic ballot they had democrats winning by four points. they have a four point democratic advantage with that intensity, will take that any day of the week as a republican. people come out to vote in that direction. republican party verses obama. this is the extent of what is going on in terms of trend data, people have more faith in the republican party than barack obama. who will do a better job handling the economy? left hand side, republicans from 923--11. health-care reform, republicans are 7 points down in health care reform. think about that. 7 points down on health care reform and it is not driven by

but republicans are putting forward the reaction to what people are thinking about obama and what congress is doing on health care reform. the republican party feared even better against democrats rather than barack obama. two surveys. july survey, november survey, and the movement on the economy. plus 3. it has gone from plus 11 to plus 7. basically lost a couple points. healthcare, this survey gone from minus 12 to-3 and gained nine points and gaining two points and the democrats gained 2 points. the democrats -- the ball is in your court. voters have less confidence in the democrats now. it proves the other party. the benefits go to the

republicans. healthcare. nbc news and wall street journal poll, barack obama's health-care plan, good idea/bad idea, 32-47. a plurality to keep our current system in the obama plan. 44-41, 45-39 a few months ago. in the long run if the changes are made will the health-care cost more? 53% say it is going to cost more. 33% say no. quality of health care you receive will be better? if you leave as is. 50%. so voters believe health-care reforms they are talking about will cost more money and hurt the quality of my health care. have i succeeded in depressing

all you democrats? 2 thirds say it will add to the deficit. we are not going to add the budget deficit. what is the take away here? i will give you two different perspective. my perspective and i am a little biased, i do it from the other side of the aisle. americans like barack obama. they like him personally. they want him to succeed. there is growing concern he has taken up too much and relying on government to provide the answers but they want him to do well. second, the growing issue is overspending in the federal deficit. this is a huge issue. when voters cut the deficit for more economic stimulus considering the number one

problem is a front burner issue, a huge issue to overspending the federal government. next is obama's honeymoon is over. the political capital has gone and he is on his own. he ceded to congress the authority to do the health care reform without really lending a strong voice to it. congress's rating are not particularly good. nancy pelosi is pretty awful. nancy pelosi is more unpopular than newt gingrich ever was. don't mistake the shift in republican fortunes for a newly enlightened and electric that falls back on the republican party. we are not there yet. americans are simply losing faith in the democrats. they will not fall in love with the republican party again but they have fallen out of love

with the democrats. if i am a democrat, in this political environment the last two elections, i know these talking points pretty well. let me walk you through them. we have a long way to go. ten months, multiple political life times, ten months before the next election. a long way to go yet. the political environment will change several times between now and then. that is absolutely true. you know what is going to happen. the environment will change dramatically. republicans don't stand for anything. nothing more than naysayers will retain the advantage. they will run the campaign against republicans. you can say bad things about us

but republicans don't have an idea of standing for anything. voters will not care that much about it. next, the current data does not factor into passing health care reform. once the voters figure out what we have done for them they will appreciate it. that is a tough education campaign. the benefits won't kick in for a while. is defined by the program. that will be a tough case. current data certainly doesn't reflect passing health care by the senate. i am not so sure voters will like that. finally, this is nothing like the 1994 election. the reason is republicans in 1994, the democrats by surprise. absolutely true. that is absolutely true. in 1994 the democrats woke up before a election day and said i

think we are in trouble. we caught guys by surprise. in 2010 that will not be the case. two minute warning in football, tweak 2-minute warnings right now in the 2010 elections. it will give them lots of time to raise money and prepare for a very difficult political environment. next, we have obama on the side. once he puts in the campaign vote, we will get in the polls. much easier said than done. using the president, ipod peter president to motivate voters to get them to vote when they don't feel like it is going to be a tough challenge. it will take every ounce of ability these guys have to deal with an increase in turnout. i was involved in an ohio campaign this past year. the entire goal in the campaign was to increase turnout among the 2008 obama of voters, the

casino issue beepers to extraordinarily tough issue. we spent tens of money doing that. it is a very difficult job. let's see. what i want to do, will you indulge me? how much time to we have that? i am going to break you up into campaign teams right now. i am going to take you guys over here, this middle group, three or four groups. here is your job. we are all members. we are going to pretend you are running democratic incumbent campaign in the 2010 elections. the date is september 9th, the

day after labor day in 2010. i am your pollster in the republican campaign. i am going to give you data. you need to come back and say given this data, what direction should we take in this campaign. this is the day after labor day. everybody ready? here is what is going on. thank you for coming to the meeting today. we are in for the race we thought we would be in. we are moving in the right direction. voters are pretty negative. that is our district here where we are. obama's approval rating is 46-50, almost dead even. we are still doing pretty good here. the generic balance i want to

remind you is who would you vote? republican democratic candidate? generic tendency in this district only down by three points. the presidential vote in this district went for obama by 53-46. just to give you an idea where the district ended up. when it comes to the stuff we care about, our candidate, 54% of the voters have a favorable impression of our candidate, 30% unfavorable. our republican challenger, 8% unfavorable. nancy pelosi is at 30-54, where she is nationally. the ballot test if held today, good news, a ten point margin. your jobs as campaign team is to come back to us as a group and

have a consensus. what do you do next on the campaign? how do you assess these numbers? what do you think is the most important strategic imperative of your campaign immediately. break up, guys. four but groups would be great. one, two, three, four. start talking. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> we are a little bit less than two months away -- [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> we need to make sure he can really improve his favorability. >> i am not sure going negative on him with the ten point lead would help. >> if they are undecided, face-to-face is terrible. look at him as well as -- ty will look at him and that will give us a chance to explain favorability. >> if you look at the generic ballot it is 42-45. then you look at our individual ballots. >> hold on to our favorability

at 74%. [inaudible conversations] >> run ads showing that district. >> this is a pretty good number. i would say something like jolly handshakeing and all that. [inaudible conversations] >> he got 53%. no landslide area. we support him and his policies or he has a fortune and should we bringing that about at all. >> we bring him up -- [inaudible conversations]

>> some lukewarm support for obama. >> a democratic president, no way to get around -- and [inaudible conversations] >> i support these policies and don't agree with these, end of story. i won't do what i do. >> talk down issues.

[inaudible conversations] >> potentially shift our unfavorable numbers which are high right now. they don't want to mess with those. >> the biggest generic balance, he is performing the generic balance, he could be 45. less attention. [inaudible conversations] >> he does start to gain traction there is a chance of gaining momentum. he has the ability, looks like he is gaining momentum. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> we also need to go after that 8% that says he is good. >> once you see the rise in 8% you will see a decrease of 6% supporting him on the congressional ballot.

>> me we might also appear to a broader range. look at what is happening in the climate. whatever. see what other people -- we know what our figures are from the primary but it seems we might think about it. not primaries but what other democrats in the area -- seems like the other 8% -- they want something we are not giving them. [inaudible conversations] >> i think if you really care -- look at that -- negativity is hurting. also want to expand if you are

in that. 45-46. you have to do a moderate level. >> that could totally backfire. try to raise the unfavorables from 8% less people that don't know and you see a world of increase in favorable as well. >> what if we went after -- assume we are talking about an incumbent who has been office for a few terms and voted for health care reform. standard democrats. >> what if we went over the republican leadership as opposed to the republican -- [inaudible conversations]

>> our apartment stands for possibilities. there is someone who doesn't like health care reform. look at him. unfortunately, you are basically doing his job for him. >> the silver lining. i am sure the district got money for the stimulus. with health care highlighting the silver line of that voting to allow the district to not have insurance denied because of pre-existing condition.

>> it would be hard to find -- >> attack the republican leadership, they might be like i don't know this person. >> you might want to also emphasize character, the incumbency has gained district's that have continuously required the fact that the fire department has a new fire truck. basically use the incumbency to our advantage instead of we have been in office for too long and they expected come out -- he is coming out with guns blazing. [inaudible conversations] over a million dollars to your

district. you tie your incumbency to good things. try to turn the incumbency. >> a good way to turn the incumbency as opposed to the health care vote. >> this is where we have the president's two folks spotlighting the candidates's identity. 8% say he is favorable but don't want to vote for him and the benefit of being an incumbent. anybody -- [inaudible conversations] >> we don't see the vice-president. we don't want to see bill clinton. >> we put our guys out everywhere.

>> maybe emphasized that. >> using local -- [inaudible conversations] >> if you look at the country, 34% say it is moving in the right direction the message of the campaign would be more forward-looking message. proposing solutions going in the right direction. it is a good way of tapping into the wrong track sort of opinion. >> that is the whole idea of deviating from party lines. focusing more on that long track and those policy positions. >> the people who would be

strongly against us anyway. [inaudible conversations] >> 8% could be independent. if you look at the long track. >> we have to see that 8%. >> kind of floating in mid-air. they are new voters. >> if they are independent. >> we will start the presentation. we have three groups here. we want each of these groups, we are pretending we are democratic campaign the day after labor day. you have just gotten your pull back from your democratic pollster and this was the data. 34 right direction, indicating three negative moods in the

country where we are nationally. obama's approval rating pretending obama is down lower next year but this district of 40 to 50, the generic ballot, republican purses democrat is a three point republican advantage but this district went for obama by 53-46. in terms of the individual data on -- we are looking at three or four term democratic incumbent. we are looking at a candidate who voted for healthcare, democratic party line most of the time. his image is 54% positive for favorable, 30% unfavorable. republican challenger on trade, nancy pelosi's numbers are 30-54 and it is 46-36. ten point margin for the

democrats. who is the speaker from this group in the middle? stand up and talk about your take aways from this and actions you would recommend. >> our big take aways were that we need to stress the independence of our guy from the national landscape in general. nancy pelosi and obama at times mainly because the republicans will continue to tie us to nancy pelosi of -- it would be better to pull away from them. >> separate yourself from obama and nancy pelosi. >> so maybe do that by stressing key votes because percentagewise would be strongly aligned with them anyway and we did vote for along the same lines with them, i stressed tangible benefits

that the district would be receiving. along the same lines our candidate's identity because he is doing better than the national democratic party is. having local surrogates, like mayors and perhaps neighboring representatives. so focused on his identity rather than his partisanship. the other thing we found interesting was he is favored, has 54% favorability rating but if the election were being held today 46% of people would vote for him. we would like to figure out why there is that discrepancy. personally i think it might be the checks and balance issue. one% -- 1% of our group said they might like him but they think it would be better to have a republican to check obama.

or they might not be as enthusiastic about it. definitely we would be looking for those people. and also spinning it to the effect if we are on the wrong track scenario, make our guy the guy who is on the right track and on the right side of the issues. hopefully be able to persuade the wrong track voters to at least consider a argive, at least might be willing to. and lastly emphasize tangible benefits of the key votes that the republicans will try. and the key benefits of the incumbency. things that have been brought to the district that people will be directly benefiting from and by virtue of being an incumbent. >> thank you. good job.

who is the spokesman for this group over here? what is your name? >> brian. >> chase, fire away. >> the biggest thing that caught our attention is our favorable rating is at 54%-30% but the opponent's favorable rating was 27%-8%. if we could hold on to that 54% who approve of us we have a good shot at winning the election while our opponent is relatively unknown. not a lot of people in the district know him. the best way to go about this is using positive advertising methods about the candidate with his half family and apple pie and baseball showing their good, all-american, the good things he has done for this district and a challenger could have potential to rise up. so few people know of him. it would be best if we don't bring him up at all. any attention drawn to him could only help him get more people to

know him. since he has room to grow we need to have some negative ads ready but we don't run them unless the republican challenger starts to get momentum. the other thing we notice is on the congressional ballot papers will 46%. the generic ballot he has 42%. the big difference is the republican going from 36% to 45% means that they would like to have a republican make it relatively close but right now they don't know enough about him and they don't like him. we need to keep him as low as possible. the discrepancy between the democrats' approval ratings at 54% but the generic in terms of approval, that is because they like the candidate as a person as opposed to the candidate as their policy. they don't like nancy pelosi and they think we were on the wrong track. biographical adds highlight our candidate's personality to show that he is a good person

overall. that will have the voters think we like this person. he is great. the policies may not be that great but if we highlight our candidate's positives that will be enough to get us through there. >> good job. who is your spokesman? group three? what is your name? chris? hold on for the microphone. ok, fire away. >> we agree with the first feature groups on a number of things. we distance ourselves but not bash the party. we were independent and acting in accordance with the rest of the party when it benefited the district and tied how the vote helped us but there are a couple things we differ on. we would definitely want to take into consideration the strength of our approval and disapproval. 24% have extremely favorable position.

that is different from having 54 very strongly approving. another thing we want to look at is the gop challenger. not listed up here are people who are undecided on opinions versus don't know. we should not attack his personal integrity but say most people in this district want health care and he doesn't. kind of soft if that exists. >> we call that contrast advertising. >> contrast advertising. if they aren't very well known we would definitely try to keep it that way. maybe not have a debate with them. just kind of shoved them under the rug. >> is that it? >> we would try to tie ourselves to local issues.

if you went to a high-school, go to a pep rally or something. i would also try to stress that you were a three or four term incumbent first elected on recent strength in the republican party and you trust me when the republicans are strong. you can trust me now. >> good job. what i like about you guys have done, went group number two which is brian's group showing local support and making personal identity not partisanship, very smart. you have done the right things in terms of favorability. that is key to understand that. chase's group, the person, not

the policy will be a tough thing to get across. i will address that in a second. chris's group people emphasizing the independents differing from the top of the ticket. you know have -- you have no idea how tough that is to do. let me share with you how i would look at this. truthfully i have done these numbers. these are the exact numbers in the 2006 congressional race in pennsylvania except with the parties reversed. exact numbers and we lost. we lost. here is how i look at it. political environment, this is a negative political environment. my party is in power. we did a survey. voters are ready for a change. the obama number 46-50, these different numbers i can assure you the intensity is on the

negative side. there will be real intensity against obama. the generic -- republicans are three points up in the generic ballot but obama won in this district by seven points. that is a ten point shift. that spells trouble. you have a four term democrat incumbent. everybody knows who he is. he is down on the generic ballot. that is not good for your campaign. here is the most important number. the democrat incumbent's image 54-30. what does that tell you? everybody knows this guy. you are not going to change the impression voters have of a guy -- 84% of the voters in the congressional district have an opinion one way or the other. you will not change what they think about him. that is not going to happen.

the republican incumbent or challenger, 27-8. look at the ballot. democrats sitting at 46% of the vote with 46% favorability. what you didn't get was republicans at 36%, only 27%. people are voting for the republican because they don't care about the democrats. this election is about, right now, the democrats and incumbents in office. it is about this guy. with -3 generic, 46% of the vote. at 46% he is likely to get 46% on election night. this collection right now is about this guy. it is about his votes.

his connections to nancy pelosi and barack obama. as a democratic incumbent it remains about him, he will lose. his only chance of winning is to make it about the republicans. you guys have it closest in terms of defining who your opponent is before they get their campaign off the ground. kill him in the crib. poisoned the well. you need to define his campaign before they do. in real life when i had these numbers, the real number wasn't in september, when this candidate's number was 13-4 i wasn't suggesting we attack him. if we attack him then he will never get his campaign off the ground.

never look at this race again. injure him from the get go. i will discredit him and we will win the election. our campaign decided not to do that for other reasons. we lost the race. once you get to that on election day, it does not been personal. on the issues you are toast. because everybody -- it will discount. the democrat incumbent will have a financial advantage. you leverage or financial advantage when you have it. if you have a financial advantage it behooves you to have a longer campaign. a longer campaign. take advantage when the other candidate doesn't have it. when you think about your strategy in this campaign think

about what republicans do. they try to distance themselves. how successful was that? so you think you are going to do it with eight weeks left before election day, your democratic incumbent who has 84% hard name id, unlikely. this is -- how the political environment changes how you run campaigns. when everything is turning against you you have to be more aggressive. [inaudible] >> what is your response to the argument that by packing the challenger you are increasing his name id and you might increase -- you might increase -- you might increase his

unfavorable blacks you might draw attention to him to get people to favor him? >> i may very well do that. that is the question we get all the time. our easy responses there are two types of name id, positive and negative. we are giving him the negative kind. we will polarize voters and increase his favorables, it might. i would rather be running against a guy with a 30-20 than 27-8. twenty-seven-8 i am not going to win this campaign. you ignore this guy at your own peril. you ignore him. there is a saying that you can't beat somebody with nobody. that is wrong. we have proven it wrong many times before. in the 1980 election cycle at the republican national city reagan swept into office with

republican seats, the republican congressional campaign committee, that was a different time, they didn't have -- the republican challengers won. they were not even on the map. it was stunning. you can't beat somebody with nobody if the political environment is that bad. does happen. you have to be aware of that. if you have an incumbent with a 30% unfavorable rating, sitting four points above 15 you could be in trouble. if you have a ballot cast where your number is under 50% you look at this number 46-36 you are not ten points ahead. the other way to look at it is you are four points under 50. you did 50%. forty-six% doesn't cut it. if you went into -- the last

hole before election day was wednesday or thursday before election day your numbers were 36 democrats and 44 republican. my prediction is you lose. in this political environment. undecided voters vote no. they vote against incumbents. they vote against the party in power. they vote against -- undecided voters in the bloomberg raise, what did they do? they didn't vote for bloomberg. he got what he got. he got what he got. here is the deal. this is your first lecture and you have two weeks of this stuff. there is lots of information you will absorber. some reject, some embrace but this gives you some framework to understand how we are looking at the 2010 elections.

you are looking similar the way i am. this gives you an idea how we are looking at the 2010 elections and how the political environment impact's how you run a campaign. let me wrap this up real quick. then move on. i am a big baseball fan. there is a great story about ty to todd, a detroit player who played hard and his manager sat down with him one day and tried to address this. i will use my props over here. he said i want you to watch this carefully. two glasses, one is half full of water and the others have full of jean-luc watch carefully what we are doing and how this will impact your life off the field. the brown paper bag, puts an

earthworm in the glass is at its wins in. pay attention. he puts it in the glass half full of gin. the manager looks at him and says i hope you understand the point i am trying to get why this is important to you as a baseball player on and off the field. he looks at his manager and says i think so. if i drink gin i won't get worms. he missed the point of that demonstration dramatically. here is the point of this presentation. the political environment, you think you can overcome the political environment, is extraordinarily difficult to do. as a republican on have been extraordinarily experienced in trying to overcome the negative political environment.

in 2010 the shoe was on the other foot. you need to factor that in. we go through this in the next week to weeks in terms of what this means for a political campaign. how do i change what i am going to do otherwise? how do i adjust my tactics and what i am telling my candidate to do to achieve success knowing that it may not be looked at positive? you use:as a planning device. it helps you get from point a to point be. these numbers i showed you are only good for today. this is december 28th. is only good for today. anything could happen tomorrow. over the next nine or ten months the political environment, you need to pay attention to what is going on around you as well as what is in your individual campaign. let me tell you this at the very

end. congratulations on being here. this is tremendous you are doing this. even though many of you are democrats it is terrific that you are involved. this is wonderful for the process. i love having you guys here and teaching you and potentially in the future beating you. the fact that you are involved in this process is wonderful. my son is also involved in this kind of stuff. i wish he was here today with you guys because this will make a tremendous learning experience for the next couple weeks. ask questions, get their e-mail address. stay in touch with who you want to follow up with. we are all hiring or recommending people. stay in touch with people you like and you want to get to know because in 10 or 15 years just like people before you the next couple days you could be here teaching this class for the next

generation of political people coming through town. congratulations on being here in this class. good luck in 2010. i would be glad to take any questions. yes? >> fox news and that kind of thing and how effective the environment and also if you saw anything similar in 2001 on the opposite side? >> there is fox and also msn b.c. effect. it goes both ways. they generate enthusiasm and motivates the base. they don't appeal to the middle. that is extraordinarily important in a campaign. you start with the base and move to the middle. you are going to see more of

that. it is not -- republicans have fox news and democrats have the bronx on their side. i don't think we generated much enthusiasm as democrats do. in 2000, each election cycle and congressional getting an idea -- my kids were born and odd number of years. we take this pretty seriously. i have a cooperative wife. the 2000 election cycle is like dog years. you miss a couple elections cycles it was ages ago. the 2000 collection cycle, no one had heard of blog. i am not sure the analogies are quite there. >> something like this in 2010

before the 2008 election, basically one of the things we saw in more rural states like alaska and tennessee, a rise of democrats who act like republicans on certain issues like gun control or a that sort of thing. did you see a similar effect with the tea party? i am starting to see it in florida. these tea party candidates in the same way. >> the republicans, dealing with the tea party movement is a challenge in republican primaries. what you see is a real anger against washington on spending and other issues that if the republicans don't voice that there is usually a tea party candidate to do it. you will see that more in 2010.

it could impact the games republicans make in the general election. it will have an impact. >> i wonder if you could take a second, after the gop challenger, where they would be if they had those numbers? >> if i am running the gop campaign? >> where you think the gop should go from there. >> what actually happened in this campaign is the democratic challenger attacked the incumbent. their first at our candidates said i have never run a negative ad in the campaign and i won't do it now and the first ad of a campaign -- they started off with contrast. that is what i do. it is a good strategy. stay aggressive.

>> you mentioned new york -- michael's question, you are saying even now republican numbers stay stagnant and democrat numbers are plummeting but we still have plus two advantage. i you concerned that these people, 46-44 democratic and 44 may be half or more. may be branch off and go to a tea party movement and led the democrat win by default? >> there's a potential for multiple candidates in races and difference endorsements. there is that threat. in most states that is not the case. i will take things down by two points. given republican intensity and enthusiasm i will take that.

we have got to be aware of tea party candidates and what that means for our party. .. that's a great question. ask me, next september. so. question over here, yeah.

>> there's, one of the, in one of the slides you showed where something like, i don't remember exactly what it was, but i was struck by being democrat, stimulus thing, yeah there were benefits to the stimulus over tax cuts which i'm sure you heard before. but what do you do in the event that like, even issue where there are really tangible benefits but the people are against it because they don't necessarily understand it? >> well, i don't think, that is a good question. the question basically is, can you run a campaign, can you try to convince people they really have received benefits as a result of this? that is a tough education campaign. i'm not sure i would ever try to undertake that. if obama can't do it at top of the ticket i'm not sure what you're going to have running individual congressional campaign in big media market where people are not paying that much attention. >> the reason i feel like that the republicans did

that in 1980 and fdr did that in 1932. >> did what in 1980. >> kind of changed the dialogue on economic policies. >> but 1980 was a long track election, similar to this one. voters, when voters are ready for change, it's, i think part of the obama administration difficulties right now that the fact they won and won going away in a, ran a terrific campaign, but they believed that that was endorsement of everything they were pushing for. election was more of a rejection of republicans and george w. bush and than necessarily embrace of barack obama. you see that in the policy numbers. you have a tendency to overreach, and people do, and overinterpret the results of one election and what it means to the next election. you always got to ratchet it back a little bit and not

try to push it too far. other questions. >> last question. >> last question. >> since you've been through the 2006 and the 2008 elections and you see the parallels between those previous elections and this one and numbers look very similar now as they did in those years, what differences do you see? do you see this going same path what happened to republicans happen to democrats or -- >> i think it's different. it's different because you have, ten months before the election. we saw, a lot going on in 1994. 06, 08 we knew it was going to happen. it was a matter of insulating our guys. '94, we didn't really know that it was going to be that much of a until last couple months of the election. there is much more time. there is time for, democrats are in control of government. so it is, things can happen that would make people believe the country is heading in the right

direction. time is one thing. the amount of money democrats have and warning they have got to actually change their campaigns and readjust what they're doing. so, my point of view, if this were a british form of government, if i had control of government, if i was republican i would calling elections for next month. i want them as soon as i possibly can. take advantage of the political environment because i don't know what ten months down the road holds. again, these numbers and this analysis, this is good for today. things happen in political campaigns. you know, that could change dramatically the mood of the election. so, you know, that's why i said, we always, date all our stuff, put bright colors, december 28th, because man, who knows what is going to happen tomorrow. so i think if this election, if this environment holds republicans will have a good year. but that is anybody's guess.

guys, you that very much. here, remember that one thing. you have an opportunity next couple weeks to absorb a ton of information that ka can help you in the summer and in the fall and rest of you are your life if this is career goal you want to strive for. the fact that you're here and the candy said, you are unusual. you guys, not many people choose to take the weeks between christmas and new year's and week after new year's to illuminate yourself on campaign politics and what this is all about. thank you for being here. even if you disagree with me politically i am still proud of the fact that the industry drawn such bright young talent to a class like this. thanks very much. >> neil, thank you very much. [applause] we've got about a ten-minute break. please give your cards and name and contact information to chris and that we're back at 11:15 with senate races.

>> c-span's two coverage of american university campaign institute look at themes and messages from modern campaigns a former lead pollster on barack obama on survey research and polling. our live coverage resuming 1:30 eastern on c-span2. congress is on the holiday break. behind the sans have next. c-span. the senate meeting, is january 20th on live coverage here on c-span2. today a on c-span a senate hearing on growing national debt. former comptroller general david walker testify about the debt and ways to reduce it. that is at 4:10 p.m.

eastern. c-span provides a rare glimpse into merge's highest court. interviews with chief justice john roberts and justice john paul stevens who takes you on a tour of his chambers.

>> now a look how technology is impacting consumer privacy. panelists from the business and academia and public policy groups and discuss benefits and risks associated with information-sharing. federal trade commission hosts the discussion. it is an hour. >> hello, welcome to panel two. this morning we heard a lot

of conversation from jim harper and what consumers really want and what about disclose you are and transparency. we'll get the answers from this distinguished group of panels. this panel will draws address what we know about consumer expectations with with respect to use of information. we heard surveys present little value on this issue because they don't actually measure real consumer behavior. on the other hand, there is general agreement that consumers don't understand what happens behind the scenes. they browse or they search on line. they visit web sites or complete a survey. relying on consumer behavior to understand consumers expectations and use of their information has limitations. our expert panel today is prepared to talk about the issues in light of their own

she roich, informing consumers about data flows or as vehicle of consent to commercial collection and use of information. first i would like to briefly introduce our panelists. laurie kraner from carnegie mellon university. next to her. alan davidson from google. jewels parneskki from the future of privacy forum. adam fehr from the progress and freedom foundation. joe taroeau from the university of pennsylvania and last but not least, definitely is allen west tin from columbia university. i'd also like to present to my right, chris olsen comoderating this discussion. >> can i intercede to say i can't forget about the consumers. >> oh i'm sorry. joel kelsey, consumers union.

my apologies. okay. those in the audience, if you have a question for any panelists write it on a question card, it will be collected by one of the staff circulating. for those listen, e-mail questions to privacyroundtable at ftcgov. we'll talk about a number of studies during this panel. those are available on the agenda as pbs links. if you want to explore the issues in more detail you're certainly welcome to find those materials there. i would like to throw out a general question, what do consumers know about data flows and the collection and uses of their personal information both online and off-line? and, joe, why don't we start with you, because, what i would like to do is have each of you talk at a high level about the various studies and research that

you've done, and what you're findings are on this point. >> thank you. yeah, i at a very high level, the reports variable. also national surveys over the last 10 years and some starting from 2003 i believe have data about what americans know. so it is not just their opinions. and, i think it is fair to say that generally speaking they know very, very little about what goes on line behind the screen under the hood. the, kinds of things they don't know, would surprise many people around here, particularly, to for example, americans think it illegal to use discriminatory pricing. this is from surveys in 2005. company like expedia and orbitz is required to give the people lowest amount of fare, simply when people go online. they think it is illegal for supermarkets to change prices for different people during the same day.

generally speaking, people believe that the government enforces laws about privacy far more than it does. so, there is a sense that there are laws out there, people have, this great sense that laws protect them far more than they actually do when it comes to privacy. >> joel, who you found anything similar to that or different? >> our findings are largely similar, actually. i think that consumers have a general perception that information is collected about them online. i think they're uncomfortable with the idea of third parties but for the most part they think if the information is being use, sold, to target them they believe they given notice ahead of time and their prior consent is required. similarly with the government kind of protecting or government laws protecting the use of their private information, i think they feel relatively comfortable that, there's, sufficient protections out

there when that is just not the case. and, i think that, the biggest concern that folks have is, comes from an identity theft and kind of financial risk position, and i don't really think they have a true understanding based on data we have how the information is being used about them behind the scenes. >> and laurie, do you have anything to add to this? >> we found approach the same thing. but let me add i think people have very little understanding of both, the policies and laws about privately, also even how the information flows. there are a lot of people who don't know what a cookie is still. there is almost nobody outside this room who knows what a third party cookie, flash cookie all these types of terminology. what we've done one-on-one interviews with people they're confused which part of the web page content is advertising let alone advertising is tracking them which they have very little idea about.

>> ellen, you've done a number of studies over the years, i'm sorry, allen west tin, ka talk briefly about your high-level findings how consistent they are or different from what we've heard so far? >> my sense is that the surveys that i'm familiar over several decades are remarkably in concert rather than in conflict. for example, on the behavioral marketing all the surveys that are eprepresented on the table here, found that a majority, ranging in numbers from low 50% up to 70 and 80%s say they're uncomfortable with behavioral marketing and want have a minimum, notice, choice, security and, ways of intervening that would give them some comfort if they were going to have their information tracked in that way. so even though it's true we're starting from a base of low knowledge by

consumers as to how things really work, if you ask them how they feel about such and sufficient happening they're pretty strong believing they're being abused. that this is not something they have bought into. the other thing that my surveys show even though i can tell people that it's, behavioral marketing that makes possible the freebies of e-mail and other kinds of internet benefits, we've gotten to the point the way the internet developed, people just take that for granted. they're not prepared to make that into a real equation. so in our survey we asked people in setting up the question that, it's because of the ability to provide varies free services and things to be free on the net that, advertising makes possible, that bargain is now long gone and people are not willing to trade privacy for the freebies on the internet. >> alan davidson, can you comment on this in terms of what you found that

consumers expect or understand about data flow? >> thank you. i certainly think that it's clear that a lot more work needs to be done. i would say there is a lot of work being done now. what we're seeing i think a lot of innovation in the space in terms of trying to find ways to i have if consumers more information. certainly industry is seeing we've experienced that consumers don't understand all these issues and there are lots of things that can be done to give them more information. we can dig into some of the examples. for example, yahoo!'s recent announcement of product launch this weekend similar to something we launched to give people, our users, a chance to see more about what we know about them when we're showing them advertising i think is an example of the kinds of new tools that are going to be out there for people to see what is being collected, how this, these data flows work. that is just one of many, many examples. there are many people in the industry who are trying to

come up with interesting new ways to inform consumers. >> thank you. joouls you're one of those who haves been doing some of this work. talk about your findings with respect to what consumers know and what to expect will happen with the data. >> we done a set of focus groups and larger 2 6-under her say. the focus feedback group, the moderate expert users were just completely unfamiliar with the concept. the expert users there were one or two fam dollars. we know what that is watching a movie and really hungry and want popcorn, there was something flashed they talking about subliminal advertising. so clearly, lots of talking to people about privacy and privacy policies and all the other communication really haven't moved the bar. what we did start seeing when we turned to the advertising industry since

this selling and this advertising that seems to be, of such, debate, can we use those skills, use those communication skills to actually talk to people, taking it out of the hands of lawyers and technologists experts in what they do, let's talk to people. the folks at wpp spent a chunk of time with us generating language and symbols that we hope can be effective at communicating to people, not a legalese but, not anything about privacy but how your data is being used for you. that is real win for transparency, if companies can advertise if they're doing good things, if what they're dying l doing is try to sell you some stuff. consumer right or wrong way to talk about people, trying to communicate something about what they have, let's use those skills. we're hoping that some of the output can be used by the industry, who can adopt it and make it part of an

ieb, dma other self-regulatory programs. not about privacy and not doing anything with your data but here is how we're trying to communicate with you and will be trying to circulate broadly which phrases work best and what really resonates with rusers. >> thank you adam, do you have something to add on this point. >> sure. we've been take a hard look at polls and survey and child safety and free speech. we recently expanded that into privacy surveys and polls. our message is quite simple. while the surveys and polls may offer interesting insights how some people in the public think about privacy, advertising so on. ultimately they are no substitute for real world experiments which involve making real world choices often involving real money, in realtime with real

tradeoffs. and those market-based experiments happen every single day in the marketplace in ways we wouldn't have imagined they could have if we would have listened to what polls said a couple years ago. people are living their lives like open book on web sites. and information we asked if in the poll two or three years ago they would have said absolutely not. we have to remember what jim harper said on first panel, privacy is subjective condition and there is lot of trial and error out there people themselves personally experiment with how much they want to give away about themselves every single day in exchange for something else. there is no free lunch. these services online cost something and sometimes it means we have to give a little something to get them and sometimes that something is information. what i would argue there is a rational ignorance at times in these markets. might say one thing if asked by a pollster or survey what do we think about x or y, we might do a very different thing once we have our own

time and money on the line. >> laurie, what about this disconnect between the online, or the behavior that consumers exhibit on a daily bases sills and yet what we hear in the polls? is this truly a disconnect in that what consumers are doing really represent their views towards privacy or is there something more going on here? >> well, it is true only so far you can go with surveys. people will say things. it doesn't necessarily reflect their real behavior. but, you still can learn an awful lot from surveys. i think we do understand about their attitudes. now if we look at behavior, what, we've observed all sorts of things about what happens in the real world but it hasn't actually been set up as a controlled experiment. so we have situations where people don't understand the consequences of their actions. we haven't done a good job

of communicating this. so people are i have baing in the real world based on asymmetric information as mentioned in the previous panel and that in of itself is not giving us exactly the date that we want here. we have in some of our work at carnegie mellon tried to facilitate some experiments where we could actually measure people's behavior in a controlled experiment. this is very hard to do in a way that you have, very, valid data but we have been able to show, for example, if you annotate search results with information about web site privacy policies people will actually pay a little bit more to shop at web sites that have better privacy policies. so i think, these kinds of experiments, and i would love to have some of the search engine companies actually work with us so we could do this on a very large sample of users instead of small ones we can do as a university. >> alan, do you have any response to that? >> we'd love to work with

you on something like that. well, and i was just going to comment, in terms of these experiments that are happening in the marketplace just to give an experience much our own recently, we launched a product this spring called, what we call interest-based advertising and ads preference manager. some of you probably heard about it. we have a handout in the back that kind of a screen shot of it. basically the idea was to try to be responsive to the concern people really don't understand what's happening when we do interest-based targeting of advertising. so there were three components to this. one is, call in-ads notice. when you see advertisement that we helped placed there is little link so you can get more information about the ad. second that link takes you to a privacy center where there is ads preference manager shows the user all of the, all of the target signals that we're rusing to target that advertisement. and then there's a the ability for the user to change those signals. so, the signals might include things like we think

you're a sports enthusiast or we think you like interior design based on your web behavior. and we not only let people opt out of this, but we also let people change it. so you might say, no, no, i'm not a sports enthusiast but i'm really interested in automobiles or cooking. and we've now, had this out for about, i guess, since the spring. and what we've seen is, and interesting for us, this site gets visited by tens of thousands of people every week now. there are tens of thousands of unique visitors each week. the, the behavior has been interesting to us because i think we sort of had the assumption that people who were interested in privacy were going to visit this site would all be opting out. what we found is actually a lot of people come to the site, in fact four times as many people come to the visitors to the site actually change their preferences rather than,

opting out. so in other words, people are coming. they're not necessarily using our per per system opt-out, they're playing with it to, see what happens if they, you know, change these preferences. and, actually 10 times as many people actually do nothing when they come to the site as opt out. there are a lot of things you can read and still a relatively new experiment but to simply say people aren't informed and if you inform them they get rid of all this stuff is probably too simplistic of you. what we heard your mileage may vary in terms of what consumers want and how they feel about their privacy. and what's been interesting to us if you empower people with choices they may actually start to exercise them. i think many consumers, our perspective that many consumers do understand there is a bit of a bargain here. and that, part of the reason that all of these amazing free services exist on the

internet is partly because of the advertising that supports them. so, there's a lot of work to do to unpack this. i think there are going to be more experiments like this in the marketplace. and, we'll see how, it will be interesting to unpack how people use them. >> joe, do you have information to add on this? >> i just wanted to suggest, while i understand what google has done with those categories, it is important to realize that essentially, from one consumer's standpoint, those are marketing categories. i mean you go to that google site and they say, first of all, it appears incredibly bee into. it almost makes what some people who worry about privacy look foolish because it says, you like, like bicycles or you like, water skiing. why would that be a problem for anybody? and yes, you can be targeted for it and not targeted for it. what is not shown in this kind of thing and possibly

because google doesn't do this sort of thing maybe because they don't implement it yet, are the various kinds of psychographic, demographic, activities that go behind the screen to yield up the particular categories or kind of things many companies do to supposedly anonymously grab people's financial information and link them to create profiles. it appears if it is simply, do you like bicycles, do you like cars, sort of scenario. and i think it's not a correct assumption or set of projections of what's happening in our online and off- line world. >> jules, do you have a response? >> look, my response is this. you know, what i think we're seeing hopefully, i'll let the economists sort of debate, should users accept it because it causes things to be free even if they don't like it i like to focus on the fact there is a

potential feature here. when users do interact with kind of tailoring they like or choosing a book and understanding what is happening at amazon or netflix, clearly we've got some real behavioral evidence that it works. the question is can any of these models despite the fact they're operating as third parties despite the challenges of ecosystem being link as it in, can they make data use as feature? in developing a feature can they succeed being honest depiction what actually goes on without it becoming incredibly complicated? i think things will go in the direction that professor turow suggested but i hope they don't become a dashboard of a 767. that is comply ated as they get. my argument can we at least agree perfection prevented anything from happening. in my early doubleclick days it would be too hard to do it accurately. we need a little bit of sperm mentation and leeway

to figure out how you create a feature that people enjoy, play with it. today both yahoo! and at&t's yellow pages.com went live with versions of this little symbol which lead to sort of ad preferences interest managers. so you're starting to see people doing it in different ways and experimenting. we'll see whether there are in do users play with it, like it turn it off, tweak it. the hopefully the kind of feedback, i don't like those categories, why in the world are you doing them, so they will drive interaction will actually be first step of development in the market. we need to featurize data use instead of people interested care about enough privacy or read a notice or fine date about them. >> joel. >> sure, i like to go back to the looking at real world choices. keep of idea. and i think that we do actually see a lot of consumers making real

choices when it comes up to answering that cost benefit question of, you know, free content versus giving up information about themselves. one of the things we found a lot of consumers try to protect their anonymity by giving false e-mails. providing wrong information about themselves. deleting their cookies. talk about that to protending -- protect privacy or computer hygiene. consumers are going at great lengths to protect anonymity and to protect their personal information. we see market response and financial incentives, responding flash cookies like that to circumvent that consumer preference. i think a lot of these things, i would also say we also have real world experiences of data breach of, security, financial security problems and a lot of this to me, leads down to a place where we need some kind of regulatory framework

that provide more transparency, that talk as little bit about what kind of data is being collected, what is clearly acceptable, what is not acceptable in terms of what is being collected and how it is being used ultimately at end as well. >> alan. >> super quick response. first of all to the point about the benign nature of these categories. i'll say in our case those are the categories we're using. we're not using some of these other things. that speaks, for example, there are categories in google's intraspace advertising we don't have. we don't have sensitive information we use for targeting, financial information, certain other things that have been discussed. but it speaks to the fact there is certainly a need for greater transparency. i also don't want to make it sound like this is isolated occurrence. we've heard there are other companies launching coincidentally this weekend right before this conference, talking, a similar efforts which is fantastic. we have a, google has a product called google dashboard see a lot not just

about advertising but all the information we keep about a google account holder in one place. i think there are others, facebook has been a pioneer making transparency tools for all the information that is kept. these will be incredibly important. we expect there will be lot of experimentation in the market. the market you have very sophisticated players out there consumer facing and have a great desire to meet the demand joel already said for people to have more control. it will be incredibly important because we really believe transparency and consumer choice is going to continue to be a foundation of fair information practices and how we protect people online. >> in order to match the, tools that you're providing with what consumers expect, do we have any understanding about their expectations with respect to, say, the company they're dealing with directly? what they expect that company to use, or do they, do they, do we have any information about their expectation with respect to further use of that

information by other companies that are essentially behind the scenes? do consumers even know about this and what would we understand their behavior to be if they did fully understand the data flows, which will never happen but, assuming we did? i'm trying to get a differentiating what consumers expect with respect to information on different levels. also different types of information. you know, if you're just going to buy a toy online, that is different than dealing with health information. jules or joe, do you want to start with that? >> i will try to be brief. joe's studies and so many others shown this tremendous concern and it's been, this theoretical concern because nobody actually played with a dashboard such as professor ture row suggests this is or is not working. someone tracked you all day and lot of things you saw i

hope you found them use sell we did this for you. that is negative answer and that is the reality today. the question is can we bring some of that into public view so users actually get their hands on it, tweak it, feel it and we start getting a good sense, here's what they like, here's what they don't like? one of the things i like about yahoo!'s interest manager it shows something everybody in this room knows and everybody one outside technologists know, many sites know where you are. have general idea based on ip address. by saying not only things we think about you because we're locked into behavioral, no one cares. there is other stuff we care about. some of it seems trivial to us. ip we know you can geotarget based on ip. users wonder why there are cuties in potomac want to meet me. how do they know that? where do they know exactly where i am? the fact it just says this is it your ip address so we

think you're generally here, is just this great, i think demiss at thisification. we don't really know what it will truly be like when people start flicking playing and feet you'rize --, give one limited example. facebook we talk about beacon example. we've completely forgotten the most interesting facebook example which isn't beacon. may be why beacon happens. the outcry facebook initially rolled out news feed. oh, my god, instead of going to page seeing your own page and visit your friends pages all this stuff what everyone did. so-and-so break up with so and so-and-so got married. it was big outcry. we're talk stalking all of our friends. if you ask anybody, would you like, that would be terrible. there were groups and people joined it. there was outcry. why we go to facebook we now learn that jules is here, she's there and you need a little bit of room. this is not an argument for

or against legislation, you need a little bit of room leting people delight users with new ways of engaging each other. then learn about how to make sure we're not surprising them once we understand what they like. >> joe, did you have a comment? >> yeah. not to disagree at all with what jules said, we found, for example, it is not just the online world. i don't want to color it only online. i don't think there is difference anymore between online and off-line. most americans, for example, realize that supermarkets have the right to sell their data. they probably don't have idea that supermarkets collect enormous amount of data they collect. i want to bring up another issue briefly you suggested i think in your question, which is, how do people even know toe trust the companies whether they trust the companies? you may have seen yesterday's piece in the "times" about next jump, with which is a company, that companies, corporations, fortune 500s contracts with,

for discounts, for employee discounts. why not? it sound like such a great idea. apparently what this company has been doing has been collecting enormous amounts of data about people who get discounts, tying it to some extent with their credit ratings, credit card activities i should say, then using it now to deliver advertising, whatever else they're going to do. that's kind of thing it would be very hard to know if anybody in the companies that work there had any clue that this stuff was going on. and whether in fact there was a privacy policy presented to the people. so it is a very difficult scenario to imagine, how do we know when companies are being straightforward when maybe the companies themselves haven't taken opportunity to look. >> alan davidson, i i'd like to go back with a couple of things to you. one you said you don't use sensitive information. can you describe or explain what you mean by that? and also, before you get there, do you, can you give

us any sense in terms of a percentage of the total number of visitors to google how many actually have gone onto the ad purposes site or to the dashboard? >> so, on the first point, i don't have an exact number but i would say it's small. obviously it is very small if we're getting tens of thousands of people to visit each week. we have many, many more users. now you could argue many different, there are many different points that one could make, all we have is the data we can offer. but, you know, it also may be that this is something that users probably don't necessarily interact with on a regular basis. right, i think if we do this right for a lot of our users kind of thing they set the privacy preferences and controls they way feel comfortable and not think about the again that they're interested in. i don't think we expect a lot of recurring traffic to the site.

but others will draw other conclusions. on the question of sensitive information, i think this is really important area and one probably in guidance from the commission is helpful and probably will be helpful in the future. again our own, this is all within the narrow context of our own interest-based advertising product and others have done similar things in different ways we don't use signals about certain categories of sensitive information that we believe aren't appropriate to use for that kind of targeting. so, health information. information about, for example, sexual preferences. information regarding relating to children. certain categories of financial information. we don't use. and there are others who are more expert in the field if you want to dig down deeper how you unpackage those. deintooing those i think is really important. we heard in the earlier panel some reasons people might want to do that we

made made a choice not to. we i that is really important important. we think this is important for advertising region game. this is set a baseline understanding of users would be really helpful. >> if i could push on that a little bit to understand better. when you say for example, health information, if somebody did a search for alzheimer's, -- >> you would not see, you would see, anybody can go look and we hope you will go look at ads preference manager. you can search for it on binge and it will come up actually. -- bing. or you can click, but the, but the, fact is if you look at the category, this iseddest way to know this, if you look at categories you can make choices about see, you will not see something that says alzheimer's patient. will not see anything that is even close to that that is the most important way we

can show people directly. i think this is the power of this, of these kinds of approaches people should be able to see what it is exactly at or, what other kinds of information is being used about them, as jules said. this was heresy a few years ago. i will say when we first talked about it internally, it was heresy, the notion we would shows users what we were using to target advertising to them. could we do that? wouldn't they be freaked out if we did it? i think what we've, what we've, i guess the reaction we've gotten, i think actually users are pretty mature about it. they're actually, well some of them will be freaked out about it, that is appropriate for them. some have had a totally different reaction to it. this is just one small step in the market. it is relatively narrow part of our business but i think a good example of what could be done. >> thank you.

allen west tin, you've done some work in the health area, consumer health records in particular. what have you found about consumer attitudes with respect to health information as opposed to buying a toy online. >> whenever you ask people what is the most sensitive information about you that can be collected and used, health information and financial information are always the winners. we've done a number of surveys how the public feels about the emerging electronic health record movement and also personal health records. and in general, when we have had asked people do the privacy risks outweigh benefits you see electronic health records bringing to health care and into your care, or do you think that, the benefits outweigh privacy risks we get absolutely 50/50 division in the surveys. half the people feel privacy

risks outweighing benefits and half believe the benefits outweigh the privacy risks. i believe as electronic health records are now unfolding throughout the health care system, trust in the keepers of the electronic health records is absolutely central. and, we see that it's only when promises are made and explained as to, limits on who will get to see health record without your explicit consent, or, data security will be provided to make sure that data breaches of health information which are much in the news lately will not take place, will the people that we survey feel that they're comfortable with and trust the people running the system. and i think there are a lot of quotes from the top levels of the electronic health record official dom without trust, that the advantages of electronic health records will never be achieved because people will not willingly give information or subscribe to

health research using medical records with explicit notice and consent. so i think actually central aspect of the whole personal health record and electronic health record developments. >> thank you. joel kelsey, are there other areas that consumers are particularly concerned about or sensitive about the use of their information or disclosure to others? >> well, i think financial and health is absolutely at the top, the top two. i wanted to go back actually, if consumers understood the true difference between first party and third party kind of data collectors would their behavior change? one of the things we found is that they're absolutely aware that companies are tracking their behavior online. they're uncomfortable with it. take steps to protect anonymity things like that. going back to the beginning of the panel, we also found they do that and that cost benefit analysis in their head leads them to particular choice. largely also because they're confident that there is some kind of government protection if the date that

that is collected about them or being used about them goes too far. so, i think i would ask the question a different way, in that what would consumer behavior look like if they a, knew that, you know, what third parties were able to do with their data at networks, at exchanges, data exchanges. collecting demographic, geographic information, financial transaction information. pretty soon that starts to be combined and looks pretty close to pi. if they knew that on one hand and also knew there wasn't a whole regulatory framework to protect them from bad uses of that, not necessarily target ads but maybe to hold back financial offers on mortgages on credit cards, on travel, things like that. i think their relationship to first party sites would then very much change. and i think you know one of the things we have to address and one of the reasons i'm glad the ftc is having this debate, there is growing tension i think between the usefulness of display information and

display advertising, that is going to require, the financial incentives in the market will require information be collected as it gets closer and closer to pi. in order to target information more and i think we really absolutely need fair information practices to start talking about what that information should, what kinds of information should and shouldn't be collected and ultimately how it should be used. >> jules. >> just to quibble, we all throw around this third party thing online in unique way and if we actually explained to consumers their minds would explode. i'm not sure any consumer would choose ups or fedex, unless they cared about labor issues that fedex folks were contractors technically and ups folks were employees. they would care someone was controlled and somebody was responsible. i think what ends up happening online all that much we see some of these third party things because the technology makes it visible. whether or not it is really

someone else has a right to do something with it or whether a technology completely under the control and pause of the nature of the contract, they're first, they're third. we throw around first and third in ways people would have no clue and would make them melt down, hey, guess what the web site you gone to operated by someone other than the person who owns it and stored somewhere and hosted somewhere. we ought to focus a little more on who is accountable who is in control and who is responsible for what is going on and do they have the right to do something with it. industry is guilty because we've got folks who are vendors seem to have right to do stuff with data and we've created confusion and we need a little more clarity so when people, when we try to communicate with people we tell them things are meaningful and they made make decisions based on. >> adam, i want to raise a question for you and give you a chance to respond to just what's been said as well. i think you mentioned real

world scenarios that exist every day. i guess the question i have is, if you were to do a study where the full extent of the trade yofrs -- tradeoffs were made known to consumers, could you do that. this goes to jules point a little bit, could you provided adequate information that consumers would understand, that would reflect the sort of tradeoff that is going on every day? >> it helps in experimental economics sense if we had consumers bargaining with something that proximated their own money and their own real time and obviously gave them access to other types of relevant information that is often missing in some of these polls and surveys like what other types of tools do you use that might be privacy enhancing that would change the equation? i mean, why is there no mention in surveys and polls of things like ad block plus, which had 67 million downloads five years, on firefox and number one

loaded utility in firefox history. and no script. a security enhancing and base measure. people are obviously doing something. maybe firefox users are especially unique class. point is in real world they take privacy enhancing or security enhancing steps. those are the kind of things that i think need to be worked into surveys and polls. that will not substitute what happens when people make a choice in the real world of just go back to the social networking examples and some of these others. information flying around on networks that just would have been unthinkable to many of us a generation ago, not just a generation ago, a few years ago, to some of us still raises sense activities i'm really -- sensitivities, i'm concerned what my kids put online and teach them why they should think through that decision. i think those things need to be taken into account. >> i wanted to raise a question, and, that came in from the audience, and i'll

paraphrase it a bit. there seems to it be considerable support for the few that consumers may not be fully informed as to aspects of data flow and what happens to the data, notwithstanding some evidence of deployment of ad blocker plus and other tools. given the lack of information that consumers have about the benefits of certain activities, should we really care about attitudal evidence about what consumers may or may not feel? in other words, do attitudal surveys really matter if there is an information deficit? alan, you want to make a comment? >> if you lay the consumer privacy surveys alongside larger surveys of consumer knowledge, it's quite consistent. consumers are ill-informed

about financial affairs, investments, about, home protection, about medical affairs and so forth. so the, the base has to be that we have a largely uninformed majority, consumer population in the country. second point would be, that, most consumers then get signals from the organizations they trust to tell them what they think about and what to do in that situation. consumer organizations or business organizations idealogical organizations or aarp or et cetera. if that is your model, how can you make privacy relate to that? the other point i make studies we've done show the american public divides into roughly three groups when it comes to privacy. about 25% are intense, will reject ben fits and insist upon strong privacy protections. about 10 to 15% are privacy unconcerned.

they couldn't care less because the benefit is find for them and they're not worried about their privacy. i like to say 10 cents off they will give you their family history or anything you want. in between are the privacy pragmatists. who say, what are the benefits to me, what are the privacy risks presented, and how do you propose to inform me and give me choices on that and fundamentally do i trust you or do i think only law and regulation will make me comfortable in this situation? so when we talk, as we've been doing this morning about the consumer, i think it is useful to see there is a pattern that the american public divides into, which has been, shown over 20 years of surveys to be repeat in way which the public divides on these issues. >> joe, do you or laurie want to add anything to that given -- >> yeah. i think on a number of levels you could interpret the data we've collected. it's true that attitudes can

be crithe can tooed as simply a point in time but we've also collect ad lot of data about what people know, okay, in relation to those attitudes. what they believe in terms of what the government does. if you lay those things one on top of another, people who know very little believe the government does a lot and are very nervous, okay? we even asked the question, if you found out that a company is collecting your information illegally, what would you do? and aside from the monetary amount, we asked them what would you do to executives? something a little over 30% said they would get the company to train people, teach the people in the company about privacy issues, keep outsiders privacy issues. a strong percentage wanted to put the people in jail, the executives in jail. i think it was 18% wanted to shut the companies down. now i don't think if people,

on jury they would really do this but i think what it does do, it shows kind of a frustration and anger that people have about these sorts of issues even while they believe many companies are doing the right thing, whether or not they know. they think the u.s. government is doing the right thing, meaning protecting their privacy. one other point i would like to make, we have done four times, asked the same question, true-false in this sort of way. if a web site has a privacy policy it means that site will not share your information with other sites or companies without your permission? almost, every time we asked it, 75% of the people get it wrong. that is most americans don't realize the word privacy policy doesn't mean a company will protect your privacy in terms of not sharing your information. it seems to me that label is defect i have and deceptive. it really doesn't mean what most americans think it

means. >> i want to move on, now to, disclosures a bit. i note, jules, you described what, you and wpp have worked on. alan, you've talked about the google ad preferences manager. we've heard discussion about yahoo!'s new efforts. i think at&t new efforts as well. to bring additional transparency to information management practices. and i guess one question that raises is, how usable, how feasible, is it that to have these multiple different systems available, depending on what service you visit, to manage your privacy? and, is this something that consumers will really be able to navigate going from one site to one service, to

another. >> no. industry groups need to adopt adopt and standardize, if they have real meaning to the self-regulatory programs that have been hammered out the final steps need to be adopting a good standardized way so every time a user sees something it means, you know, your data is at work. perhaps different businesses may do different things behind that there are different models, there's different features but that power button is the thing that indicates, this is a smart interaction. let's be a little broader than behavioral advertising because it is not the entire world, right? data is appending. a lot of people talk about behavior advertising and targeting and billboard and interacting me with their screens. we're in a world of smart interactions. will users understand, i click, paid and been charged that i'm getting something different than the person before. that this is being used in some robust use. i like the fact that my local giant in potomac where

those folks are looking to meet me is giving me coupons as i use the scanner and i work through the supermarket and, i'm wondering i looked at coupon that popped up i wasn't in the aisle that had orange juice and i was wondering is it because they know my shopping? it would be useful if that was or knew where i was. i was like i have no clue. if i simply with a symbol, which dashboard was behind it i get it. this is i want to use this or not based on whether, you know i want to know who knows about my shopping whether i find this of value or not. industry do unis and industry putting rules behind it, this is what it means. it means trustee promises this. bbb is asserting this is essential. one effort by a couple companies, by fpf, by wpp will be nothing. if we're going to move the vast majority of people and get it on the radar screen of their consciousness it needs a broad effort. >> laurie, did you want to comment on that? >> yeah. so we've done a lot of work

at karn -- carnegie mellon looking how to communicate with people on privacy and privacy notices. going more broadly looking at behavior advertising looking at privacy notice. we find english language privacy notice is completely unpen net trabl to most people. we've done studies giving them reading comprehension questions and see how long does it take to figure out, will this company send you poseal mail advertisements? people read a privacy policy, they can't figure that out. so we've tried a number of different formats including the layer notices format. tried things my students have come up with. what we found if you move to something that is closer to what we called a nutrition label where you have very simple format that everything's always in the same place, then suddenly people are able to use it and drive information and you can give them these

policies from two companies and they can compare them and tell you what's different. we tried a variety of these formats. and, actually, the gains from, do you put it in paragraphs, do you put it in tables, you get little gains here and there but the key thing is that they're standardized. that the two companies both use the same for mat. that is where you get a really big win. >> are there particular elements that you think consumers are most interested in? would it be, i share information with other unaffiliated companies, for example? or are there other things that are more important when you talk about a nutrition label that should be included? >> yeah. we've looked at survey work been done over the years by many people including some of them at this table and it seems like, some of the hot buttons for people are really have to do with information-sharing and the secondary uses of their information.