types are hot button as well. so in the nutrition label format we came up with, which you can check out at privacyoffinder.org you can do a search. any web site with a privacy notice we generate a nutrition label for them. we tried to highlight some of the areas that do seem to be more hot buttons with consumers. >> alan, did you want to jump in here? >> to echo something that jules said, to the question whether this is feasible, in some ways we don't necessarily know. what we know industry is really going to have to get together to do more together to address some of these issues. so, for example, i mentioned the persistent opt out that we created for our own interest-based advertising offering, and you know, one of the big, i think one of the biggest legitimate critiques of it that, it works for google but what does consumer did for all

the in of information out there. great thing we released in open source form and intrepid young hacker remain nameless but who is in the room and took it, made it something that would work for a large number of other advertising networks. that's great. that is kind of thing we need to see more of and to do more of. but i think the fact is there is a giant challenge here and to your earlier question whether these attitudes matter, on the part of consumers they absolutely matter. i think there are strong signal to all of us in industry we have to do more and do better here. it is a is about imperative. it's difficult, i don't want to sugar coat it, you can look at lori's fantastic work on nutritional labels, realize how hard it is it is not like vitamin a. we don't have recommended daily allowance of these things and they're not objectively measurable in a lot of ways. so it is going to be very difficult. i looked at her great paper again this weekend and, you know if you look at label

that i think, one of the labels didn't include location information right? this is dynamic environment. there are new things happening all the time. nutritional labels is hard but we've got to find better ways to communicate with people. . . >> we tested what happens if you mess up the disclosure and get a simple sentence that says here is what is happening and people got that even though 15 minutes

before, they had very little concept. a simple brief sentence and go ahead and find out lot more. in some way consistent with the self-regulatory regime. don't point this to your privacy policy but something relevant to what happened here. to get to my point about featureizi featureizing. i have not read the amazon policy but most of us know that books are being tracked and we are getting books -- it is in context. it is relevant to what i am doing. how do i not give you policy that my lawyer will insist as every caveat and in every case. they give all little leeway so someone can save something and give users the gist. it will never be exactly accurate or have the 18 caveat.

one of the interesting things from the focus groups was we tested a particular phrase, why this ad and users said i get what that means the why ask me questions and make me click to find out what it is? if you have something to tell me, tell me and i will decide if i want more information. we have to avoid years what you should want to know readiness call with testing and hearinnow with testing and hearing. they said tell me. >> consumers are smarter than we give them credit for. >> one of the things we should talk about is every time data is

appended to an existing profile that exists, running the risk of being ambiguous, i will say third-party data collector, networks and exchanges. every time they append more information to an existing profile it would be interesting to see what that looks like, how close it comes to pointing to witch consumer -- the information is being collected from and making sure the consumers have access to information being collected about them. going back to the distinctions that need to be made and what information consumers care most about google and yahoo! should be commended for trying to be more transparent and and and transparency to the marketplace but consumers -- there's a difference in a consumer's brain

with regard to google or yahoo! as a search engine. the dashboard lights the understand how the information will be used differently. everybody has actually said this as well. needing consistent information or -- they did not have financial incentive to be consistent across the board. that calls for getting away from this choice model which is clearly failed because we don't have clear disclosure into regulatory framework for a national standard that will give consumers consistent information upon which they can make marketplace decisions in a rational way.

>> i just want to second what hirohisa fujii was saying and milan bandic too about the point to know what is going on at the point of the ad being served because so many things are happening that may not be yahoo! doing it or the site publisher. there may be a network that bought a particular person in real time. what is happening is more and more people are dynamically served in real time based upon an exchanges. you are buying individual consumers computers rather than clusters or space or time. that makes the challenge much greater but also makes it very important to say you are a dynamic person. your profile may not be in some back a somewhere. it is available at that moment for that particular purpose. >> let me cut to the chase.

we are short on time. and get to the ultimate issue at stake. we are talking about the need for more disclosure and transparency. everyone agrees that is a good thing for consumers but how we get there is the real challenge. we have to ask the question if we are going to allow ongoing experimentation with disclosures and dashboards and privacy tools and settings or if we are going to foreclose that process with a one size fits all models that says this is how we think it should work and work for evermore. we have lived through this when we had the about disclosure or information ratings for content in the field of child safety. we had a debate many of us were involved in about a 1-size-fits-all model for reading on television content. i am not here to say that didn't work out at all but look at the model that revolved when we had experimentation in the internet context when you have a mosaic

of tools and empowerment methods that don't exist for television. those are two different types of models that we chose. the latter one is some lessons for us, we should allow and encourage more experimentation, more competition between these companies like google and yahoo! and others are doing for better dashboards and information disclosures. i say let a thousand flowers bloom. >> a follow-up question. does it make sense even in the context of experimentation to have certain things be consistent from one entity to another? you mentioned the amazon example. consumers may understand information is being collected to provide guidance about books

they may read. similarly there may be similar expected uses of information that companies engage in. do you need to provide consumers with notice and choice for additional information related to the fulfillment of an order for example, or let consumers know that information may be used for fraud detection? one way of simplifying the information has provided to consumers is to cakes and uses expected or anticipated of of the table to reduce off the table. >> should we have standardization -- they evolve. getting back to what alan davidson said, we look at things we are trying to measure or deal

with location based services, things that developed very rapidly. i am for holding companies to the promises they make about the information they collect. that is where we need to be. if you promise to treat information a certain way live up to your promises but the question of taking a different approach about mandating everybody, the same policies across the board forecloses experimentation and innovation. information is the lifeblood of the internet and if we foreclose through these regulatory regimes that has profound ramifications. >> how industry ought not to be working hard to figure it out. i got into a car and every car had a completely different set of controls we would be in big trouble. we worked a combination of legislation and effort and consumer research about what worked so that when my 5-year-old 6 down to a computer game she can scroll her way

around and -- we joked about people doing things to day. it is the sort of touch points that the privacy folks say we have to do stuff by tomorrow. sometimes you need a prague and industry leaders and sometimes it is you guys. >> in response to something adam said. we are not just talking about the internet any more. television is becoming the internet. you just have to look at what various television cable networks and other entities are doing in terms of new ventures and comcast lab experiments with collecting data. the same thing we're talking about in coursing data through the internet is beginning to happen in television.

these words are metaphors that have less and less meaning over the next several decades. the other point is all the data we are talking about is peanuts compared to what will happen ten years from now. not just for advertising. increasingly the news, the information and the entertainment you get will be varied based on a profile you have. the issue here confronting us not now not to make rash decisions is how we will live in a society where those kinds of data go under you without you knowing it or having any control about it. do you want 60 minutes to be different for your neighbor compared to what you see based upon what companies know about you and you don't? do you want discounts to be different based upon what companies know about you and you don't? these are small things that exist in small technologically feasible ways. at up the fire power in terms of technology and they are going to

happen because the industrial logic points that day. that is why we have to be worried about this. >> alan davidson will have the last word. >> i go back to what the chairman said about the worst form of government except for all the others. maybe it is. it is one of the reasons we have to get this right. ten years ago we said there is going to be a set of web sites that will ask you to input all sorts of personal information, where you went to school and to your closest friends are, we share that information with hundreds or thousands of people including developers, we would say that is crazy and we should prohibit that. or there would be location based web sites that would ask you to share with all your friends where you are at any given moment. we should never let that happen. it is a very dynamic

environment. we have to be careful. there is a giant business imperative for us to get this right. we need to work more closely together. i would offer one challenge to the commission which is an area we haven't talked about which is how government gives access to information because one of the things consumers don't understand is under what circumstances we are forced to turn information over to the government. the commission is a law enforcement agency and has an interesting role to play here and we should think about that. thank you for having us. >> i want to thank all of the panelists. this has been a provocative and disturbing to it -- interesting discussion. we could go on an hour or two. thank you for your participation today. [applause] >> let me add one logistics. we have a limited amount of food

available out here. there is a list of local eateries outside at the registration desk. if you do leave the building to get food please keep in mind that it takes time to get back and we will reconvene promptly at 1:20. thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> congress is on holiday break but behind-the-scenes negotiations have begun on merging house and senate health care bills. the house returns on january 12th annual see live coverage on c-span. the senate meets on

january 20th. live coverage on c-span2. today on c-span a senate hearing on the growing national debt. former u.s. comptroller general david walker and others talk about the debt and ways to reduce it at 4:10:00 p.m. eastern. at 8:00 c-span provides a glimpse into america's highest court. tonight interviews with chief justice john roberts and justice john paul stevens to take you on a tour of his chambers. >> the communicators on c-span2. >> this thursday on c-span a day of tribute to u.s. and world leaders including the dalai lama, ted kennedy, walter cronkite, colin powell and robert byrd. new year's day look at what is ahead for the new year.

vladimir putin discusses his future. presidential adviser austin ghoulsbe. innovation and entrepreneurship and the art of political cartooning. >> michele malcolm is our guest on in-depth. >> now abb see look at the top stories from british parliament. it is about an hour. >> welcome to the record review.

a look at the big events over the last three months. in this program the economy. they argue over how to balance the books using public money to claim everything from clearing lots to buying houses. they try to put the expenses behind them. is this the future? members of parliament show how it is done. >> now is the time to be heard and it is time to hear answers. >> the one subject that dominated everything in recent months, money. britain has been in recession for more than a year but unlike other countries like france and germany has yet to show signs of coming out of the recession. questions towards the end of the year, david cameron try to pin the blame on the prime minister. the conservative leader claimed britain was the last country to

move out of recession. >> six european countries that are part of the european union are in recession. i have to say to them the purpose of asking this question must be either the policy that he wishes to put forward so that we can do better or simply talking down britain. >> he is reading out lists of countries for australia, canada, turkey and brazil who went into recession after britain but cannot be for britain. france and germany went into recession at the same time but cannot before. can the prime minister answer this? given that all those countries are in growth and we are not in growth, can he tell us what he meant when he said, quote, we were leading the rest of the world out of recession? >> not one policy from the

opposition. we have taken action to restructure the banks -- we have taken action for a fiscal stimulus opposed by the party opposite. we have taken action to keep unemployment down as a result of creating jobs opposed by the opposition and taken action for international cooperation opposed by the opposition. they have been wrong on the recession and they will be wrong on the recovery. the voice may be that of a public relations man. the mind set is that of the 1930s. >> when you look at the prime minister's three central claims, that we were better prepared than other countries was wrong, our deficit was worse than other countries. the credit that britain was leading the world out of recession was still in recession and the claim of boom and bust is rubbish. the three biggest claims are is

three biggest failures. >> the more he talks the less he actually says. nothing about politics. >> mr. brown continued to say the conservative candidate, multimillionaire who will benefit from a conservative policy to raise the limit people paid. >> the only person who has made a specific pledge in legislation to reduce inheritance tax in the coming budget is the prime minister. he legislated to raise the threshold from 325,000 to 350,000. is he still planning to do that? we would like an answer. >> it is interesting, this exchange. it is interesting. this exchange started with a great idea of economic policy and he has to defend his own

policy on inheritance tax. the question he has to answer is the issue that concerns the whole country, that inheritance tax cuts to millionaires will cost us nearly two billion pounds that we should be spending on public services. the issue for the country is public services for the many our inheritance tax cuts for the few. i have to say with him and mr. goldsmith, inheritance tax policy is dreamed up on the playing fields of eaton. >> mr. goldsmith told the bbc he was giving up his noncom status. a few days later the chancellor unveiled his mini budget known as the pre budget report. he confirmed tax of 50% to see -- award senior staff bonuses of

25,000 pounds and announced a rise in national insurance of 1/2% in 2011 on top of the 1/2% rise previously announced. he said he wanted to promote growth without wrecking the country's economic recovery. >> once recovery is secured we must as i made clear at the time of the budget reduce the rate of public spending to meet our ambitious target to half the deficit. mr. speaker, we take these positions from a position of strength. investment in health and education. >> the idea is to go back to 17-1/2%. the inheritance tax was frozen at current levels, not increase as previously pledged. the rise in pensions and benefits of one year. and exchange for inefficient

heating boilers. mr. darling turned to banker's bonuses. >> we can build the capital base but a substantial rewards, according money to the taxpayer. i decided to introduce from today a special levy of 50% of any discretionary bonus above 25,000 pounds. this will be paid by the bank, not the bank employee and anti avoidance measures will be introduced with immediate effect. bank stocks will have to pay as usual income tax at the top rate of any bonus they receive. the assumption which includes expectation of some banks bringing back bonuses, this will yield half a billion pounds. >> it had to be hard and front leg had to be protected. >> this cannot be done without a difficult decision. i intend to increase all employer employee and self-employed race of national

insurance by half pence from april 2011 and to protect those on modest incomes i have decided to raise the starting point from which national insurance is payable under 20,000 pound will pay more contributions as a result. >> he was accused of failing to excuse the plan dealing with britain's debt. >> the tough spending decision before the general election, or would he complete the ducked them? we were promised a free budget report and what we got was a pre-election report. >> he moved on to the chancellor's proposal. >> we warned him that he should try to shock the list of big cash bonuses and vice sit in my conference speech we should look at the tax system. they will pay a bonet don't -- bonuses patient have paid in the

first place. >> he concluded like this. >> the prime minister always talk called himself the nation's bank manager. the nation's finances on a never ending property bubble. like every other failed master of the universe he is asking to be bailed out. he should remember this. most bailouts start with a change at the top. >> vince cable said it was clear since the economic position was very grave. >> genuinely great labor chancellors in the past, roy jenkins among others would not have been upset as the chancellor is today with a drawing tactical dividing lines. >> this had been a good budget deeper and he accused mr.

darling of making assumptions. >> the government has assumed today that high rates of economic growth, 3-1/2% in 2011, what is the basis of this assumption? it is like the story of the economists who is given a tin of food to eat, let's assume the existence of a tin opener. let's assume economic growth. why? has the government made an estimate of the risk which is a very real risk, of the economy going into a double dip recession? >> nationalists said it was not a budget for growth. >> this budget statement was specifically to confirm the cuts and some capital to scotland. why did the chancellor not take the advice of his own colleagues

-- capital expenditure to protect the recovery rather than insuring the cuts weaken the ability of scotland to recover. >> how did the pre budget report go outside westminster? i asked norma smith. >> a lot of concern in the markets as to whether it has gone far enough to put us on the path to the and off the deficit. the basic argument comes down to timing. when you look at the arguments made by different parties about what they want to implement, liberal democrats have something like twelve billion cuts which overshadows the tories. we have a difference in timing. what we find is the conservatives say we have got to start now, start paying back money now because if we don't payback the deficit we will never get economic growth.

the liberal democrats argue you cannot pay off the deficit until you get economic growth. a lot of people will argue that is the way the government says let's pay off until after the general election. the general election was a few months ago. it is a character of cuts. the governments argued this is down and it would be reckless to try to cut spending down. >> if this really shows the dividing line between the party's leading up to the election? >> certainly a narrative for development. their argument is they are in the business of protecting public services whereas they retain the tories as largely indifferent to public service. it has to be said when you look at the policies that both parties said they would protect the image and from that end of

the agreement there is also agreement on public sector pay because the tories too suggest they should pay just as the government should be a cap on public sentiment. one of the funny things is when you strip out the rhetoric and dividing lines that the government creates action in the party's, not that far apart. the economic environment we are in the personal 1 seventy-eight billion pounds, that is a yawning deficit. politicians are aware they have to be something and that will meet tax rises and spending cuts and will be insignificant in trenchant in public service. ..

parliamentary commission for standards launched an inquiry. he upheld the complaints and miss smith. as the report makes clear, i thought received from the parliamentary authorities that supported my main home designation. and indeed, i spent more nights in london than in redich for three of the four years in question. i have never flipped my designation, and i only own one home. the committee recognized there is no evidence that

the taxpayer would be any worse or any better off as a result of me having made a different decision. >> a few days later the former home office minister, tony mcnulty apologized after being ordered to repay more than 13,000 pounds in second home allowances. he claimed the money on his constituency home lived in by his parents. he came to the commons to apologize after the parliamentary standards commissioner john lime that he claimed on the house after he married and moved out. mps meanwhile anxious awaiting outcome of their review of allowances by sir christopher kelly. after newspaper revelation that is the mps claimed had flipped the designation of their second homes and others appeared to wrongly claimed for mortgages.

mps were told to rent properties in the future instead of paying mortgages. the communications allowances to be scrapped and resettlement grant which mps received as they stand down from parliament is to be phased out. there is also to be a ban on employing relatives. just ahead of the reports, official release i spoke to the labour mp and drought slaughter. suze squire from the taxpayer alliance. sally ham monday wife of conservative mp peter hammond who works as his parliamentary representative. sally it seems odds that mps can employ their relatives in the first place. >> i suppose it does. an mps job is not just a job but a life-style. your family is probably expected to be part of it any way. in our particular case i worked for members of parliament for 25 years and the last general election, the mp i was working for actually retired. i was offered a job by his successor but my husband was eoak ared at the same time.

and i thought actually it was the best way forward was to work with steven. i know extremely well. i have years of experience in the commons. i thought it might be a bit strange if i went to work for another of his colleagues. that's me. >> does seem a little unfair doesn't it. do you think we'll see mp he is wife working where secretaries move around. >> that has been rumored. that goes into more deep water. because, sally is an example i'm sure because of working a long period of time. therefore it is a hard case. but, this is the but, i don't think we are any longer in the position where we can simply plead even on the merits, to our advantage. the problem with employing relatives, and same thing with mortgages, i'm in the

fortunate position, being london mp i don't claim second home allowance i can speak more on wreck tiffly, looks like unjust or unintentional enrichment. you got money in the household or capital gain on the property. may not be a loss to anybody else but it is a gain to the member or member's family. i at this that's what people object to. >> let's look at some of the other things were expecting to come out. kelly, what about in the suggestion, in future mps would only rent homes. somebody that you would welcome? >> absolutely we would welcome an end to second home allowance as we've seen it in the past it. was never a right thing even unwittingly point being made mp. were not able to build property off taxpayer's money we have to see an end to that. the second homes is actually a misnomer. what we want mp to have to ability to do their job well. they don't need a home necessarily for that. they need to choose main home for their family. that is absolutely right. but then they just need a

place to do their job effectively. if they want to buy a second home, that should come out of their own pockets. >> and draw slaughter, do you think mps will accept it. >> i think some people are unhappy and happy about it. majority opinion will be like my own, that a, we brought this on ourselves and may only be a few cases of serious abuse but there have been a few cases that kind. secondly it is a completely nonsensical system. this system of, creating property empires. even if it doesn't. as i something the taxpayers alliance arguing for things which might cost the taxpayer more, rent might cost more. not employing family members might cost more but i think family members work harder. >> transparency is everything though. >> i'm afraid that's right. we have to be seen to be behaving like normal people basically. that's where we are. i think the majority of mps will be of that view. >> in your dealings though with constituents in your

communications with them, is there still a sense of anger? do you think that the, that is in any way abating. >> we never had any anger against us at all. my husband was a "daily telegraph" saint. i think people appreciate that, as was andy here -- >> i was even standard saint that is more difficult for labour mp. >> yes, he is there with you. and, basically, i think people people appreciate dealing with me in many cases they will phone up with a huge problem and then i after a bit i might say look i'm the mp's wife as well as secretary, can i help? it seems to calm them a bit actually. >> a few days later the kelly report was officially finally published. we asked the "the mirror's" james lyons what he thought of it. we went to press conference to hear christopher kelly. the crackdown starts now. >> the most controversial of all the issues, is

accommodation. main recommendation here is that support for mortgage interest should cease and that in future, members of parliament should only be reimbursed for the cost of rent or in a few cases with you that offer is better value for money, hotels. >> a new parliamentary standard authority is in charge of bringing in the rules. sir christopher kelly had a stern warning for them not to pick and choose from his recommendations. >> it is intended to a package as a whole. i hope you see it has been quite carefully constructed in order to address some of the issues people have been raised. i think sherry-picking is a very, a very bad idea because once you open up something like this, who knows where it will, where it will stop. >> next the expenses road show moved onto the floor of house of commons. speaker john burke, announced kelly would be head of new parliamentary standards authority. mp. were less than impressed to hear they will get double what he will be paid.

>> he will be paid a maximum of 100,000 pounds per year. order. order. >> harriet harman came to the dispatch box and told mps they would have to take punishment without a commons vote. they listened in miserable silence as they heard the gravy train finally hitting buffers. >> this house of commons has yet to fully resolve this damaging episode but with clear acknowledgement of the public anger with firm action already taken with the kelly report and the establishment of the independent parliamentary standards authority, this will be resolved. >> chastened mps queued up to meekly days of duck houses moats flipping and fancy mortgages were over. >> i behalf of these benches i like to thing sir christopher and his colleagues creating a thorough report we should accept in full and take forward. >> i am clear, sir

christopher kelly's proposals should be implemented in full without equivocation. >> i very much, approve of the approach that the leader of the house is taking in this matter. she should be assured of the support if there are any parliamentary procedures required, to implement what she has laid out in her statement. my colleagues will be happy to support her. >> so, the john lewis list and tax funded property empires are going to be a thing of the past but grasping mps are already lobbying hard for a hefty pay rise to make up for it. >> so i asked bbc political correspondent norman smith how much of a shadow of expenses sawing today continued to cast over westminster -- saga. >> it overshadowed this parliament. the long parliament. rump parliament. this parliament i suspect will be motor duck house parliament. will be forever identified expenses saga which utterly

overshadowed everything. one part of that is the fact if you look at number of mps who are leaving this parliament there is absolutely staggering number quite possible we will see the biggest clear out of mps since the second world war up to a third of mps standing down. now, not the sole reason but a very large part of the reason is the expenses saga. a lot of mps not just those who found to abused system but a lot of mps feel, very, very bruised by it. a lot of mps were pilloried in local papers. they feel they don't have a chance of standing again. a lot of mps what is point of being pm? it is tough existence. they don't want to carry on doing it. we'll see a massive clearing out. that one of the one. point ever expenses saga. it is not over. we have to get legislation through parliament to implement the sir christopher kelly proposals. thomas legg, looking into bills mps should pay out. he has to send out the final bill. whole saga seems to me will

keep on rippling along. implementation of the christopher kelly proposals some of them not being able to employ your spouse or everything that not liable to kick in for five years. seems to me some way to go yet with the expenses saga. >> norman smith, but while all of that was going on in the house of commons there were troubles aplenty in the house of lords too. a group of peers recommended that the lords should have a standards commissioner all of its own. the committee was shared by lord seems who wanted to see a ban on peers acting a parliamentary consultants. the review had been set up by lady royal, leader of house of lords following cash for amendments affair in which a newspaper claimed that some peers had been willing to take money in return for making changes to some bills going through parliament. i asked lord seems what his standards commissioner would actually do. >> they would have a very wide remit. they would first of all be totally independent. they would be asked to do a

job in which complaints brought to them about individual members of the house of lords, they would then relate that in terms of fact-finding investigations and then it would be pushed on, when the facts have on about established, pushed onto the committee system that we have. but the key point of our recommendation of this, that they have got to be seen as transparently independent, up to now the clark parliaments has been responsible for much of this process. this is not a judgment on the way that he has done his job. it's an attempt to say, look, the amount of work involved in this and above all the public perception of integrity is such, it's got to be a new person doing it. >> but there already is a commissioner for standards in the house of commons so couldn't you just share that one and maybe cut some costs? >> it would be very easy to take the economic argument as we call it, but, that

ignores one very, very important point. first of all, we're not salaried. we're part-time. we come out of a sense of duty and privilege to do the job of scrutinizing legislation coming from the house of commons. >> but, isn't it inevitable that you are going to move towards peers being paid? because one of your other recommendations that they shouldn't receive money any longer for advocacy. >> the point in your question is this. that is not a question of salary. it is a question of using the position of influencing legislation, influencing the life of the, of the chamber in a way which will give you financial gain. that's over influence. that's what we've said we want to ban parliamentary consultancies for that reason. the question of whether or not we'll be salaried that lies in the hands of another committee. people must not confuse what

we've been set up to do with other committee looking entirely at financial backing of the house. we've got to away its results. >> don't you think though this is something of a sad day for house of lords? doesn't it mean the house of lords is no longer full of honorable gentlemen anymore? >> you could take that view. i like to think the vast majority of my colleagues do an honest, very, very, clear-cut job and do it because they're proud to be asked to do it. i don't think it's a sad day for the house of lords. i think it is very realistic day. it is also a day in which we can say it is moving made, moving into new waters, moving into new areas but doing so with a real attempt to gain integrity. >> lord seems. that wasn't all. gordon brown asked the senior salaries review bod i which sets pay for top civil servants and armed forces to look at lords allowance the that followed further paper

allegations some peers ! for second homes. it recommended increase in daily attendance allowance to 200 pounds to include office costs but a reduction in the overnight allowance from 174 to 140 pounds. peers debated the proposed changes just before parliament broke for christmas. >> i know some members of this house are concerned that the net effect of an appropriate or misapplied series of proposals on allowances would lead to number of members disengaging from this house and returning to the house which is largely wealthy, retired, male, southeastern and narrowly based. my lords, we must go out against this we now have a vibrant house which we're all proud and we must retain the wealth of our diversity. >> her conservative opposite number took issue with the claim politicians elsewhere in europe cost less. cost of each peer was only 25,000 pounds he said. >> in france, 110,000 pounds. italy, 136,000 pounds and in

united states of america, 258,000 pounds. even my lords your equivalence, draws 72,000 pounds ahead on average. dare i say it is a little sloppy to implied your lordships cash in a significantly more costly way. because my lords, your lordships are not costly. your lordships i believe do not have snipes in the trough. this report should not and does not change that fact but it might be a little more sensitive to the realities of life. >> my lords i think i said to you before, it is now 43 years since i first entered this palace seeking my first political job. i did so with a sense of awe for what it is and what is stands for, an awe i retain this day. my predecessor on these benches roy jenkins, once likened public trust to carrying a very valuable glass vase across a highly polished floor. it is our turn to do

carrying. voting for this motion tonight will be one way of ensuring that we do not slip. >> i'm astonished that there is not a single person among the woman among 10 members of review body perhaps why they believe mps and peers should have no family life and be content with one bedroom flat like the recommendations that peers should be allowed to travel first class on the grounds they need to work, should dispatch their spouses to the crowded standard class carriages or worse, to share standard class sleepers. it is not peck can i and small-minded but underestimates the contribution made by spouses, and the sacrifice they make all the time so that their partners can contribute to public life. it's the kind of attitude that will disgorge many that could contribute from doing so. >> i believe we're in grave danger of ignoring the impact on the public we serve if we think this

report is only of internal interest and significance to this house. that way, to my mind, leads to the guilded bunker mentality to which the lord speaker referred. i'm especially concerned that we do not continue to imagine that we can ourselves be the final arbiter of our allowance package. my lords that was exactly, how mps got into the quagmire of scandal from which they have yet to emerge. >> peers debating proposed changes to their allowances. there was one other story that dominated debate in westminster in recent months the situation in afghanistan. back in october, gordon brown said he would be prepared to deploy more troops if three conditions were met, that military equipment was adequate, that other questions were prepared to deploy more forces and african army was stronger. gordon brown and conservative leader david cameron both paid visits to troops in afghanistan and gordon brown pledged more

money to tackle so-called ieds or roadside bombs. at the end of october, gordon brown came to the commons to announce he was to send another 500 troops to the country, bringing the military effort to over 10,000. >> faced with the terrorist threat, some of argued most effective strategy to simply defend britain within our own borders, a fortress britain. some ask why british troops are in afghanistan at all if al qaeda can organize in britain and somalia, yemen, other places and internet chat rooms in every part of the world. as long as the afghan-pakistan border areas are location of choice for al qaeda and are the epicenter of global terrorism, it is the government's judgment that we must address the terrorist threat at its source. indeed as long as three quarters of the most series serious terrorist threats to britain have links to the

afghan-pakistan borders we would be fail with our duty if we did not work with our allies to deal with the problem where it starts a more stable and secure, afghanistan and pakistan will help insure a safer britain. >> mr. brown promised a political surge along the military one. david cameron asked about the timetable for handing power over to the after dwans. >> naturally we all want our troops to come home as soon as possible as soon as their job is done but does the prime minister agree with me we must never do, or say anything that gives the impression to the taliban that we will not see this through? nor should we raise any false hope or any false expectationsing amongst the families of british forces that may later be dashed? so can he assure the country and our forces as we approach the general election that any suggestion about timetables for handover will be based on a hard headed assessment of the situation on the ground? isn't it the case that the british public when asked to do what is right, not to

speculate and risk the danger of raising false hopes? >> it is finally become mainstream to talk about the need for a big shift in our strategy in afghanistan. when i first questioned the effectiveness of our action there six months ago, and called for precisely this kind of step change, i was told it was, i was told, i was told it was unpay at this at tick to do so. for the prime minister's change of tone since then has been dramatic and welcome. our approach to our mission in afghanistan has always been simple, we should do it properly or not do it at all. so does the prime minister agree with me at that success is not just about troop numbers? and that focusing on troop numbers has he done today ex-chrigs of other things is putting the cart before the horse? there is no point sending a single extra soldier unless first the strategy they need to succeed in their mission is in place? >> opposition politicians have repeatedly asked

whether british troops in afghanistan have enough equipment particularly helicopters. the defense secretary came to the commons in december to announce a package of cuts to fund 900 million pounds of new equipment for afghanistan. >> we will reduce now the size of our harrier fast jet force by one squadron and close our base and consolidate the harrier force at raf. >> but the money saved would allow for spending elsewhere. >> there will be 22 new chinook helicopters with the first 10 arriving during 2012-2013. >> although more chinooks will be welcome we have to accept that this will be 2013 before we get them. it will be 12 years since we went to afghanistan at that point and doesn't it now indicate the sheer stupidity of the government's decision to cut the helicopter budget

by 1.4 billion in 2004? >> how many will really arrive in 2013 and when will others get there and how does this fit in with president obama's timeline of beginning july from july 2011? would this not have helped if the decision would have been taken a good deal earlier? >> doesn't the right honorable gentleman understand, the deployment of 22 chinooks in afghanistan is welcome many of us believe this should have been ordered many months ago? does he understand that mission was culpable and negligent? as a consequence men have died needlessly? >> as i've said to him he stands as a, member of a party that supported our operations and yet, does not offer and has not offered a single penny more for defense. and he has to square that with the kind of comments he just made. >> i asked our political correspondent, norman smith, if in the run-up to the

general election the situation in again began was a party political issue? >> one of the paradoxes it seems to me is the harder the conflict has gotten in afghanistan, and the more casualties we've gotten, far from it leading in political circles to a growing sense, we've got to get out, my sense actually is people are beginning to sort of consolidate around the idea of, we've got to give it one more go. and whereas, a few months ago, it was quite obl to to see liberal democrats adopting a position, let's get our troops out, it seems to me, they too have noticeably stiffened up their position and in part, because i mean it simply down to a obama and the american push, we are, like it or not, pretty much bound to whatever the americans do. it is almost inconceivable that we could pull out if the americans were piling in. with obama announcing his surge, it seems to me we have very little option but to follow that course and indeed we have. we're sending 500 more

troops. now that doesn't mean we're there forever and a day. obama i think has said, july 2011 i think it is when he said, american troops might be able to come out. we haven't been given that timetable in britain but i do sense that politically afghanistan is not as divisive an issue as, you know the difficulty the war might suggest and most politicians or most parties seem to be of the view let's give it one more go. >> the committee corridor here in the commons and in nearby port kules house is where much of scrutiny of parliament goes on. following arrest of conservative mp damion green in november 2008, a special committee was set up to investigate the circumstances surrounding the affair. mr. green's homes and offices were searched by police and he was interrogated for nine hours as they investigated leaks from the home office. mr. green was later released without charge. mps on the committee were particularly keen to find out how mr. green's house of

commons office came to be searched without a warrant. he gave them his version of events that morning. >> they arrested me. i was at a meeting elsewhere in kent they arrested me when i came out of the building. they took me, we want to take you back to your home. so, i took them back there. about 200 yards before we got there, here? no, you go up to the top of the hill. i eventually directed them in. when i let them in they looked at me and said, so, this is your home, is it? and i decided in the circumstances sarcasm was probably wrong response but there was a circumstantial evidence it was my home. i know where i live. let them in house key. >> [inaudible]. >> indeed. the, and the, policeman who arrested me went outside, went on his mobil, five minutes later eight other people showed up. >> how many? >> eight, eight. that is incident why they

arrested me nine in the morning. they went around to the wrong house this is the should remind the committee. antiterrorist police. can't find member of parliament at home, address published every four years. i never find newspapers of any difficulty finding my home, photographers when they need to take pictures of me. so i was quite surprised. midaway, that's, -- >> sarcasm is very dangerous weapon. >> that's why i didn't use it in that period but i feel now, recently, able to do so. it wasn't a triumph. that's why they didn't arrest me 9:00 in the morning. >> the charge, misconduct in public, in a public office, technically can lead to a life sentence. what's your view of that charge being proffered in this matter? >> indeed while i was being interviewed by the police i was told i faced life imprisonment. as i understand mr. galley was as well. so, they -- >> did you take that threat seriously?

>> i thought it was ludicrous. the circumstance i would have thought it was laughable but the situation is not very humerus when you're banged up. . . >> he discover canned joe had known about the the police investigation for a week before the search. >> during the course of the meeting of the 2nd of december,

i asked the sergeant why she had conducted herself in this manner. the clock of the house interviewed to see that chief superintendent bateman had bamboozled the sergeant and tricked her from keeping the matter from her immediate superiors. >> and he continued. >> in an area which can have some social difficulties for 30 years. never has anyone came to me and spoke to me and said my house was searched, and there was no warrant. there's always been -- when there's a search, there's always a warrant. that was basic. and that's what i expected to happen is a warrant. >> the next witness, chief superintendent ed bateman, rejected claims that he bamboozled commons officials over the raid. mr. bateman, who's in charge of security at the department, denied he tricked the sergeant

in arms to involve her boss, michael martin. >> don't you think with your duty to the house you should have informed her very clearly that she did not have to consent, because this is the basis of the difficulty here. >> if i could just -- i think she probably thought i was patronizing her. if i said after all the conversation conversations we've had that we'd had a conversation that explained why -- i'd had a conversation explaining that, you know, if i then said do you understand what the word consent means, i think she'd have looked at me -- >> excuse me, excuse me, it's not a question of her understanding what the word consent meant, it was a question of her understanding, right, that she did not have to, you know, to give consent and that,

indeed, you would go and apply for a warrant. there's nothing to do with patronizing her, it's simply informing her of the facts which, clearly, you didn't do as she just said for whatever reason. >> my understanding, perhaps i'm not being clear, my understanding is that jill fully knew she did not have to consent, and every conversation we had led me to believe that. but i -- >> led you to believe it, but you did not at any stage tell her that she did not -- >> no stage did i say no. >> so it could have been based on a misunderstanding of her part because you did not have the conversation, you know, that was not clarified. >> everything, everything jill pay said to me, the series of conversations over seven days led me to believe she knew -- >> it was not meant, you did not explicitly have that conversation can, did yousome. >> at no time did i say that she did not v.a. to consent. >> okay. >> and then it was the sergeant

at arms, the official in charge of security in the commons to appear. she admitted an error judgment but said the police didn't tell her as they should have done that she could have insisted on them getting a warrant. >> how could the speaker of the house of commons be left in such a situation as he was left in in which he believed that, you know, that there was a warrant for the search of members of parliament offices and there wasn't. how is the speaker, the person with whom the buck starts, the person who is elected by the members of the house be left in -- >> well i -- sorry. >> go on. >> i think only the assumption that when you say people assume there is warrant. >> don't you think it was part of your responsibility to make sure that the speaker did know that there wasn't a warrant? you know, to make sure that he knew that, that he had that

information? don't you think he should have known that, and you should have, you know, made sure that he understood exactly the position, that there wasn't a moment? >> i think with the wisdom of hindsight, yes, i do wish i had said that, but i'm talking about facts, and i didn't say it. i didn't say it because, you know, the reason that i said that i believed i had the authority to give the consent to church. >> well, i understand -- >> yes, with hindsight, i should have made it clearer. >> mps also wanted to know why police didn't tell her why she didn't insist on a warrant. >> would manipulated be a proper description? >> no, i think i was pressured. i think pressured would be the only word i'd be comfort can bl with is pressured. constrained -- >> made to go in a particular direction? >> yes. i was pointed in a particular direction, yes. >> so may i take it then that the committee can conclude that your view is that you were

pressured to go in a particular direction by the metropolitan police. >> yes, that's -- >> were you conscious of that at the time? >> at the point when i went to seek advice from the clark, i felt under pressure. i didn't feel at the time i was being pressured in a particular direction because they had consent me about this consent -- convinced me about this consent to search. >> by not telling you what the alternatives were? >> that's true. >> so am i correct on your understanding now they failed to o provide you with the necessary information to enable you to make a choice? >> yes. yes, i wasn't given the correct guidance under the pace code that would have opened up a choice. >> well, if that isn't manipulation, what is? >> i think i'd rather not comment about manipulation, but

i can understand what you're getting at. >> well, we note your answer. >> jill pay, and that committee will publish its report in the new year. now, november brought the state opening of parliament, the official ceremony where the queen opens parliament and reads a speech written by the government setting out all the new bills that it wants to introduce. this year was slightly unusual as the session will be cut short by the general election which has to be held by june at the very latest. there was the traditional sight of the max mass ranks of peers clad in their robes, some distinguished faces including the former prime minister margaret, now lady thatcher. the enterprise czar, the two archbishops of canterbury of york. the queen arrived in the traditional irish state coach. ♪ as all the peers stood, the

queen and the duke took their seats on the thrones. >> my lords, you may be seated. >> this year saw a new black rod, the queen's messenger. he's freddie biggest. he made his cursory walk to the entrance of the commons, and the door was slammed in his face which means he has to bang on the door. black rod spoke his usual words of invitation -- >> the queen commands this oval house to attend her majesty immediately in the house of peers. >> and mps made their way from the commons to the lords. rival politicians always talk to each other on this occasion or at least appear to be talking to each other. the speech was handed to her majesty by the lord chancellor, jack straw. >> my lords and members of the house of commons, my

government's overriding priority is to insure sustained growth, to deliver a fair and prosperous economy for families and businesses as the british economy recovers from the global economic downturn. through active employment and training programs, restructuring the financial sector, strengthening the national infrastructure and providing a responsible investment, my government will foster growth and employment. >> opening the debate on the speech, the conservative leader, david cameron, said there were some good things in the program. he urged gordon brown to tackle the expenses issue and call the general election now. >> mr. speaker, what is the point of this government? what else has he got to do? this is the shortest queen's speech since 1997. they've run out of money, out of time, out of ideas, and we've just seen from the prime minister, they've run out of courage as well. >> gordon brown dismissed the

claims that the queen's speech was highlighted by politics. >> ease the anxieties and give new rights to thousands of elderly people, the first-ever digital economy bill, the first-ever legislation to abolish child poverty, the second historic climate change and energy bill, making parents also responsible for antisocial behavior of their children, an equality bill banning cluster bonds, a draft bill to legislate for the all-time 9.7% development target, action on bank bonuses, regulation so that agency workers are never again denied the rights other workers have. >> nick check said the ideas wouldn't solve britain's problems. >> all the pageantry cannot cover up the fact that this is a fantasy queen's speech from a government that's running out of road, from a parliament that's lost the trust of the british

people. a queen's speech which won't give people the help on housing, on bank lending, on adult joblessness that they so desperately need in this recession, a queen's speech which won't fix our rotten politics. >> finally, for now, to a parliamentary first. at the end of october, the doors of the commons chamber were thrown open for a group of young people to come and hold a debate. the speaker welcomed 300 members of the u.k. youth parliament who are aged between 11 and 18. several mps came along to hear them speak, and the leader of the house, harriet harmon, also spoke. the subjects on the agenda, youth crime, lowering the voting anal and university tuition fees. >> i can cannot afford to go to university, but the government will give me a loan. i'll two to uni and i'll get my degree, and then i'll be in debt. but i'll work and hopefully, gradually pay off that debt. tuition fees should not be

abolished. it's unrealistic, unsustainable and not for the best interests of all young people and those yet to come. >> i don't expect the people who don't two to university to pay for my education from their taxes. why should the people who get up at 6:00 in the morning to work as a dustman or my father who didn't go to university and works a builder pay for my education? i should pay for my education, i'll be benefiting from it, i should be the one who incurs the debts and incurs the pleasures afterwards. >> forget about the debt you get into when you go to the university, this country is in 800 billion pounds of debt to begin with. that is the biggest political scandal in this country in a generation. we cannot afford it. university education would suffer, universities are asking for more money. the president of universities u.k. said, u.k. higher education

requires further injections of resources for teaching and learning in particular. universities need more money, mr. speaker, and members who are supporting this motion are going to deprive them out of that. >> when you're educated and you're earning extra money, you're going to be paying a higher tax rate, and you're going to be making more money giving people more jobs, getting this country out of debt in the first place. i think education is one of the only ways we can do this. >> very few young people watching this debate today will see how out of touch, unrealistic and unaffordable scrapping or reducing tuition fees simply is. >> here, here. >> it is acquit bl for students to make a financial contribution to their degree teaching. they stand to gain financially from a degree. education is an investment, and it is rational for students to borrow at this stage of their life cycle to finance such investment. fees encourage students to be more selective in the courses

they choose and discourages students from taking mickey mouse degrees such as beckham studies, golf management and surfing. too many young people are pursuing courses which lead to these sorts of stupidity. >> what is the point if busting your hump, really, over so many years to get great grade levels, doing midnight black coffee sessions and this course work if by the time it comes to it you cannot afford to go to university? if you're just above the threshold for help but your parents can't afford to send you, why have you done all that hard work in order to have somebody else say, i'm sorry, you can't do it? is that person's dream to go to university, it's that person's way out, and who's anybody to crush that dream, to say you cannot do it? so this is what i propose, i propose a lowered university fee

and those who then take that fee and attend university on that rate pay the tax, pay a slightly higher tax on a sliding scale depending on what they earn. this would allow people who would otherwise not be able to attend university to attend it and then people who didn't attend university would not need to pay the tax. >> ludicrous is how one young person described the concept of tuition fee to me. practical is how another described it. the investment fees do not worry me, i'm not looking forward to the shadow of debt i'll be left with. do you know how she describes this, mr. speaker? as the curse of her generation and how she'll be unfairly shackled with debt from the word go. we've campaigned on abolishing university fees. here's just one example of how we did it. these postcards sent to our mps urging them to support us on this campaign, these were

sent from people all over england. now is the time to be heard and time to hear answers. >> members of the u.k. youth parliament showing them how it's done. and that's it for now, do join us again on january 5th for the record, our daily roundup of events here at westminster. until then, good-bye.

>> 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 show. austin goolsbee on the economy, the critter of the segway and co-founder of guitar hero on innovation and entrepreneurship. the art of political cartooning.

>> fox news contributor michelle malkin is our guest on booktv's in depth. the blogger and author of four books including the best-selling culture of corruption takes your calls, e-mails and tweets. three hours with michelle malkin, sunday live at noon eastern on booktv, part of a three-day new year's weekend starting friday. >> again, we are returning live to american university's campaign management institute in about ten minutes. it resumes at 1:30 eastern time. in the meantime, we'll get a look at this morning's headlines from "washington journal." >> host: good morning to stone on our democrats' line, what do you think, is more security needed? >> caller: good morning to you and happy new year to your listeners. >> host: good morning. >> caller: i cannot believe an unsophisticated yes tin was able

to virtual cause a midair holocaust. and now we're bringing prisoners here to the illinois state prisons to be incarcerated? we still haven't learned yet. this is the most despicable breach of security since 9/11, and i will not support any more people coming here until those issues are resolved. now, i am flummoxed over this, and the administration needs to get up and deal with this situation. and we don't need any partisan rhetoric or this name calling, this is a very national, serious incident. >> host: and "the politico"'s 44 posting this morning, their focus on the president does indicate that president obama may say something about the incident in the administration's efforts sometime this week. to new york city, mike's on our independent lines. is more security needed? >> caller: yes, hello, good morning. >> host: good morning. >> caller: is more security needed? absolutely not.

people need to do their jobs. what happened is there was a man in a suit, a very well-dressed man who got this nigerian onto the plane without a passport. so this man should have never been on the plane to begin with, number one. number two, this man's father who is a very high-level banker in nigeria -- >> host: right. >> caller: -- called the fbi and told the fbi that his son was an extreme radical. so between the fact that the father called the fbi and informed them that the son is an extreme radical, right there he should have been on a no-fly list which already exists. and number two, the guy didn't have a pass port, so he shouldn't have got on the plane, and number three, who is the well-dressed man? they need to look at the videos and see why the is main -- is the mainstream media not bringing up what i just brought in? >> host: michael, thanks for the input. homeland security secretary

janet napolitano was on yesterday, here's what she had to say about the incident. >> one thing i'd like to point out is that the system worked. everybody played an important role here, the passengers and crew of the flight took appropriate action. within literally an hour to 90 minutes of the incident occurring, all 128 flights in the air had been notified to take some special measures in light of what had occurred on the northwest airlines flight. we instituted new measures on the ground and at screening areas both here in the united states and in europe where this flight originated. so the whole process of making sure that we respondro and effet very smoothly. >> host: as we come can back from the homeland security secretary's comments yesterday, here's how "the new york post" is playing it, clueless, homeland chief on air bomber, hey, no biggie.

bossier city, louisiana, on our republican line, good morning to you. >> caller: good morning. i quit flying commercial air about eight years ago. >> host: can you tell us who you flew for? >> caller: what airline? >> host: yeah. >> i wasn't a pilot, i was just a passenger. anyway, the last time i flew, my wife and i were both completely disabled, i'm a 29-year air force disabled veteran, and every time we would go through i have little metal clips on my suspenders -- >> host: right. >> caller: and they would nearly undress me and pat me down. we actually missed our flights because of all the investigation it put on me and my wife. >> host: if that happens all the time to you, isn't that where you give yourself instead of the usual one or two hours, you give yourself three hours? >> caller: oh, that wasn't the problem. we couldn't get through the line

before they was able to take us through. and we have to go in a wheelchair everywhere we go, because we can't walk. anyway, one other reason i quit flying commercial aircraft, i've learned they're taking uncertified aircraft mechanics to work on airplanes. i worked on airplanes for 29 years and when i heard that, i said, no more, i'm not flying on commercial in airlines anymore. but the airlines are overkilling one area and underkilling another area. and i believe that, and believe me, i enjoyed flying all my life but because of that, i'm not going to fly anymore. if i can't get there in my car accident i'm not going to go. >> host: thanks for the call. or to cincinnati, anita is more needed for airport security? >> caller: no. i've got two comments to make, and then i'll headache g hang up -- hang up. >> host: okay. >> caller: and, well, number one

i think with the amount of security that you already have to go can through now is sufficient, i think ms. napolitano was probably caught off guard, but i think she was right in a way. with the sophistication of chemicals now, and i was a medical librarian at uc for 30 years, that can be carried on the body, i mean, we've had the cia come into our library and take stuff out that people can carry. people in the united states are going to have to decide whether they want to go through, i think, what they call body searches or that kind of carrying on because it's no longer, i think, a question of civil liberties, i think it's a question of whether you want to get blown off the plane or not. that's number one. and then my final comment is that one of the things i've

heard over and over from passengers were that the young man was so young. and these kids who are doing this, these are not french people seemingly. he had a $2 million apartment in central london, his dad apparently in frustration called our embassy because he was scared that he was going to do something. i think we're going to have to get, be a bit more like the british and become a bit more sophisticated in worrying about not only the al-qaeda outside of the country, but our home grown young men and women and those studying in -- >> host: well, let's take a look at how the story is being reported in a couple of british publications, the sun, 25 brits in bomb plot with a picture of the suspect over the weekend. also from the u.k. the telegraph this morning, detroit terror

attack. yemen is the true home of al-qaeda. this is an article in the telegraph online, it may be harder to contain a smile, but the frightening truth that emerges from the christmas day etaingen -- attack on flight 253 is that both standpoints are technically true. electronic eavesdropping and more enticive security procedures al-qaeda and its associates are both desperate and inventive. next up is jim on our republican line from raleigh, north carolina. jim, what about airport security? >> caller: well, maybe we need to take a page from the israeli playbook. unfortunately, we still are in denial that there is international and now, as you say, a domestic al-qaeda plot against the united states. when we come to grips with that and start fighting it like a war instead of a criminal information or a -- investigation or a possible criminal activity, then we'll be

all the better. i'm just, i'm just surprised that no one has called in and said that this is george bush's fault. now -- >> host: explain that, what's your reasoning behind that? >> caller: what? >> host: that this is george bush's fault? >> caller: oh, i said i was surprised that no one has called in -- >> host: okay, i see what you mean. [laughter] i see what you mean. >> caller: after the 9/11 commission came out with their report that there needed to be more cooperation, interagency cooperation with these watch lists, it does amaze me that they were able to miss this, especially with the state department having a walk-in source reporting this individual. so hopefully they'll get their game together because this was a very, very lucky incident that we thwarted, especially for the passengers. but they're going to have to take another look at it, as always. >> host: it might be that we hear from the administration

further this week. politico's reporting that the president may have something to say, a statement about it this week. his spokesman, robert gibbs, did have something to say about it yesterday on "face the nation. ". >> the president has asked for two reviews to take place as a result of this potential terror attack. the first is a watch listing review. this individual was on a list of what's called a database list based on the information that the government gathered from his father. that put him on a list of about 550,000 different people, the different departments and agencies can log in. the selectee lists which is for second screening and no-fly lists encompass in total about 18,000, so we want to insure that all of the information that needs to go to decision makers gets to where it needs to go. the president has asked for a review of the procedures which, in some cases, are several years

old. secondly, the president has asked the department of homeland security to review our detection capabilities to insure that somebody that might be carrying explosive like this individual was can't get through a screening stage like they did in amsterdam. >> host: another half hour or so for you to weigh in, is more needed in terms of airport security? the inside the daily news, a two-page spread on the story, the system worked, but they have a piece here on missed clues about the attempt on christmas. umar had a one-way ticket from lagos to amsterdam and amsterdam to detroit. he checked no bags carrying just a small back pac. the suspect's banker dad had warned the u.s. embassy in november that his son might be a danger. the ongoing assault on al-qaeda in yemen including two massive rounds of air strikes and terrorist leaders should

have heightened vigilance for revenge, and a an al-qaeda operative in yemen made an online video december 21st threatening the u.s. for revenge on the air strikes saying, quote, we are carrying a bomb to hit the enemies of god. and a look at the suspect from the daily news in new york. good morning to phillip on our independent line, is more -- good morning, phillip, go ahead. >> caller: happy new year, sir. jeez, this is such a complicated course here. as far as more security at the airports, granted it could be a little bit more secure, i guess, a little bit more like i've heard the israelis, it's like a four-hour wait to get on a plane compared to america they say two hours. so i think they're a little bit more strict on their operation. >> host: right. >> caller: in israel. but as far as the terrorists, he's on a possible terrorist list but he's not on the no-fly

list. i think this has got to do with the homeland security. wasn't that because of all these organizations didn't combine their knowledge to find out about these culprits that did 9/11? and is it the same problem that's going on? if a guy's on a possible terrorist list, he shouldn't be, he should be on the no-fly list. isn't that common sense? >> host: so what's that bar that you raise somebody from being on a watch list to the no-fly list, what's the bar the government should set? >> caller: you should at least have a double check on your person. take him to the side, you know? there's no reason -- see, america's got the idea that the more people we get coming to this country, the more money they'll bring here to spend, to -- tourism. it's one of our few industries

in america that's still going, you know? so they want people to come here to the united states. if they slow it down, they think they're going to make it too tough for people to come here to spend their money. >> host: phillip, thanks for your comment. let's hear what the folks at twitter.com say. anthony writes in, no changes necessary, i'm done with the fear factor. that is so easily exploited by the right, caller was correct, do the job. back to the brag of nate -- blog of nate silver writing about the incidence of airline terrorism. he writes the bureau of transportation statistics provides a wealth of information on air traffic. for this exercise i'll look at both domestic flights within the u.s. and international flights whose origin or destination was within the united states. i will not look at flights that transimportanted car go and crew only, only from october 1999

through september 2009. over the past decade, according to bts, there have been 99,320,209 commercial air departures, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures. he further write, these departures flew a collective 69,415,000 miles, that means there has been one terrorist incident per 11 billion miles flown. this distance is equal to 1.4 million trips around the diameter of the earth, 24,000-plus round trips to the moon or two round trips to neptune. you can read that full post online at 538.com. here's quaker, pennsylvania, and james on our republican line. is more security needed? >> caller: how you doing? unfortunately, i wish not. i just noticed we just accept

more and more of these little losses of our little liberties like the amenities like carrying on water bottles, your own baggings, and that's the way, you know, it's the frog in the tepid water. we're going to lose -- also europe is slowly surrendering their freedom of press and speech because of their muslim populations to appease them. and this is the way civilizations die, not by murder, but by suicide. and i'm listening to the day after this attempted attack to listen to c-span i didn't feel i was living in the country can i was born in. 75% of your callers had a knee jerk reaction that was either against our government or against america or -- even white people, there was, like, 60% of your callers were black who seemed like they had an allegiance to this guy coming in. it's very disturbing. nobody talked about where this guy is from. let's talk about nigeria.

is nigeria a place where it's a beautiful utopia? no. what is nigeria? it is a partitioned country, north and south. the muslims live in a certain area, and the christians live somewhere else, in the south, i believe -- >> host: well, i'll follow up to bring a story from "the wall street journal" this morning, incident sparks concern about terror in knew jeer that. this morning in "the wall street journal," despite the violence, though, there has been little evidence so far to suggest al-qaeda or like-minded group cans have established a significant presence. in recent months, though, there have been isolated incidents that have worried u.s. officials. west africa could become vulnerable to the sort of networks that are attractive in north and east africa, and that's from this morning from the weet journal. here's -- "wall street journal." good morning, what about airport security? >> host: good morning,

mr. scanlon. >> caller: this is basically what i remember richard clark talking about during the 9/11 commission. what i see is that you had a nigerian individual calling in about his son, and nothing was done about that. >> host: right. >> caller: and during 9/11 we had british officials calling the fbi, and nothing much was done about that. the caller that called two callers ago stated that we give them a carte blanche to come in here and, let's say, be tourists. and i can can recall personally in fairfield, connecticut, the terrorists stayed at the days inn, and that was half a mile from a convenience store that had a lot of middle eastern people that could have provided any type of material for them. if the police are too busy profiling, then the things like negligence are just an apparent issue that are going to allow that to occur. >> host: thanks for the call. next up is north carolina, asheville and lou on o our

indent line. >> caller: good morning, thank you, c-span. >> host: you bet. >> caller: first off, i'd like to reference the obviously republican called back a few moments ago with his cynical remarks about bush. no, i don't think this latest incident was bush's fault at all, but as an independent, i'd like to add in reference to the richard green thing whether we need more security, i'm wondering how long it's going to take before we all have to remove our underwear now at airports. thank you. have a good day, america. >> host: thank you. good morning, go ahead. >> caller: i think that i see now why so many young men were picked up from different countries around the world and taken to black sites because it's very easy to condition these young men to do these kinds of missions at a time when people are trying to take our government away from this need them to do this to try to put fear into the whole world, into

us and everyone. i'm conservative, and i really think that we need to go back to our constitution, we need to preserve the rights of our people, and we need to stop turning our government over to people who, obviously, care nothing about us, nothing about the world, nothing about creation. i, i think that, you know, these guys -- how could that guy get burned in his groin the way he was, and he's sitting there like he's dazed? somebody had tampered with his mind and sent him on a mission. >> host: "the politico" writes this morning about what this could do to the president's plans, the administration's plans on guantanamo. the bomb plot complicates get no plans, they write that this morning yemenis represent almost half the remaining 200 prisoners at gitmo. it could spell more trouble for barack obama's plans to close the island prison while transferring a limited number of detainees to a prison in the u.s.

six will return home earlier this month and hoped more transfers would follow. here's washington, d.c., deborah is a democrat, and what are your views about airport security? >> caller: i flew yesterday from detroit, actually, to baltimore. i saw no increased security at all. >> host: none? really? >> caller: none. it took no time at all to get through security, there was nothing extra. >> host: what's, what's the secret, deborah? it sounds like everybody else encountering it this weekend, at least -- [laughter] >> caller: no, we got through in record time as far as i could tell, so there was absolutely no difference. i wonder about the, the attention paid to africa for one thing and whether -- and i, i believe that the state department needs to put more attention into africa. and i think it's always a question of too little, too late.

there's a lot of attention, obviously, paid to the middle east, and this, this is maybe a middle eastern issue, but i do think that africa gets underrepresented in terms of the amount of attention the state department pays. and also consular training and how much, how much more work consular officers might need in terms of screening. there's a lot of attention paid to families coming over here and they can't stay -- >> host: yeah. >> caller: but i question where the focus is. >> host: so you see it as this, that the man, the suspect it's a broader issue than just his radicalization or alleged radicalization in yemen or elsewhere, but you think it's an issue that needs to be addressed by the u.s. with african nations? >> caller: i do. i think, well, with african nations and with consular policies in general and who they let in, who they don't.

and i think it may be a question of switching focus on, in general, in the consular office. >> host: well, thanks for calling in this morning. mitch mcconnell can, the senate leader was on yesterday this week with george stephanopoulos and talked about his response saying more needs to be done, here's what he had to say. >> well, our leader on this issue is senator susan collins of maine, suggested to me yesterday when we were talking about the question she's going to be asking which is how does a person on the terrorism watch list get a u.s. visa? particularly when you consider that his father was concerned about his son's proclivities? this fall? i think there's much to investigate here. in addition to that he, obviously, had some kind of connections with yemen, and we know that there was an imam in yemen who may have been the inspiration for the fort hood attack. there's much to investigate here, it's amazing to me that an

individual like this who was sending out so many signals could end up getting on a plane going to the u.s. >> florida, next, richard. is more airport security needed? on our independent line, good morning. >> caller: yes, good morning, bill, happy new year. >> host: to you too. >> caller: it's been great listening to you all these years. i think anybody could have guessed this is going to happen. i mean, janet napolitano, there's where the problem starts and president obama going around the world telling us that our enemies that the u.s. needs to be punished. janet napolitano as homeland security directer is almost a joke. when she was the governor of arizona, she wouldn't even give the state police the weapons they needed to fight the drug cartels. so consequently they moved in and took over the cities. and phoenix became the kidnap

capital of the world. now, what scares me, if it hadn't have been for a -- then she sits there and tells us that the system worked as advertised. the system failed big time. if it wasn't for a dutch citizen who jumped on this terrorist and was able to disarm and mitigate the situation, we would have 290 dead people and possibly dead people on the ground. >> host: richard, let me ask you what was the one thing that failed the most? a caller mentioned that this guy should have been on the no-fly list. is that the biggest missed opportunity? >> caller: that's a glaring failure. it reminds me of 9/11 when these reports from our intel agencies sat on the desks of our president clinton and possibly president bush, and no one investigated. >> host: yeah. >> caller: we had the pictures in the background of all the terrorists in the reports with the intel people, and they did not act on them.

>> host: thanks for weighing in, about 15 more minutes of your calls, up to about 7:45 eastern on airport security, is more needed? other stories in the news this morning, the protests in iran over the weekend, iran battles reinvigorated opposition, clashes leave several dead. this is the front page of "the washington post" this morning, and i will pull this off for an update, the bbc online has reported on monday iranian state television is saying that 15 people have been kill inside the confrontation between the opposition and security forces. so i'll show you some photos this morning from "the washington post," photos and i will warn you that some of these photos are graphic of the violence in tehran over the weekend. as we continue taking your calls, orlando, here is francis on our or republican line. what about airport security? go ahead. >> caller: morning. >> host: good morning. >> caller: airport security, well, the entire security of the country is just a laugh, a big

laughing matter, you know in? a terrorist is a terrorist like a smuggler's a smuggler. no matter what you're smuggling, a terrorist is a terrorist. he should have been investigated much more thoroughly. you don't have to be on a no-fly list. he should not have been allowed to travel. >> host: so as soon as his father turned over his name to the embassy and he was put on a watch list, he should have been, there should be heightened awareness? >> caller: oh, sure, certainly. if you're a terrorist, you're a terrorist. >> host: michigan next up, go ahead on our democrats line. >> caller: michigan? >> host: i'm sorry, yes, michigan. go ahead. >> caller: yes. you know, this little small incident probably will happen about a billion times the last 20 years or so. we had, when the president last

campaigned, we had people there armed with ak-47s, nobody get all whiffed up about that. now, you know, here we go again with this fear mongering. i guess the next thing you're going to have to do is take all your clothes off and go walking through the checkout in the the nude, i guess. me and my wife flew to las vegas, and i'll never fly again. >> host: what, what happened on that flight that made you say you don't want to fly? >> caller: oh, they almost wanted to test your privates or something. this has gotten crazy. you know, all the murder and hate, even when obama was campaigning. you hear people out there saying kill him! kill him! kill him! did anybody else get arrested for that? so that's my comment. >> host: a couple of looks at

x-ray technology that you have encountering or will be encountering, two types of x-ray, the x-ray back scanner is one, also the millimeter wave screening, and "the new york times" this morning in a look at airports across the country here in "the new york times"es that are using the millimeter, millimeter scanner that you will begin to see more of. to centerville, virginia, and alicia on our independents' line. what do you think about airport security? >> caller: i think, i have two comments, first of all. airport security, i think airport security right now is fine if we had properly-trained tsa inspectors who knew exactly what their job was. but i think the biggest breakdown in this case was the same breakdown that we had in 9/11, that everybody had information and there was no coordination, no way to coordinate that information to avert any type of terrorist activity. and then the second comment i

wanted to make refers to a caller a couple calls ago who stated that she felt the state department hadn't been paying enough attention to africa. >> host: yes. >> caller: if we remember correctly, hillary clinton's first major trip was to africa, she was reaching out to the african nation. she was there, i think, for ten days, and it was fabulously noted and chroniclized on the web site as she went on the trip the, but the only thing i think people took away from that trip was the comment that she made when she was with the press and they asked her who was really making the decisions -- >> host: right. >> caller: her or bill clinton, and that was what people took away from it. they don't realize that the state department -- and after that comment i went to look to see why was she in africa, and i realized what she was attempting to do there. so i think before anyone jumps on the state department, they have made africa a priority, they did go before congress a couple of weeks ago, senator

clinton was there when they were talking about the war, or secretary of state, excuse me, when they were talking with mcchrystal talking about the war, and a couple senators commented how much work the u.s.aid was doing, and they needed funding for 30,000 more people to go and make the kind of contact on the ground to get africa in shape. that was my comment. >> host: thanks for those comments, too, and back to the blogs for a minute, and the blog of nate silver this morning on the odds of airborne terror. he writes further that assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles an hour, those airplanes were aloft for a total of 463,431,261 hours, therefore there's been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours of airborne operation. that blog this morning you'll find at 538.com.

another blog this morning, politico's blog -- the hill, excuse me, briefing room from the hill writing about senator lieberman's appearance yesterday on fox news sunday. lieberman, yemen will be tomorrow's war if preemptive action is not taken, and you can read that at the hill.com and their blog. to columbia, south carolina, jim. good morning, republican line, hi there. >> caller: you know what really bothers me is we're not going to have to pay $50,000 a day to incarcerate that guy. that money will grow. we've got to take care of his medical bills for the rest of his life. in ten years, twenty years that'll equal over a million dollars, so these people saying why don't we have capital punishment for this incredible act of terrorism, why not have capital punishment for terrorists? >> host: so you're saying, jim, an attempted terrorist attack like this should have capital punishment? >> caller: why not? we're already strained majorly with our costs.

you had a caller two calls ago asking why we would commit capital punishment on this fellow and how cruel we are, but at the same time he's going to ask the government for benefits tomorrow and where's my medical benefits, where's this? but yet here we've got extra costs because he wants to get on a plane and blow it up. for that kind of heinous crime, put 'em out of their misery, and who cares if it's seen as jihad or they get their wish? >> host: it's a busy travel week, and the sun times writes on about our topic, and their headline is safe, not safe enough, powder carried by suspect on detroit-bound jet would have been detected by proper equipment. feds vow sweeping review. to jacksonville, florida, good morning on our democrats' line. >> caller: good morning. i have a point, and i'll try to be suck isn't as possible. i certainly agree with the

caller earlier that talked about coordination of services. not only nationally be our fbi and with our own agencies, but also internationally as well. i also see a huge gap in terms of the consistency of the screening at airports. around the world. we seem to do a fairly decent job here in our country, certainly we have our alert grading and those kinds of things, but i don't know if internationally if we're really coordinating those services across country lines and if they are, also, attending to the same kinds of alerting system that we have. i mean, why was this guy able to get through a screening of an airport outside of our country? >> host: so you're thinking that perhaps he would have been caught if he had -- let's say he was flying from -- >> caller: from detroit out of the country can.

>> host: yeah, or droit to l.a., whatever. >> caller: possibly. possibly so. i'm not saying for sure, but i think it would have been harder, definitely, for him to have gotten through our screening positive here. i'm not saying i think it's perfect, but i think our screening process here is a lot more stringent than it is in other countries, and i think if we as a global community could have a more consistent screening process across those lines, i think that would help also. >> host: we appreciate your input, and it was a bit of a déjà vu in detroit, in fact, that's the headline this morning in the "detroit free press", flight 253, déjà vu, it does feel surreal. this is the story about the second concern over a nigerian passenger that flew into detroit yesterday, same flight and it turned out that everything was okay. he was simply ill and had spent a long amount of time in the bathroom, but it was not, not a terrorist incident. pittsburgh is next, john on our gop line.

go ahead, john. >> caller: good morning. >> host: hi there. doing fine. >> caller: good. bill, i've just been watching, you know, bits and pieces of all this stuff. i saw the homeland security napolitano's her name? >> host: yes. >> caller: made some remanages that just -- remarks that just baffled me. i can't believe she'd come out and say that the system actually worked. and if you kind of, you know, connect the dots, you know, with not only her comments, but, you know, eric holder made a remark that, you know, simply stated the facts. didn't say anything more, you know? and it's what he's not saying that concerns me, you know? he said if this would have taken place, that many people would have been killed. but the concern, you know, to me

seems like there's, these officials, even something that president obama said that, you know, really shocked me, he made a comment a couple months back where he said or a few weeks, i'm not sure when, but he said something that he had planned to do something, you know, regarding this terrorism issue but not until america knew what it was to fail. you know? that may not be verbatim, but he said something that, you know, he was going to do something once he realized what it was like to fail. >> host: new york's peter king weighed in on the detroit incident over the weekend. he was against on face -- a guest on face the nation, here's what he had to say. >> yes. i think we have to face up to the reality that we live in a dangerous world where islamic terrorists want to kill us, and, yes, there is a brief violation of privacy, but on the other hand, we can save thousands of lives, to me we have to make that decision, and we have to

come down on the side of saving thousands of lives. and that's why i think it's important for the president or the secretary to be more out there and reminding the people just how real this threat was and how deadly it is. for the first three months of this administration, they refused to use the word terrorism, and even at his speech at west point, the president did not use the word, terrorism. this is a teaching moment, to use the president's term, and i believe that he or the secretary or the vice president or the attorney general should be out there reminding the american people saying, this shows how deadly this enemy is and why we have to do whatever we possibly can to protect the american people. >> host: and a tweet from donald who writes, do the scanners pick up things inside of the body? because the next step will be to surgically implant someone with an explosive. here's sterling heights, michigan, brian on our republicans' line. what do you think of airport security? >> caller: i believe that the security is fine, i don't think that is the huge, major problem

there. i want to bring up something i haven't heard anybody talk about yet. now, this omar guy was on this no-fly list. there's also the possible terrorist list, how many names are on that list? who was checking these lists? that's what's getting to me. we don't know who's checking them or how to find this one guy's name out of, what, 500,000 people? so i just want to get some input or information on who is watching these lists, when do they check the lists? it's just absolutely incredible how we have so many names on the list but yet no one is even looking at the list to stop people from getting onto planes. thank you very much, and i look forward to "washington journal. >> host: john on our republican line, go ahead. >> caller: yes, i think -- >> host: john, make sure you mute your telephone or radio so we can hear your comments. >> caller: anyway, i think --

>> host: john, i'm having a little trouble hearing you, sorry about that. worcester, massachusetts, let's hear from daniel, last call on the airport security issue, go ahead. daniel, make sure you turn down your television or radio. folks, it'll feed back, so mute that and go ahead with your comments. daniel, from -- make sure you mute that television or radio, or you're just going to confuse yourself. go ahead. >> caller: yes. airport security is well needed. we all know that airport security makes, you know, great jobs, and the reason why, you know, people visit is because the the airlines have to keep their jobs. but what, why we can do something like what the chinese do do? >> host: what's that? >> guest: before you get a visa to china, the same document to

state department in china and they approve of it before so we can also take. that's my contribution. >> right now we're going to take you live back to the campaign management institute at american university. because of a technical problem, we are joining this afternoon's first the seminar in progress. first up today this afternoon, a look at themes and messages for modern campaigns. live coverage, now, on c-span2. >> somebody came in and said, okay, so we can really effectively compete in about 25-30 seats. and he looked at it and said, but we can't win. if i win all those seats, i have to win every single seat, maybe i'm going to get the majority back. all right? i need a -- and he said, the chances of me winning every single one are just incredibly remote. i need to enlarge the amount of

seats i have and basically got a response of, well, you know, have you taken a look at the data? this is the way it is, this is changing perspective. so he went out and got a redistricting person to take a look at all those seats, and he more than doubled that list. that doubling of that list allowed for the majority. everything he did after that was interesting, but he asked the

we came back and approached this election. how do we win ohio? how do we win indiana? how we win north carolina war south carolina? question reallyor south carolina? question really was how we win independence and married women and children? the problem facing john mccain's campaign was figuring out how they were going to win in virginia, pennsylvania, we list the state's. what was the common theme? those particular groups. how were we going to win independents on a large enough scale to impact all those states? there was a focus on single

states and as a result of obama's focus, we will go through this list again. the groups of individuals 18-29 in particular and african-american picked up states like virginia, traditional republican states, and indiana. indiana ten years ago was the moral equivalence almost of one of the most republican states you can imagine. the obama team looked at how to build a majority coalition and they focused on independents, catholics congressional and specifically 18-29. winning 18-29 vby a 2-1 margin. that was a critical element in

the 2006 election. this was actually the second cycle. what the obama team was able to do was take it and institutionalize the operation to get a higher turnout of 11% to 12% in 2006. it was around 17% to 18% in 2008. let's go back to this. using a structured approach based on the understanding of potential environmental elements. how do you do that? there are two things i want to go through. situation awareness. what situation awareness is is how well your understanding of the current environment actually matches reality. that sounds like of course you would want to do that. you would be absolutely surprised how many people don't

want to hear bad news. how many people are willing not to tell them the bad news and as a result organizations and campaigns do the wrong thing. it is remarkable. i will give you a simple example. in 1998, republicans were expecting because of an off year election to pick up -- and had six years as president, the expectation was for republicans to pick up a bunch of seats. in reality we ended up losing five or six. newt gingrich stepped down because political people -- the political campaign committee told him he was going to win all these seats. you have likely voters and registered voters. likely voters in terms of surveys was coming back and giving wonderful news. we were going to win. it was great.

registered voters were telling us a different story. registered voters were saying that was the university you were looking at, we may have some significant problems here. everybody said likely voters say this. what it is is the equivalent of this is what i want to believe and i have something that backs up what i believe so i believe it. that is the equivalent of if you have ever been in a car and your gas tank is almost empty it would be like flipping the glass to the middle and say i have half a tank. the signals that you use to let you know you just changed it to make you what you want it to be but it doesn't reflect reality. situation awareness is hard to get. in terms of the military, the military spent a huge amount of time training people to understand situation awareness because this is one of those things that you are a fighter

pilot and somebody is on your tail and you don't know, you will be dead. you had better understand and really effectively evaluate what your true situation is or you will end up politically in the same situation. information that was being fed newt gingrich, dan let him know he had someone on his tail and as a result t down. real party registration identification. as opposed to let me give you another example. just prior to this last election in new jersey and virginia, there were survey reports done that said republicans are at an all-time low, 20%. in the exit polls we were at

33%. the surveys were saying -- that was one of the low points in terms of going back over time. republicans are down to 20%. that would be one of the most cataclysmic shifts in party identification the party has ever seen in its entire history. in terms of the country. a staggering shift. what that also -- a lot of democrats want to believe that. republicans are just hemorrhaging. if we had been at 20% as opposed to 33, not only could we not have won to virginia and new jersey, we should have been blown out in new jersey and virginia. if you have lost almost half of your republican vote, how can you go back and win one state in

virginia, how can you win that in the next election but that is generally -- how can you win a state like new jersey even with all the things going on if you lost almost half your party and the answer is you can't. what you have is information that was telling you your tank was half full when in fact it wasn't. that is pretty common. it is very difficult to read through and understand in terms of what is real data and what is not. the better you get at it the more effective you are going to be. what is the device you use? i tend to use exit polls, actual accounts of party. i trend that overtime in terms of how people shift. you may ask questions of individuals in survey form, people you suspect may have been

switching parties. you validate a lot of assumptions. accepting the data as was done in this case from virginia and new jersey ended up giving democrats a really false reading. losing new jersey -- the other thing is that was a local situation, that is what republicans used to say all the time. it wasn't something broad. it was a fundamental mystery of where it was. demographics. understand the demographics of the area you are dealing with. florida is going to present a different set of dynamics and problems. montana is going to present a different set of dynamics than north carolina. you have different types of populations in different states with different emphasis. go the other direction too.

just because you have differences does not mean you don't have common threads. you do have differences that will potentially have slightly different approaches. i don't care what state you are looking at, unemployment is deriving a lot of behavior. if you are employer in california, an older population, in the midwest the trade issues may pop up in terms of jobs going overseas. ultimately at this point it is one issue in terms of unemployment. there are different ways it can be translated as you talk to those individual states. previous political behavior, look at the election returns. where are stronger or weaker areas? you want to use a variety of races. as many as you can get your hands on. key issues in present political discourse. what are people talking about?

one of the things you are seeing the obama administration understands as they discuss health care and the unemployment rate is going up and they have been pretty straightforward especially this last week, they are ready to put to the economy. they want to get there. they want to get on it and -- they understand everybody wants to understand what to do in terms of unemployment and if you're not trying to get an answer and say you are talking about some other subject it seems you don't understand the problems americans are facing. they have clearly done this. the strengths and weaknesses of your candidate and your opponent. it will be easy to get your opponent. the committees are geared up to do research. your candidate will do research.

everybody wants to attack the opponent. it is their favorite thing to do. the most difficult thing to do is the same assessment on yourself. what are my true weaknesses? nobody wants to do that. no one wants to say you have a structural flaw here. imagine how pleasant conversation that is. you need to do an effective pajama as you can becaujob as yr side will. you assume they will do as good a job as you have done that. you have talented people doing that. not all strengths and weaknesses are the same. going back to that 98 election. one of the things republicans rather than picking up for lost time, we decided to focus, there

were individual things they wanted to focus to award bill clinton. that monica lewinsky thing. people were very unhappy about monica lynn wednesday but there were policies the democratic members -- they were ok with the policies. the democrats overall, al gore painfully reminds us -- the next sequence of assumptions you're going to operate under, what are the key issues likely to be? this is pretty straight forward. it is about unemployment and the economy but what other items? we have this situation, what does that do in terms of increasing people's concerns about terrorism or unemployment? we will get a sense of that.

what in the environment is likely to change or is unknown and what will remain the same? this is the most problematic. i go back to the unemployment number. it is going to change, just don't know where to. that is the key. also, as just happened on christmas day, all of a sudden the environment changed. you need to think through the possibilities so that you understand how your strategy is fit. in terms of that context. this is the context in which you set up a strategy. going back to the dynamic of al gore vs. john mccain, john mccain wanted to make a clear break and go in a different direction. that is a different context from al gore to didn't make a break

when he probably should have. weaknesses and strengths are likely to be important. i was just emphasizing that. not that everyone has weaknesses but do they matter in the campaign? i was involved in one race, the big attack spot, the opponent's father had bought his son a house and therefore relieved him of some financial responsibility in terms of what he could do for income and there was a contribution -- an illegal contribution. /my son a house i would do it. that has nothing to do with running for congress. other things we got into --

indicated or convicted -- what is the impact on both parties in other political races? the view of the republican party and the democratic party is pretty grim and very hard for both candidates from either side to get that upward swing that the democrats had in 2008. the other thing, and this is really important and you should take time -- what are your opponent's likely strategies? not what strategies would you like them to adopt to make it easier for you to win but what strategies they will actually do. the strategy was painfully obvious. our response to the change strategy was to run an ad comparing britney spears and paris hilton.

how do you think that matches up? you can't define your opponent's strategy. you may be able to give context to that strategy that makes it look less desirable. i will go back to 1988. democrat michael dukakis was trying to run as a competent democrat. that has an interesting dynamic. george bush was succeeding in remarkably popular president in ronald reagan and saying i am going to do the same policies. what is the point of competence and people agreed. george bush, ronald reagan has done really well here. you can use something to define a context to what the strategy is but they get to choose their strategy. to give you a sense of how fluid things can be, both john mccain

and barack obama won their primaries because of iraq. when we got to the campaign, the sequence of the housing market, gas prices, because of energy, the wall street meltdown, all those events came along in a row. the obama team in this case had a better idea -- ability to adjust to that. let me give you a scene in terms of where they were ahead in terms of having fought for what they were doing. i don't know if you remember there was a debate last time and this was the height of the wall street crisis. mccain decided to suspend the campaign and come back to they see and work on a bill to resolve it and he didn't do anything including a debate that

friday. from my point of view that was not a bad decision. what he was going to do was that was the focal point everyone was going to engage on and if you could really come up with some creative stuff you need money to get it on television. everyone was going to know what your proposal was. he got back and the weakness of that decision was he had no economic policy that he was promoting in contrast to what obama was going to do. both of them sat in front of george bush. if you are going to do something like that and make a decision like that, a few need to have a direction laid out when you made that decision in this particular case. he simply arrived, went to a meeting and declared it over and went to the debate and completely undercuts people's

confidence in his ability to make economic decisions which is difficult anyway because of his statement that the economy wasn't a strong area. the other element when you look at assumptions, i will do this in contrast. the way people for example consume -- dramatically different. in 1980 when reagan got elected fifty-two million viewers watched network news. by the time you hit the 2006 elections when republicans lost the majority that dropped to 26.one million. there was a huge population growth. the way people got their news has structurally changed. i can't begin to tell you how many people are involved with campaigns, worry nightly about what the network news is going to cover.

it is cable or the blogs or the social media or what is driving these stories. this has a role but it is not the dominant role that it was in 1980. putting together your campaign plans, the first thing you need to address is who and why. who is going to vote for you and why. i have a little bit of a great line from david cameron who is head of the conservative party in great britain. hopefully the next prime minister. the purpose of political party is not to win elections but to prove you are ready to govern. who is going to vote for un why. in terms of understanding that, do you have an agenda that lets you build a majority coalition? when you are thinking through your majority coalition you need to define that decision, what groups are reliable in your column and how you hold them.

what groups are the key swing groups and how you attract them. project what your opponent coalition will look like and identify where the friction between the two exist. this last one is incredibly important. think through how your opponent -- so you understand where the overlaps are. i go back to 92-94. independents and republicans, by 11. that was the point of friction. how do you build a road map for this? i will show this chart to you several times.

who is the target? what is your action will goal that you are trying to achieve? for republicans the idea of winning independents by five points. 55, let's say. go through and figure out how to build the majority coalition that you need to win. the question is why are they going to vote for you? that is the message in this particular case, identifying the economy but it could be a variety of things. you will look at what people are concerned about. the other thing you need to understand is what is your opponent going to say? when you match up with your opponent is going to say with

what you are going to say, is that a real number? if i say to you -- i am concerned about health care and i want to make sure every american has access to health care and i put that in a survey. will you support a candidate who says that? you need to say -- the important thing is i am going to do something else. i am going to make sure the mandate that every american is required to have health insurance and lower the cost of health insurance and make sure -- contrast those things. the mandate may be a problem. all of a sudden you have a different dynamic. doing solitary messages by

themselves presents no contrast. you need to have the other side's message, not what you would like it to be, our it actually works. i can construct statements -- you can do statements that people will naturally agree with you but understand that this is not the american electorate's dialogue. two people will be saying of the same thing. that is something to understand. you can try to go out and get the initiative on an issue and suddenly people respond back and forth. but ultimately -- i can and tell you how many campaigns we are going to do this and this and we are going to win. if you can't identify with the other person will say, whether that is something -- you don't

know how to win. in this particular case the press will i don't know how to enlist this out, maybe these three or maybe it is nine. think through what that coalition will look like. what are the dynamics? obviously you will not be able to do this in the same degree. you might be able to take a look at exit polls from previous elections that are on line. so you can get a sense of what is driving those groups. i make a clear distinction between strategy and impact

exceeded. strategy consists of the political environment defining audiences, understanding your opponent and they're likely strategy is the broad, higher level thought. tactics is the how. tv ads, social networks, phone banks, internet ads. the things you do that you don't execute when you define an audience. do not let tactics become the driving force of the campaign. when you focus on tactics you are missing strategy.

i will take you through 2006. there were quite a few republicans who said we have -- we can't be beaten. mike allen in october of 2006, senior republican who said we had the best program, these are districts -- there was one minor problem with this list. that is the whole point of the campaign. he got thoroughly beaten. coming back, this is what you need to produce. i will talk about different communications. strategic communications is that first step where you begin to translate your strategy into some sort of interaction to the

electorate. everybody wants to get into give me the great phrase. do it this way or that way and i will do eight points better. the best communicators of all time. this was delivered at his last speech in the oval office. he said i won the nickname the great communicator but i never thought it was my style or the words i use that made a difference. it was the content. i wasn't a great communicator but i communicated great things. candidates style matter but if they don't have anything to say, it doesn't matter. ..

and a good example is and let's use the last 2008 election. obama was not positioning himself as i'm going to be the liberal left candidate, i'm going to be the liberal left candidate who's going to jester might remove his party to the left. because that would've been horrific positioning. what he did say is your tired or this country has been for eight years. i'm going to give you a chance to change what she wants. and he actually never defined a

change, but what he's able to do is deliver a positioning statement to people agree with you. that's where i go back to think if mccain had said well, and he could have done it, he's the guy who fundamentally made george bush change his strategy in iraq yet did you ever hear him say it. no. because they're positioning wise we are going to sort of like continue forward on principles as opposed to obama understanding the country and is tired positioning era changes actually very important dynamic. okay, at least to this and this and that once he laid out and you understand basically what your opponent strategy is and what your strategy is, lays out for you kind of a very basic dynamic of a chart that i want you to try to set up. what i want you to do first off is come up with and again you're going to put this into four quadrants. what are you going to say about

your cell? and by the way, there may be slightly different ones are the groups you're talking to. but the more different they are when you do different groups, the more complicated your message is going to be and the more difficult. so that much you can make these overlap. the first thing you want to do is come up a list with the things you say about your candidate matter. and not specifically are going to help you go after those key groups that let you get you to your majority coalition. then you're going to think about, by the way, what you are going say about them. i'm virtually every campaign, at least in the next couple years you'll be on, this will be the dominant theme. what are you going to say about the opponent? it's not what are you going to say about yourself. it's not by the candidate should be elected. it's why the other kennedy should not be elected.

republicans ran a massively negative campaign operation in 2006 with no results. and did the same thing in 2008, also with poor results. ultimately going back to the camera line, the purpose of the party is not to -- means you have to say something. asarco is a flight is proposed the future and make it possible. the republican line in 2006 into the night was proof about the democrats are in joe gets votes. you hear the dissonant and not? movements in europe tend to be doing a little bit better than certainly republicans in 2006, 2008. then the other element is what are they going to say about you and what are they going to say about themselves? the problem again you'll also find in this is very important. the honest about what they're going to say about you and about themselves.

don't make it what you would like them to say about themselves. i'm a liberal, but they're not going to say that. how want to make sure everybody in this country has health care. that's what they're going to say as opposed to i'm a liberal. but i can't tell you how many campaigns i didn't end, doesn't that prove their liberal. the other element to communication is what i call the voter's memory process. understand for everybody in this room, you know, this is a lecture that i hope a somewhat interesting. but for most people in the country they would be just heads on the table. thank you very much, when does this guy shut up? the reason for that is because you all want to become campaign managers. you're going to a story all folks come to talk about politics and are hoping okay, when i finish the second do i want to do. you have an interest in the subject matter. there are tree types of the memory process that people have.

that is one. you have an interest in the topic so it's relatively easy for me to skin appear and talk. number two, where something significant occurs that graph peoples attention and suddenly they weren't interested in now they are very interested in. and the best example of that politically as 9/11. prior to 9/11 the interest and concern about the foreign affairs at the national level what percentage of people identified defense foreign affairs terrorism as like the number one issue was very small. 9/11 happened, it becomes a dominant element of discourse. why? because that was a jarring events and people remember. okay, let me give you another example of that, just in terms of their own memory. how many of you have actually been in a car accident? okay, my guess is there are details that you can still remember, hopefully. because you are conscious while i was going on.

there are details of that car accident that you can remember better just remarkable. i mean, i've been in one and i can remember like a couple of leads that were going by and how the light was on them. i have no idea why i remember that particular thing, but i just in members. your remember is similar. it was so overwhelming it doesn't know quite what is the most important type of information to be pulling in so it is pulling everything and it's going on a level of awareness with an adrenaline flow that is staggering of the results you have memories now it turns out that that for some reason you just hold onto. yet if i asked you what to do up for lunch yesterday? a good portion of you couldn't remember because it just wasn't as critical. to some degree that's what 9/11 was. the third type of memory is my particular biased quoting just puts me to sleep.

quilting puts me to sleep. i don't care how good the tv show with or how interesting somebody writes a book. i'm just not going to pick it up or watch it. my loss, granted. but that's just my biased in terms of spending time. to a lot of people, that's political discussion. it's the moral equivalent except when things start to get particularly more difficult, then there's a little bit more interest and awareness. but ultimately i remember when you're talking to folks in terms of what you think the issue should he and i seem campaign after campaign do this. your turn to tell me you should be concerned about this here now, they have concerns. and if your campaign is not addressing those concerns you're not having a good conversation and you're not likely to get elected in for good reason. because if you can't regret what your constituents are concerned about you can engage them in the political process and in terms of what you're trying to do, then for not succeeding as a

candidate. the amount of times that i watched campaigns they say we're going to prove this issue is the most important. and what they end up ribbing is that they're not listening to people. they're not listening to their constituents. and that is -- and so what happens is the tbs become what i call the moral equivalent of the ugly american embarrassed era rather than understanding that you're just not in the right language, you slow down and you talk louder as though now somebody who doesn't understand english nights. no, you're just in the wrong line. and so to a large degree when you're thinking through those three areas. one, the fact that something are interested in, too, huge event, three they're just not interested. understand where you're coming from. there may be something that occurs that is so overwhelming you come up with some concept is

so grand an awesome that you can sort of vaults that second category. that happens once or twice a generation. i mean, that doesn't happen that frequently. newt was able to do with the contract. reagan was able to do it with his sword a fundamental shift from a centerleft to a center-right viewpoint. obama for a short time did it in terms of change. but ultimately, it is very rare that you need to get through to what hangs people are concerned about and then you can get some theme and direction to that and tie that together. but ultimately, if you're not talking about what they're concerned about why should they vote for you? okay, so with that i want to get to a very specific way of doing that. and this is the means and barriers to education. this is actually what reagan years to particular success in

1984 when he won virtually every state except for minnesota in the district of columbia. and it's based on this concept. it's a lottery concept. what is the issue attributes? what benefit does that attribute generate? what's the personal consequence to the voter and what value are you basically emphasizing? value not in a sense of moral value, value and a sense of personal goals that people have. it can be i want to be successful in my field. i want to be a good parents. i want to be a good part of my community. values along those lines. i want to start off by showing you an added that i think reflects culminating this in a

way that i thought was particularly good. mme just setup a dynamic year for you you in terms that the site at. and what it is, working mothers were in fact not buying cell phones. and so the phone industry was trying to figure out a variety of different ways to get working women to actually purchase phones and what they were discovering was women just viewed the really interesting pieces of technology as boy toys because they're fun gadgets, but why do i need one? so in this particular ad, the company sat down to figure out how do i answer the question why do you want this phone? okay, and here's what they came up with. >> mom, i can't find my skates.

>> our baby sitter watches tv day. mom, why do you always have to work? >> it's called videos, food, skates. >> i've got a meaty with a very important clients. >> you have five minutes to get ready to go to the beach. nbc/"wall street journal" poll ♪ nbc/"wall street journal" poll >> hey everybody. >> you can see that's a pretty powerful ad. there was one interesting thing that to me a lot of you pick up

on. when she's actually singing the song. i do not be picked picked up the specific lyric. and again think about this in terms that four guys this is having talked to my wife about this she's the one that pointed this out to me. the mother specifically ask the question in ad, when are you going to learn to lead your life right? this ended up jumping, sort of engaging and giving a reason why women by cell phones. and here's the latter conflict that goes along with it. so your technology lets me call from anywhere. issue benefits come i can be in two places at the same time. personal consequence, can be with my family and get my work done and not neglect either. which gets to the value i've can be a better mom. the point of that ad was not to sell the cell phone. the point of that ad was here's how you can be a better mom. here's how we're going to solve your problem.

think about that now in terms of political communication. how do you translate that level of intensity so that you are actually going to solve people's problems? and to some degree, george bush in the 2000 election, when he was on the issue of education had better connection. it was by far and away his best issue. and you can actually go through that with every child and learned and there's no child left behind. everybody in this country is going to do better. it was a very resonant message. and having gotten bewley badly on the issue in 1996, bush did a terrific job in terms of we lost by like 70-point on the issue back in 96 and i think we lost by eight or nine on the issue. and at that point education was significantly more important than it is today. so that gives you a sense of that. now let me give you a sort of a liberal construct and a

conservative construct on how you actually apply this in a political dynamic. let's start with the political hatcheries about 5% tax cut. okay, let me do the conservative side first. what cc benefit benefit? i have more money in my pocket. that means i can afford my child's education. i'm a better parent. let's do the liberal side. not that the liberal side when before that. i oppose the 5% tax cut. government needs resources that we can pay for health care and take care of seniors and if you like the value being on the better part of my community. i'm helping my community. the key thing in terms of that is this and that is the personal consequence. is what you were describing defining a personal consequence that matters to people that lets them achieve the values they want? you don't actually say the value. you don't say in that ad, i'm a better mom. everything around it was letting whoever is watching us say this is resolving your problem.

okay, a couple of last things here. i hope. okay, resource allocation. this is going to be a little bit more controversy ogier and the sense i will play that i have a different take on money than other people do. money is a resource, not an outcome. if you have a really good strategy and not much money, you have a much better chance of winning then if you've got a lot of money and no strategy. i'm just going to give you a couple examples of that. if money was everything, then mitt romney should've been the republican nominee and rudy giuliani should've been a close second. mitt romney wasn't. he raised $110 million. rudy giuliani raised $70 million

acting out one delegate in the end. and by the way, it stuns me in turned the giuliani because he also hasn't been that mitt romney didn't and he had favorables within the republican party they were just huge. i mean, he was actually well-liked. there were differences of opinion, that he was well-liked. so a $70 million i think he ended up with eight delegates. okay, i'm not saying he's not one but he said of gotten more than one delegate. john mccain, when he had all these resources was a miserable candidate. then when he got out and everybody wrote the obituary, it's over, no wait he can do this. and with no money heat made a comeback and positioned himself so he could win. and you have huckabee who absolutely no money and he was there at the end. the point being is that resources are important to have, but they're only as good as what to do with it. and if you're doing something stupid with them or if you're doing something ineffective with

them, you're going to lose. and i will tell you that what frustrates me in terms of watching a lot of campaigns as they spend all their time, yes you need resources to be able to do certain things that in and of itself it doesn't matter. ron paul, i've asked a question about ron paul raising $50 million. and my response to that was that interesting, but it's not an outcome. if you've got resources. and what is the end of doing with it? you know, he didn't do as well as he certainly had hoped given that amount of money. so while money is important, it's not so much the money in other itself. it's what do you need to get down? so when you map out your strategy, do you have the resources to cover your strategy that's what you're looking for? the amount of campaigns that suddenly go into and say we have three weeks ago when 40 million in the bank on the how do we spend it? that is a campaign that doesn't know what it's doing.

$40 million is a little high, but you're watching some of these presidential set of huge amounts of money. raise the money you need to get the things you need them. that implies that you know what to get done here it. money in and of itself will not win it for you. it won't hurt, but in some cases it might because you'll do things that just in fact end up being contradictory and you don't realize it. okay, last thing. how do you manage your strategy? and i'm going to give you -- there's this military term called through the loop. and maybe run through what it stands for. observe, orient, decide, act. this sequence is this. is that all these goals that you want to achieve. the first thing you want to do is observe where you are in

relation. orient is given your specific where you are in relation to this particular goals, what are your options that you need to execute to be able to get to those goals? decide means you pick one of them, one of those options. in terms of orient themselves and then act is you act. the new loop back to see what the impact of that is. that's called the decision-making cycle. typically the observe tends to be serviced. and so you cannot different types of time frames for that. if you are in a location, i'm going to go back to a 90's example because it's clearer and see if you can figure out how to apply today. if you are in an television environment you could get messages out quicker. so the process of when you act getting a message out there, what happened over a shorter

time frame he would likely go back in and observe relatively quickly. if however you were in the middle of an urban area and you are a state senate race in the middle of new york city, then you're likely to use direct mail. well the cycle therefore you have to create the mail, get a job, get it out there and have everybody read it. the cycle is just longer. so the timeframe going back to an observation might take longer. i would suggest that actually in the situation we are saying in terms of the way people and new media, social network, the whole dynamic, one of the dynamics that exist here is the temple of the campaigns are at a remarkable pace. and so not only do you have to observe your traditional means of survey, research which you probably ended up having to do, but you have to do any more frequent basis you're also going to have to find other tools to sort of understand how things are going. you have a low-budget of analytics they give you a sense of is your candidates been heard, hominy times a day pop up

in stories. and figure out how to make them all work together so you have really good ability to figure out the observations he can orient good it is a constant loop. the team that can go faster in terms of doing not as a team that has a strategic advantage over the other. and it's hard. the other is his concept of equilibrium. went to the message out there that is in fact impacted, everybody's got it. okay, it's not going to continue to move people. it's going to move wherever they move to many other disequilibrium in terms of okay, the electric waiting for the next ibm will be moved instead next discourse. now there may be something along dealing with that same degree that was brought up to move people, but understand that electric tends to move to an equilibrium. once they've heard it they'll make their decision and i'll get to a stable point and then you

have to interject new information. which again gets back to this. trust me on this. if you could just have this layout, but effective messages and figure out a way to test back, you're about 75% of the way there. just in terms of the salon. in terms of the strategy, not in terms of figuring out how to get the other pieces. two last things. one, i'm a big believer in things that there are certain books that are particularly worth reading given the timeframe. one is this book by chip. it's about why her ideas sticking. why will people consume information from one type of information and not another. it's a terrific book. the other one is the laws of simplicity by john maeda, which is fortunately 100 pages long and is a real easy book to read. but what it does is he really

gets into this idea -- and i'm sure that people come out and say here's the policy. we're going to have 17 different, giuliana had 12 policy engineers. okay, have you ever -- how many of you have paid simon says? if you are playing that game, how many of you think you could actually get to 12 lights? okay, the giuliani campaign and your focus onto cassettes all you're doing and adjust colors, not even ideas. the giuliani campaign somehow expected you to remember 12 separate issues. guess what? that wasn't going to happen and it didn't. his whole point in terms of simplicity is your goal is to create something that people can get their heads around. it can effectively then use or comprehend. a good example is an ipod is a great sample. a very simple device that virtually anyone can pick up and use.

nothing that was interesting in terms of developing at ipod is that was not what to keep him, but what to take out and still leave the essence of what the product was about. and that's to challenge you have in terms of messaging. how in fact you do that. the inverse of that is i don't know how many of you have vcrs, while not vcrs but you get the stakes in terms of dealing with your television or dvr, whatever and they've got a hundred buttons on them. and they say here's this manual that 60 pages back. and that the product? that they doctoral dissertation. right, it is not something used easy to use. you want to make this, and began simplicity isn't simple and it isn't intended to make teeple think in a simplistic, and a

simpleton way. what simplicity is is the way to take a very complicated thoughts and communication ideas and make them as consumable as possible. so, i would encourage you to read both of those books. and then to wrap up i'll go back to this. just to really emphasize this point. strategy without taxes is the longest way to victory. tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. if you have your strategy right, there's a good chance you can win. if you have it completely wrong, you have no chance. and so start off with that. so with that, we'd like to open it up to questions. >> through the way you were discussing it, is it better if you have for example a campaign nbc/"wall street journal" poll [inaudible] can you think of the change idea? >> changes a good example. a lot of things apply to that. a lot of people interpreted that

the way they wanted to. new to the same thing in terms of the contract as well. he had ten items but he didn't do ten items. and then you could pick within those ten what you like, but you could focus on one thing, the contract. what you were able to do is take complex complexity and make it comprehensible and valuable and that is really hard to do. >> when a campaign of so much money obviously you have a really good strategy going in. how did they apply those extra funds and extra resources so that it didn't become too much? >> actually they made a fundamental error at one point. if you remember, i want to say this was the night of pennsylvania, ohio, and texas. i think those were the three states. okay, ohio and texas. and they went back to sort of

traditional means that they were just going to overwhelm hillary clinton and earns that hillary television and it didn't work. so what might take away from that is next they realize that going back and doing what we think was the old way of doing things when we have the ability to just completely overwhelmed the other side didn't work. when we stayed focused on these new methodologies that we come up with to sustain the fleet, that the way that they worked. and so they had one moment where they clearly had a failure. and it was a pretty big one because it had turned out to the race would've been over at that point. but they learned from that and they went back to things that impact were working before realizing again monday with the resource and outcome. and they learned it early enough that they didn't experience that later on where it could've been potentially more catastrophic. at that moment, basically that let her back into the race. it was about to sort of take it over completely. and let her back into it.

nbc/"wall street journal" poll [inaudible] >> he said that was their own mistake. we should've just gone all-out to try and win texas. and that would've put it away. and he didn't, so they went on. >> any other questions? >> to the beginning of the lecture i remember when you were speaking about the fundamental mistake of going. wouldn't you make the argument that early on in fundraising he had to rally the case. i mean, when palin was elected right after that. >> again, fund-raising was not the outcome. the actual election. so the problem mccain had was that his sitting party's president of the job approval of just above 30%. the strategic goblin for him was why is anybody going to potentially vote for him if he's going to do the same things as

the person sitting there with 30%. and he never made that delineation clear enough year it and that was a strategic error. so again, the conservative republicans make up 21% of the country. that's not 50. again, democratic race this is even smaller. the liberal democrats make up 50% or 60% and that's why what it should be a center-right country because of that particular balance. but going again he was going to get to the base. obama and the way he was doing his campaign as much as he was focused on change is also running a campaign in such a way that the base was going to turn out. and so that was not really particularly in question. the question was, and again, mccain could've fit into this. he was viewed as a sort of maverick or zen. and so, the storyline would've fit perfectly. here's his maverick republican, here's a map or kings is going to do and it could've fit into that storyline. and for some reason, chose not

to. >> if you don't have the money to blow all the fog away with surveys, how would you turn assumption into knowledge? >> that's where i've seen candidates that i'll give you a very good example of one particular candidate. this is a friend of mine. he was running in michigan. he was running for governor of michigan. the other candidates have raised about more money than, but he's also the lead person on the intelligence committee and as a result it had an opportunity because of what's been going on overtime for a lot of people in michigan to sort of see the decision-making process that he does and if they result he is a capable, smart%. the value of that to him has got them at the point where despite the huge fund-raising efforts of the others, he's actually in the

lead. in terms of that race because people had a chance to hear him, understand who he is weird so the dynamic here is can you come up with compelling enough content, purpose that let you get heard in a sense of people are willing to consume it. and that will get you going. i mean, it's hard. you need some level of resources but you don't need huge overwhelming numbers. you need the ability to get interjected into the public discourse. emphasizing the back to the three memory process. you need something people are interested in and simple enough they can comprehend it and you got to make it engaging enough that it actually is a personal consequence. and if you can do that, you can get a long way with less resources. that doesn't mean, you still need some resources. i'm not saying you don't need any. but again, giuliani had

7 million that romney had ten. >> after the strategy should give you work out every sordid detail you want that we're going to do this or is it more like going along the way and seeing that your strategy isn't working or that this happens and then rethink in the strategy that you have? >> when you sit down and your initial strategy you need to think through what are my options? where the different directions and why were those different directions exist. it do the same thing for the other side. why would they pursue those particular options? which you begin to do is not them all up and see which ones are the best ones to emerge and you'll pass them in terms of when you do your survey, to get a sense of which ones do better against each other. this is one you want to think through what the other side can do completely and what you can do completely and see how it matches up. again, if obama had run a base,

were just going to get out the base, then mccain in theory could have run a campaign to get at the base, that would've worked. that would've worked in terms of that, but then matched up against however against a candidate change suddenly that strategy becomes less appealing. soon you to think through what the other side options are. the other thing that also gives you is you then have a better understanding so as certain things above, you can see why they're evolving and the potential impact of a clearer understanding. for example, unemployment jumps to 10.3%. and if you're trying to run a campaign sort of focus on that, then that would lead you towards it. what other options are open to you or if it drops down to 9%, what are the options open to you. because an assumption you had wasn't coming out the way you thought you had to change what you are saying. and so, by thinking through all

those options you have the ability to better adjust when you hit critical moments. sorry, this is going to be kind of like in chess. when you're in the middle of an opening and you understand all the dynamics of wet opening can go. when somebody does something different because you're broader understanding is in terms of that position you can better adjust to because you understand why it was a mistake or why was a good move. and so broadens your understanding. the idea that you're going to follow one single line in if something goes wrong go somewhere else, you may find yourself going down the wrong strategy initially and now you're nowhere because you didn't have a complete understanding. >> david, thank you very much. hot [applause] >> a quick break while we switch out the speakers.

sound sound mac. >> the campaign management institute at au, our live coverage continues this afternoon. and coming up next, we'll hear from the former lead pollster from barack obama's primary campaign on survey research and polling. as our coverage of american university's campaign management institute continues like you're on c-span 2. a quick programming note that president obama right now is making remarks about the attempt of terrorist attack on a northwest airlines plane on christmas day. you can watch that live on our companion network on the c-span. the president speaking from hawaii. congress is on its holiday break, but behind the scenes negotiations have begun on emerging house and senate health care bills

>> back live at american university in washington d.c. where today we are covering eight use campaign management institute. in a short break right now the afternoon portion of the program. and yet to come, just a couple minutes from now the former lead pollster for barack obama's primary campaign talking about survey research and polling. as our live coverage continues on the campaign management institute right here on c-span 2.

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] sub >> your were live at american university waiting for the resumption of the campaign management in to toot. we'll be hearing it this afternoon from the founder and president of lincoln park

strategies who is also barack obama's former lead pollster during the primary campaign. he'll be talking about survey research and polling. a american university's campaign management institute is celebrating its 27th year with this program that trains individuals for participation in local, state, and federal political campaigns. should be getting underway, resume and in just a moment or two. our live coverage continuing with this all-day event here on c-span 2. [inaudible conversations] >> okay, you guys ready? the last speaker of the day i know you're jealous. so our next and final speaker of the day but you can't lead after this because you have to choose teams. so you won't be out of here until nine, 10:00 tonight is

stephane hankin because i've never had him before today but some people who i adore think he is god, seriously. and when ascetical and around state who could come in and do a presentation on survey research, i was really kind of strange how many people will meet to talk to him. i am very, very excited and is a treat to you to see his presentation. what i know about in izzy is seven years as a pollster. >> ten. >> if you want to know more i'm sure he'll tell you but some of the big names diane feldman, peter hart, really some of the basic names in democratic politics. the fun things he graduated at university of mass. she said in a rugby player. i thought that was cool. i recently sat to visit with morgan freeman. i don't understand rugby so maybe you can explain. >> thanks for the very kind introduction. so, as lids aside my name is

transfixed. i've been doing polling for ten years now. everything from presidential level. i worked for obama and kerry in 04. senate races, gubernatorial, down two states alleged racist. so pretty much everything from top to bottom. i just recently started my own firm about six months ago, something like that. and i am happy to walk you to the very fun and exciting world of polling today. so as a sort of go through this if you have any questions, just growing and that. i know some of this is going to a little dry in the beginning but i just want to give everyone a little bit of a background. i don't really know how much knowledge everyone in the room has a polling, but just to sort of if you a few ideas of what's going on and then we'll sort of move into what's hopefully a little more interesting. so basically, for pulling itself this is public opinion research also known as polling. quantitative research is another way to describe this.

the one-way assertive remember this is it is quantitative if a large quantity of numbers you're calling 400, 500,000 people. and really what polling does is allows a campaign to understand the opinions that voters have on issues, on the race you're working on, and a whole myriad of things. and what it really is is polling will give you the building blocks to your, for your campaign, for the messaging, the positions you are making on the media. basically completely unbiased opinion. everything starts with polling and decisions are made on the polling that you're doing. there are a couple types of polls. first is your baseline poll. that's the initial injustice and talking about this and sort of giving a very all say generic

view of a campaign. so this is your average campaign. we'll do these kind of polls. you know, smaller state ledge races. the budget is not there. presidential you're doing a whole ton more than this. but just to sort of give you an idea. it started with the baseline poll. and the earlier you can get your baseline poll in the field, the better. because this is what's going to give you an understanding of why voters opinions are on the issues that you're going to be talking about, on the policies that you may or may not be rolling out. and, you know, the one thing that people tend to think about when it comes to polling is always the horse race. it's what they talk about in the media. it's sort of a fun thing to talk about. in a baseline poll, the horse race is one of the least interesting things in the poll. it's in their. look at it for five seconds, moveon. you know, you are ten months away from the election.

a month away from the election, whenever you're doing this. you know, what you have to remember is a poll is a quick snapshot of a moment in time. now, the people's beliefs on issues, the way they view the framing of issues, that doesn't tend to change a lot into the short-term. those are the things that can change in the long term. the horse race can change on a day-to-day basis. so the one thing i say to all my clients and i will say to any campaign, do not get caught up in the horse race, especially in the early stages. it's not worth your time and it will just drive you nuts. in midway poll, this tends to be usually right before you're going to start putting out mail, putting out advertisements depending on what states are working on and what your budget is. this tends to be a little bit dialed back on the issues, but it's a little more focused on

what you're planning on talking about in your, when you're reaching out to voters. and now you start getting into the horse race being a little bit more interesting. events are getting a sense of where your base voters are, who the swing voters are and who the voters are you have no chance of getting regardless what it is. and then you have trackers which are short polls. sometimes you can output is a rolling tracker which is basically for two weeks before an election. every night you're doing a set number of calls and you can just start eating the movement as you're going into the election. it helps makes decisions on your media bias. if there is a mail that needs to go out to the last minutes, this can show you who needs to be targeted and sort of gives you a sense of where you're going to be on election night. okay, a few things that are going into a pole. so sampling, the method of olene and/or sample size.

now again unless anyone goes into polling we'll never have to worry about this again but just good things to know. for a sample site there are two sides. there are voter file and reb which stands for random digit dial. for the most part you will only use voter file and that is because you want to make sure that you're talking about people that turn out to vote. you have the information that the states have on there so when they register, do they vote in primaries, do they not vote in primaries? i'm a general election so they voted and? a lot of times, aged you're in the south there's races on the file. a lot of southern states. and it makes the job much easier. and with rdd, what that is is basically a computer-generated numbers so you know states have area codes, each area within the state has the first three digits are unique to that area of the state. then basically a computer just generates a possible numbers.

and the only time you really would use this is if you are working on a national campaign and in a, i mean, now after a wait this is a little bit different but the rule of thumb is if you are in a national campaign possibly a large state like california and you think the turnout is going to be much higher than you've ever seen before, sometimes you'll go with rdd. again, 99% of the time you're not using it but just want to make you aware of it. for the method, online, followed. for the most part pretty much everything for voting wise is being done over the phone still. there are arguments over which is better, which increases the largest cross section of your either state or area. for right now, i would stay rule of thumb is that unless you're nationally there are good voter

files with e-mail addresses. some states have good voter files with good addresses. anything smaller than the state, the samples aren't there yet where you are getting great information that i would really feel conjugal with using online. so for the most part your campaigns are going to be using over the phone polling, sort of what's been standard cracked disc for the last 30 years or so. and in the future, i think this is going to change, but for right now for your campaigns you will be seen phones. again, depending on your budget sometimes especially if you are concerned about younger voters than you need to do a special reach out. you want to do a poll among younger voters, there's issue with cell phones and how to reach them. so that could be a case for going online could make sense over something over the phone, but again, for the most part,

you're going to be seeing phone polling. sample sizes, so in general for -- the smallest i would ever go is interviewing 400 people in a poll. if you're doing a national survey it goes up to about a thousand. the reason you do that is that you want to make sure that your margin of error is not so ridiculous that the numbers are meaningless. so once you dive below 400, i never say it's not worth holing, but it really you're not -- you spend the extra money is going to take to get a more robust sample. the higher you can do with your sample the better you will be with your campaign. it's also the demographic groups. so men, women, and the higher number you go the larger subgroups are going to have. so it's not just men and women. it's white men, white women, black men, black women. so the more information you can

get the better off your campaign will be in a more informed decision still make. though the larger the sample you can go, depending on your budget, the better off you're going to be to a point. try not to let your post or talk you into some ridiculous sample just because we get paid more money. although, it sometimes happens. so, in a poll again real quick because you're probably not going to be running your own or you really shouldn't be. just so you can sort of see what goes in to it. and this is sort of a very typical way things go. starts with some form of screeners. so it's actually asking people are you planning on voting in the upcoming primary in the upcoming general election. you know by the sample you have that you are talking to voters, but you sort of want to hear from them to make sure they are planning on voting and haven't gotten so off they are just not going to bother because at the end of the day you're running a campaign, you want to talk to

the people who are going to turnout on election election day. and typically, you tend to move in to issue concerns and a lot of times it starts as sort of an easy question. you know, how do you feel about the direction of the country, the direction of your states, the different ways of asking the question. a lot of times you want to ask a question people know the answer to or think they know the answer to. you don't want to start them off with something they have no idea what your talking about the people feel i cannot do smart, you hang up the phone. you want to get them in and turn it get them to speak. a lot of times, upfront they try to get things in that don't have, i don't want bias with all say political think. so once you introduce the worst race, are you going to vote for candidate x. or candidate y. people's brains of mine change.

so the more you can get up front, the more you start asking about political question the cleaner read your going to get. so if i'm asking someone about health care is a bad example these days. but if we're talking about the economy, if we are talking about energy. if it's done in a sort of nonpolitical way up front you're going to get a different answer than if you put it out to the back. people go into that frame of mind and that it's very much people start inking okay, well, i'm a democrat with the right answer for a democrat on this. i'm a republican, with the right republican answer on this. you want to try and get away from that and get below the surface and get a handle on what people are thinking. you want to try and do that kind of stuff up front as much as possible in before you introduce the politics into the situation. favorability is. this is lifting off names of people, to be looser with the president whoever it is that the time and if it is someone

everyone knows. there's 2% of people who don't know who brock obama is or who george bush is. and then it goes into the people you're running against. local politicians who may or may not be supporting you, and may not be supporting your opponent. you can also put in groups labor unions, and ra, put that into a favorability and then you get a sense of what people do, what they think about these people. two ways to do about it is just a personal preference for your pollster. if you do have a favorable or unfavorable opinion about them. and then some people do a dummy thermometer scale soa 02 mack 100. it's the same results but it's a personal preference. then you have your horse race. are you going to vote for candidate x., canada wide. not is followed up a how certain

are you about that. it shows how strong people's convictions are about that person. people tend to be fairly honest about whether or not they are open to someone else or if this is just, that's who they're voting for regardless of what you tell them. then it tends to follow up with how we want to test your candidate bio, policy proposals that they might have, other things that are a little bit more into that sort of political theater. and then you end up with your demographics which are asking people to age, race, education, sometimes income, if they have kids, depending on what education is going to big thing u.s. if they have kids in public schools. and that helps you in the which i will explain in a little bit. all make sense? okay. so there are two things a bit of

deliverables of the campaign manager, as a campaign. first there were be topline. here's an example of a poll he didn't handle being a beginner but the directional pennsylvania pettit, generally speaking are you satisfied, dissatisfied, et cetera. this the total people we talked to. 46% are satisfied, 46% were dissatisfied. 8% don't know. that's just every voter that you have. and then the second thing you're going to get our eye call them banners, other people call them breakouts. other people call them different things. so this is the same thing that we were just talking about. here's your total number and this is where i was getting into with a bigger sample size, the better because now you just are breaking it out into different groups here at the men think this, women think this. this happened to be men in the northern part of the district were calling in, women in the northern parts, eastern, and so

on. and this would go on and then we had breakouts by race, by age, by education and adjustment on from there. and this is where you get your targeting information. this is really what is interesting. the total numbers are sorted easy to talk about. you know, it can be interesting but you know this is where the campaign is won or lost. in your understanding of the different groups and the people you need to go out and talk to, the people you need to go to target. ..

typically it is not just 600 pages of numbers. so basically the things you can learn. first thing, inspire them. if you are working for a candidate who has decided to run you don't waste time spending money and effort trying to prove that he or she can or can't win. they are already running. no need to prove this unless they are ridiculously rich and want to feel good about themselves. these polls tend to be done more

i can pain committees. sometimes they start raising big amounts of money for candidates. in general the person you are working for is actually running so don't worry about proving that they should run because they are going to do it. i talked before about the building blocks in the campaign story. every campaign should be a good story. in your story you need to have an understanding of the landscape your working in. the way you are going to be framing the race and framing your issues. i think other people will be talking about messageing. the poll is going to inform the message you are talking about. that goes into the narrative of the campaign and who are the good guys or bad guys. this is the way that a story is

written and this is the way a good campaign tends to unfold. lot of times you don't think about it in that sense but if you look back on a lot of the successful campaigns there was a story and using a personal example, the difference between the obama and john kerry campaign is there was a story on the obama campaign. there was a clear reason that was given for why you would want to vote for obama and there was talk about these are the good guys. your candidate is the hero of your story. you want them to be the candidate in office. it is oerall frame of the campaign was hope and change to the point where you almost wanted to throw up when you heard the word change again. four years earlier you had john kerry, i am from massachusetts, not a very successful campaign.

you couldn't answer the question, what does the campaign stand for. i could go around room and get 15 answers. there was even confusion in the campaign about what this actually means. it came down to there wasn't that kind of clear story line. the last thing i want to talk about was how to talk about policy and issues. i want to be clear on this. you shouldn't be pulling to figure out what your policy is. you should know what your policy is. your candidates should know what issues are important. you should get a good handle on what the issues are in your state and what is going to come up. education, economy and jobs are important things. there will be local issues. it is not rocket science to figure out what the important issues are.

what it really is, there are six ways to talk about an issue or a policy proposal and trying to figure out the best way to talk about it is ultimately going to be the difference between a successful or unsuccessful campaign. the two examples i like to talk about, first is what started as the estate tax. this is probably early 90s where it started. the republicans came out with a bill that was against the estate tax. it failed. talk to people in focus groups, why do i care about rich people and their estates. why do i care if they are taxed? then the inheritance tax. it did a little better. you heard people, i might get into this. i don't want that tax. they did more research and death tax. everyone is against the death tax. i am going to die someday and i don't want my money being taxed.

the policy didn't change, it was just what they called it. that is what research did for them in that case. how to get the most people behind it. the other example is out of the political field but it is a great example. tivo. when tivo came out they marketed it as on the premise of the technology behind tivo when all the ads -- they were awful, how to cool it was that they come up with the way to record commercials and figure out the types of shows you want to record and they could figure out shows you might also like and it failed. no one bought it, no one cared. it made no sense. they regrouped and did a bunch of research and came out with a

new advertising campaign that was based on this is how this is going to change your life. you never need to sit down in front of the tv again. this box will record all the shows you want to watch. you never have to watch commercials again and you can watch tv on your time. i don't know how i live without my tivo before. a very dark period in my life. nothing changed. the product didn't change, just how they talked about it. don't want to be pulling on what your policy is. you want to be pulling on how to talk about your policy. make sense? that kind of is the naturutshel what polling is. we put together a group of 10

or 12 people, sometimes more, and talked-about basically a lot of times the things we want to flesh out. what focus groups do, if polls tell you what focus groups are how you figure out why. we know that you find out 40% of people support the health care package, will it go through congress? that is interesting in and of itself. what you don't really have is why. the focus group, usage down with people and figure out why. the other nice thing in a focus group is if you want to talk to a left-handed voter who voted in every third year and have blue

eyes you can do that. you can get very specific with what you are doing in your groups so you have groups that are less educated women or focus groups of parents with kids in public school or voters over 65. you can do whatever you want in the focus group and you start to get depth of understanding of these issues because at the end of the day a lot of polling tends to be by gary. it is yes or no. very black or white kind of picture of things. most people's views on issues are not black and white. they are shades of gray. focus groups allow you to get into those shades of gray.

smaller campaigns don't have the budget for focus groups. they are expensive relative to pulling. these are things you don't want to do without because this will give you a depth of understanding that you really need and want. this is also a great way to test the media. there is no point putting up ads if they don't know if they resonate with people. you would be amazed at what a campaign can overlook in an ad that someone in a focus group will point out and say you recant stay that in this state because -- trying to think of a political example, something that isn't political but the chevy nova, this is going back a few years, they come out with a car that doesn't do very well in mexico so they put together some focus groups and figure out it means don't go. not good for cars.

i have been in focus groups that we thought was great at the campaign and all of a sudden you start hearing from people where they said either they picked out, that video wasn't shot in this district or that is not our state in the background, that is somewhere else. things people didn't pick up or it happens or it is good to have your average voter look at things because they have a different i then you will and save you a lot of heartache in the long run. just like in the corporate world no one is spending $10 million on an ad campaign without testing it to make sure there are no mistakes that people overlook. that is the focus group. what we just started talking about with the shades of gray, the other big thing is candidate bios. this is a personal pet peeve.

i find it is a waste of time to read a bio to someone over the phone. i don't know if anyone has taken a poll. is very lightning to see what it is like to sit on the phone. if you read a one page biography and ask what they thought about it, they probably stopped listening after the second or third sentence and they will give you an answer in the middle. and less they are really attentive but that doesn't happen too often. if you say does that give you a positive or negative view of the person, not really. even if they say very positive they don't know what was in it that resonated with people. if you sit in a group of ten people and hand the machine of paper and say read this, you can talk about it and pick out, this is where you get interesting things like maybe the person had a military background and that is drawing people in because they had a military connection

or some of the work they have done in the past. that is when you really start learning about what is the best way to couch your candidate or present them to the voters. it is tough to pick that up in a pole. you can really do that. >> is there a time to do a focus group given all the resources? >> typically you do your base line and follow up with focus groups. there are times when you might do that differently. i would say if you are dealing with two very well known candidates you could do focus groups first and really start getting a sense of what people think about the candidates. that doesn't happen too often. the other time from statewide ballot initiatives where you are

stuck with a sack paragraph of how this is going to go on the ballot. that is a tough thing to test on the phone because focus groups can be more enlightening to do that first because it is something concrete you are dealing with but you will probably be doing a baseline first and follow up with focus groups. >> doing it anyway -- >> the one thing you can't do is learn something and apply it to the audience at large. you can't do a group where you sit down with ten people and learn something and say ok, we talked to ten women, all women think this. bad idea. it can't be applied to the bigger picture. the reason why they tend to be a little more -- it depends on how you are looking at it. the number of people you are

talking to -- the facility you are holding the groups in need to make sure they have the right groups. if you are on the lower part of the campaign and choose between the two you will go with the poll. if you have $20,000 on research you should probably do the poll as opposed to doing focus groups because you want to have some numbers to look at the entire universe. does that answer your question? the negative is also a good thing testing focus groups because you can from a lot of things out there on your own candidate or someone you are running against but it is a good controlled way to release information you might not want to get out in the public sphere. on the phone, they don't really

enjoy hearing bad things about people even if they are true. or they start thinking they are involved in a porsche poush pol they are not. this person was arrested for drunk driving and what effect that would have. it is better understood in focus groups. and we talked about the media. it is tough to have an ad over the phone. maybe one day but we are not there. for the most part this is done in focus groups. for chris -- does that make sense? any questions? ok? >> what we are doing, writing our plans, i can only presume it will be budget.

does that give us an indication of what you would charge a reasonable rate? what do you think that will cost? >> 80% goes to polling research. anything less -- i don't care what these other people say -- a good campaign you are probably spending 10% of your budget on research. a great campaign might be 15% to 20%. that will be a large campaign. you are probably in the 10% range. it is tough because it all depends on your sample size and how long the poll is. speaking of which, stay away from long poles. you are not getting good information if you have someone on the phone for 20 minutes.

by my best guess you get people's attention for 10 or 12 minutes. how do you think the direction of the country is going -- when you are trying to get good information from people, 10 or 12 minutes, they answer questions about their demographics and stuff like that. a lot of times we need to find out about this or this and put that in. at a certain point, by adding things, i hate going over 15 minutes. eighteen minutes is the maximum. there are 25 minute polls. they are excruciating. i am weird. pollsters are weird. if someone wants to call my house i take it and don't get screened out. i put my watch on and i see when

i start to not and it is 10 to 12 and its. and that is for someone actually interested. the question is what they are actually asking. your average person who actually picked up the phone and doesn't have caller id is not really giving you great information. they don't -- if you are on a zero to ten scale place a 5. whatever is in the middle because they're not listening and just trying to do it quickly to get off the phone. trying not to put these polls in the field, doing a service to pursue you have to do two. you might not want to -- if that is the case people pick what is

important to you and call with the poll you have. you are not doing yourself a favor. does that answer? yes? >> take a stab. many requests -- >> the industry standard for focus groups, these are your standard type things. if you need to picked some outrageously hard group to find, the price is going to go up but you are looking at $7,500 per focus group and usually you do two a night so you are looking at 15,000. depending on a solid baseline poll, let's say you do a poll of

600. fifteen to 18. you are probably in the upper 20s or 30 depending on how long the pole is or the sample were something in that range. if you are in a smaller district and you are doing maybe 500 people and you are probably down in the low 20s. that is about where you are. if you are looking at a baseline for complete the round numbers, save 30,000 and a night of focus groups like 45, let's put on a 18 for that. i just lost my map. 35. forty-five. 45. okay. now we are at 63. now you have -- let's just say

for round numbers on a statewide -- i doubt you are getting away with less than 100,000 probably on a shoestring budget for your research and you will do more than that because if you are looking at a state you will not just do one night of focus groups. you could be on the money. the idea is you will not do, let's say, pennsylvania is the state i have been working on, you will not just do one night in philadelphia because you want to hear from voters in pittsburgh and not just men and women in philadelphia but you need to talk to black men and black women recombination of white men and hispanic men. you are not just doing -- you are spreading it out and talking in different areas. the number just keeps getting bumped up. it also depends on how much

media you are doing and the entire side of the campaign. a lot of times the bigger state campaign, you do your base line and a couple months later something will happen. some issue will hit the national scene. something no one saw coming. you don't know the answers and you need to look at the poll and see what people are thinking about and what you need to say to make sure you're keeping your base voters on how to pull in the most swing voters and independent voters and not kiss of too many of the people -- these tend to come up and you want the flexibility in thef to these tend to come up and you want the flexibility in the campaign to do that. the more information you have the better you are going to do.

same with military, sports, whatever example you give. more information, the better you are going to do. people understand you have a north side and your opponent's side, the more informed decisions you are going to make. you don't want to be in a situation where you are on a conference call that you hear people fighting. what you really want to say is we know that voters think x. what does that mean for us on this issue that just came up? what do we do to move forward and make sure we are doing the best thing. hi try not to choke on the research budget because again, this is giving you the building blocks to a successful campaign. to view don't have that a understanding your mail will not be as effective warrior media will not be as effective as it should be because you don't have that level of understanding you should really have.

what i thought i would do was talk a little bit about an example plan. some people's brains work differently. i have less going through, giving a little bit of an example. i came up with a fictitious candidate. there is no senate race in new jersey coming up. mr. smith here is an independent just to get people out of their partisan thinking. we have a guy here who is a self-made millionaire who made his money in the tech world in the 90s after selling his business and started a nonprofit but raises the graduation rate from public high-school in new jersey. white, mid 40s, good amount of money, two kids who go to private school. here is a dream candidate.

rich candidate, especially willing to spend a lot of money. you come in progress will you are hired, you know this guy is running, you don't need to prove to him or yourself that he should run because he has already decided to do it. you are ten months away from your collection and you are about to go to go to your baseline pole. here are some of the things. you need to know -- we have someone who is not very well known. has not been in the political sphere in the past. you have a different way of working with them. the democrat and republican who are running in 2010. a lot of what you are going to be doing is looking at issues -- the issues that will be favorable to your candidate and

match up with what people are thinking is important. for looking at this guy, business savvy, also the education peace, these will all be things to flesh out. what do you think of this? a lot of this is not going to be saying mr. smith started an education program that tries to get kids to graduate from public school. do you think that is positive or negative? not many people are going to say that is a negative thing. you are much better taking it back a step and make it nonspecific to your candidate. how important is the graduation rate from high-school for you for all the schools in new jersey? what that is going to tell you is is this something we should be talking about or focusing on or is this a piece of the background puzzle we are trying to put together as something

that is good to bring to the table but not what the focus of the campaign is. with good bowling you are going to get those answers. what should be the front and center piece of what we are doing and what is a little bit more of the background. with a lot of other things, we have the issues, favorability, you are testing your candidate and the democrats who are running and the republicans who are running and the new governor of new jersey and probably the president, maybe you have some surrogates who are going to come in. you will want to figure out who those surrogates are. it doesn't do you a lot of good if joe smith's cousin who no one else knows but a couple people think is a good guy comes out and says i am for joe smith. if no one knows who they are,

kiss is where you have to figure that out. the horse race, this goes back to the beginning. no one is going to know you are a guide. you'll get 2% of people who will vote for you because you get two% of peopley. you'll get 2% of people who will vote for you because you get two% of people who vote for you. if you say independent you will get more ropes then you think. that is where it falls into that category. it is good to figure out where you stand but the least important thing you are doing. putting up this description to personal what do you think of this? we are really not doing -- you are not running anything. this is where i would really start breaking this out and really start talking about --

almost piece by piece. what do you think of people -- obviously will count this in favorable ways to your own candidate. a self-made man who was very successful in the tech industry and what that means. ..

>> you know, and then there's some things, you know, here where, okay, you know, what does a self-funder mean to people? is that a negative? is that something we need to address further down the line? you know, the fact that he owns a nonprofit or started a nonprofit that talks about going from graduated from public school but his kids are in private school? is that a negative we really need to address? and at the end of the day you're going to get a clear picture, you know, piece by piece of your candidate and what they think is important and what they bring to the table, and you're going to be able to figure out, okay, what are our biggest strengths, what are our biggest weaknesses, and what do we need to do to address these things? and, you know, the one thing, you know, another thing i would say to campaigns is don't worry too much about your strengths. your strengths are your strengths. that's going to come out, those tend to be things that you need to -- they help paint the picture, but it's not something you need to completely focus on

to the point that you're just ignoring your weaknesses. and, you know, if you see weaknesses out there that you know are going to come -- i mean, you know some of the stuff's going to come up. there's no way the fact that his kids go to private school is not going to come up, so don't put your head in the sand, go after it, address your weaknesses, start owning that issue. the earlier you can get on top of these issues, whether it's something that's good or bad in your bio, if you can beat everyone to the punch on framing that issue, you're going to be more likely to be successful in the end. and, again, you know, as an example of this is back to '04 with kerry and the swift boating, they waited forever to talk about that and really, really take that on. i mean, they also invited the whole military piece into the campaign because it was a big focus in the early stage, i could do a six-hour class on why

that was maybe not the best idea, but, you know, it's one of those things where you know something like this is going to come up. it always does. do something about it, and the earlier you can do something about it, the better, and, you know, with a good baseline poll, you're going to know how to do that, or you're going to have a very good sense of the best way to start setting the table for this likely attack that's going to come your way and then start using it to your advantage as much as possible. all right. so, you know, you have your bio pieces, we talked about policy, then you have your demographics. that's pretty straightforward stuff. in your baseline poll you tend to ask more demographic polls, so you have not only do they have kids, education, you might get into is anyone in their household a union men, is -- member, is anyone a military member, do they own a firearm depending on what state you're in? and then also in the policy there are also sometimes basics

of just getting a handle on, you know, what percent of your voter population is pro-choice, what percent is, you know, for gun restrictions, what percent are against which, again, just sort of helps paint the landscape and gives you a better understanding of where the voters are in your district and, you know, your baseline is where you're going to learn this and where you're going to start really getting a handle. and, again, you know, you might be from the state, you might have worked in the state before but just, you know, try to keep in mind, you know, you're one person. even if you've worked in a couple cam campaigns, you've worked on those specific campaigns, it's also good to get what the people think from the people that you're trying to persuade to vote for your candidate as opposed to just thinking you know and going on that assumption. that can lead to some very bad things and put you in pretty awkward positions. and, again, you're just much better off actually knowing what

the people are thinking as opposed to just assuming what they think. and, you know, again, if you're on a conference call and a lot of people are saying i think, i think, i think, i think, you're having a very bad conference call, and you're probably about to make a very bad decision. you're much better off having a conference call that says, well, we know that -- and going from there. i'm sure we've all, or some of us in this room have been on those conference calls. all right. so now you did your baseline poll, you're starting to really get into the flow of the campaign, now you have your midway poll. issues and, you know, i talked about it before, if you tested an issue two months ago, three months ago unless something radically has changed in the public sphere, you know, someone's view on abortion is not going to change in two months. someone's view on public education probably not going to change in a couple months. again, if there's something very specific that has come out, you

know, there's a piece of legislation in congress that just passed or is about to pass, you know, a big news story hit your state that you didn't talk about before, you might want to put that in, that's what you'd want to put into your midway tracker but retesting what you already know is just wasting time, and you're spending more money that you don't need to spend. not being a good business model here, but again, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to, if you have an understanding of where the voters are, don't bother retesting it because you know what it is. favorabilities, you probably tested a lot of people in the first one because you wanted to get an understanding of a lot of the players in the state. so it's interesting to know where the government stands, do more people know him than he did before, what about the people you're running against. but, again, don't waste your time. if you tested unions or a group

like the nra or planned parenthood or, you know, whatever group it was that you tested, unless they've been in the news, the opinions haven't really changed all that much. don't waste your time and effort relearning what you already know. the horse race starts becoming more interesting as you're getting closer to the election, voters tend to be paying more attention, you're starting to get a clearer picture of where things are heading. you know, you started at probably a very low point since you're working for this guy who no one has heard before so, you know, you want to see some positive movement. you'd hate to go from 2 to 0, but, you know, don't expect to be winning a huge race, and you're probably still going to have at least 30% of the electorate who says they're undecided at this time. you know, it's interesting to find out who those people are and what they think about the issues, a lot of times you can sort of flesh out are they really undecided or are they playing hard to get? new jersey is one of those states where voters are

notoriously coy about who they're going to vote for. i think they just like attention so they say, oh, i don't know who i'm going to vote for. the numbers didn't change in the past month, but a lot of times in presidentials you see is new jersey turning red, are republicans going to win, and then usually the democrat ended coming back and winning without too much trouble. again, this past year is a a different story, but this is how it's sort of happened in the past. but you can sort of start figuring out because a lot of voters do get in habits of party politics and will vote for the republican or the democratic regardless of who else is on the ballot, but you can figure out who the true undecides are, and a lot of times that's the main focus of your campaign. you know, your bio piece unless something's changed in your bio or you have a specific question that you didn't test in the first one, again, no reason to be relearning what you figured out in the first one.

so there's no point in wasting time going through your bio again and trying to see if anything really changed. it's just wasting everyone's time and money. and, you know, this is where you might want to be getting into some more specific policies that have come up over the last few months. some new issues have hit the radar, you want to hone in a little more on this one specific issue that you didn't have a chance to do in the fist poll. here's -- first poll. here's a good chance to do it in your sort of midway tracker. and then moving into tracking polls, now you're looking at very short polls moving up to the election. so at this point unless, you know, something is completely blindsided and you really need to get a read on it, you know, what you really care about is do people know you, what do they think about you, how has that changed and how is that changing as you're moving towards the election? and where the horse race is.

sometimes, you know, in some campaigns it's just the horse race, are you going to vote for candidate x or candidate y? i've worked on some campaigns where we were seeing more movement in descriptions of candidates which tend to be a little more interesting. the horse race really wasn't moving, but we saw more movement in people saying that the candidate i was working for, you know, understood the problems of day-to-day people in new jersey. and we started seeing that that was actually positive movement for our candidate, so sometimes, you know, there are other ways of sort of getting at the movement. sometimes it presents itself in the, in the horse race. other times you need to find a slightly different way to get there, but with your tracking poll that's pretty much it. you know, at this point your policy proposals have been made, you have been arguing what they are, you're up on tv, you're sort of lost the ability to redefine the race, so what you're really trying to figure out is where do my last mailers need to go out, what tv, you

know, what media markets do i need to be up in? are there any problem areas, do i need to worry about if i'm having a problem in this community, do i need to get a surrogate to go out and talk for me to try to get that last boost and get me over the finish line at the end? you know, and the other thing that you should always remember with polling is that you should be polling because it's going to inform a decision. if you've made all your decisions, if you've spent all your money, if, you know, you have the final media bit is in the can, it's at the tv station, you've already decided i'm going to put, you know, x hundreds of thousands of dollars in this media market and the other 100,000 dollars is going in the other one, polling is doing nothing for you at that point. again, except spending money and putting a little extra money in my pocket which i'm usually not completely against, but there's really no reason to poll if

you're not going to make a decision based on those polls. so, you know, if you've hit the point where you are 100% comfortable or there's just no decisions left to be made, don't poll. >> really important point. i really want you to remember that because often times we'll see a plan, well, we're going to do a baseline in january and we'll do a midway in june, and we'll do some tracking in august and we'll say, why? well, because, why not? and, you know, do a poll to inform a decision that you're going to make. >> right. and you can, you can drive yourself nuts on a campaign, and sometimes too much data is exactly that, it's too much data. i worked on one campaign where going can back and forth, and i actually had recommended to not poll but some other people wanted to get the poll in, and, you know, the one thing that you also have to remember about polls is when you hear them talked about, they talk about the margin of error at a 95%

effective rate is usually the way they talk about it. so what that means is basically if you did the same poll 100 times in the same district or the same state, 95 times you're going to get pretty much the same answer as within whatever that margin of error is, a lot of times it's three or four points, but it's going to stay consistent. five times you are just going to get ridiculously weird numbers. this is just how it happens and, you know, in this case i'm specifically thinking about when we were deciding whether or not to poll, my concern was we just had too many numbers to begin with, and this was just going to completely freak out the candidate, and then we got just a truly bizarre poll back where we had been seeing numbers changing by centimeters over the last two months. and all of a sudden we did one poll that was done two days after the last poll that all of a sudden, you know, our candidate had dropped eight points. and, you know, the other candidate had dropped five points, and everyone was undecided now, and we were just seeing weird things in the voter

id. and it was just one of those five polls that happens. and it did exactly what we thought we were concerned about, the candidate just got completely flipped out and just was a basket case for 24 hours because they were convinced they were now going to lose even though for the last two months they'd been up by six points, and they ended up winning. it was just one of those polls. so really as a campaign manager especially as you're getting towards the end, you know your candidate, you know, you know, what is going to make your campaign the most effective campaign. and if you have no more questions that need answered, don't muddy the waters with more numbers that can just cause problems. so really, you know, get a clear sense of -- and like we were just saying, you know, this poll comes out, are we going to make a decision based on this poll? if the answer is, no, then you

probably shouldn't do the poll. make sense? everyone? yeah? questions? no? yeah. >> this isn't, well, okay. i just outover curiousty, if you have to have 500 people polled, how many people do you usually have to call? >> it gets, it's getting worse and worse every year. it all, it all -- i mean, usually the way that the phone banks tend to think about it more is not how many -- it's done a little more of how many names you need to give them to get 500, so these days you're looking somewhere, usually it's b about 30, 35 to 1. so every one call that you need you need to give them about 35 names off the voter file in order to get that one person. it used to be 20 to 1. and now as we're going on, you know, with more and more people just having : cell phones, no d lines, caller id, things like that, it's just getting harder

to get people on the phone. now, you know, that being said you shouldn't, it's a very odd thing where when you look at studies that have been done on what is sort of truly statistically correct research versus, you know, what is done for, let's say, political campaigns which i'm not going to argue is truly, pure statistically correct research. the difference between the two are so minimal that the amount of money that it would cost to do it perfectly correct is not even worth it for the purposes of the campaign. and i know it's sort of it doesn't seem right, it seems odd, but it's true. and, you know, what we've seen especially on some of the bigger presidentials where you really have a chance to sort of look at this, when you introduced cell phone numbers into the sample, the difference really wasn't worth the effort, again, unless you were doing a specific poll

for, let's say, younger people. so if i'm doing a poll and i need to know what people under the age of 35 think, i'm doing a lot of internet, and i'm doing a lot of cell phones. i'm not calling a lot of land lines because it's just not going to happen. and the other reason why you are hiring a pollster is because they know the demographics of the area, they know how the calling works, and they know how to make sure that the calling house is getting a representative sample of the district that you're calling. these are thicks you don't -- things you don't need to worry about, but this keeps us up at night making sure that we're getting the correct spread geographically, demographically, we're getting the right age groups and all this kind of stuff. this is what tends to be sort of the heaviest lift, you know, especially during the calling because if you just call people, you'll get old white people who stay at home a lot and really like to talk on the phone. like, that is what, who you're going to get. and you really need to, you

know, our job is to make sure that that doesn't happen, that you're getting a true representative sample of the district that you're working in. >> you just briefly touched on, i think, for the first time mentioned internet polling. do you think in your experience that internet polling is less reliable than talking to someone on the phone, or do they even out? >> it all depends on what you're doing. like, right now i'd say i'd be 100% comfortable of a nationwide sample of voters online. some states i would be comfortable in doing an online poll. once you get under the state level and even in some states i just would not, i don't have a comfort level with the online studies. now, not to say that you couldn't get a good panel, but a lot of times what some states now, or most states are getting e-mail addresses when people register to vote.

a lot of us have sort of that e-mail address that we kind of give out on things that we don't can really want to give it out, but you have to, we never really check it. phone polling isn't perfect, internet polling isn't perfect. there are trade-offs for both, and for the most part, you know, i'm for -- for an election, for a campaign, i'm going to be relying more on phone polling right now than i will be on, with online. different kinds of outside of for political sphere it's much more online these days than it is phone polling. i think that's gonna keep changing, you know can, we sort of see the lines crossing, and we're probably a couple years out from almost going excleeseoffly -- exclusively to online. but you do have, again, there are problems with both. you know, not everyone has, you're going to completely underrepresent lower income groups and voters who don't have regular access to the internet,

you have problems reaching people who, you know, again, you get the people who are at work or online all day, have a very easy time of doing a survey on online, and you are missing other people. it's not to say that phone poll calling is perfectly any means, but with the way that the voter files are right now, you're going to probably get better information from a phone, from a phone poll than online. >> [inaudible] say i was to be asking you to do a poll for me. what information would i need to give you, and what information would you, like, basically, would i be writing the questions for you? would i be giving you topics to ask about? or how would that -- >> good question. so basically a good pollster and a good campaign there'll be a sit-down whether it's on a conference call or in person, especially for the baseline, of really talking about, okay, what do we think the big issues are? what do we need to know about these issues? what are the policies that we're

going to be thinking about talking about? and one of the more important things is what does this candidate like to talk about because regardless of what you tell them to talk about, they're going to talk about what they want to talk about, and it's frustrating, but it's just what happens. so, you know, the way i sort of look at it, look, you're going to talk about your two pet issues regardless of what we tell you. let us at least tell you the right way to talk about them. so, you know, figuring out from whether it's the candidate themself sitting there or the campaign manager already has a sense of, oh, god, they really love education and migrating birds, you know, something just ridiculous. okay, well, let's figure out how we can tie this into something that actually means something to the voters because there's going to be that day where they're bored on a stump speech, and all of a sudden they go off on a tangent of this little pet project, and you would just really hope they're going to talk about it in a way that can be then tied back to a meaningful policy or issue or

just the way you're talking about it. so, yeah, for a campaign it's sort of getting that background information of, all right, here's what we know, here's what we'd like to find out and then, you know, then i would go pack and, you know -- back and, you know, with my colleagues work out a draft poll. and then that would get sent out to the campaign, then there'd be, you know, time for everyone to look at it, then there's usually a conference call again -- lots of conference calls on campaigns -- to walk through and really talk about it. and, you know, this is where people have different ideas of how to word a question or, hey, we forgot to put this in, could we add this? what if we change this, etc., etc. and there's usually a couple rounds of drafts of the poll, and it gets to a point where everyone's satisfied with where we were, we have the best poll going in the field, and then the calling happens. and i farm that out to a calling house. there are calling houses all around the country. again, these are things you

don't really need to worry about, but a good pollster will match the calling accents with the people that they're calling. so if i'm calling into a southern state, i'm going to use a southern calling house. if i'm calling new york, i'm not using a southern calling house. it just, you get weird answers, and it's especially important if you have a very diverse population that white people calling black voters get different answers than black people calling black voters. and vice versa. and, you know, again, a lot of it goes into -- you know, a good poll, what was on my shoulders is you need to make sure you're not biasing the questions, and you're not asking questions where people are thinking, what's the right answer? because people on the phone really want to give the right answer, and they'll sort of think to myself, what does this person on the phone want to hear? and if they're talking to, you

know, if the person on the phone is a white person and they're pretty sure the person is black, and there's a question about does barack obama's race have any effect, they're sure as hell not going to say it if they're positive they're talking to a black pimp on the other end of the -- black person on the other end of the line. making sure you have a good mix that tends to reflect the dem graphics that you're -- demographics that you're calling into, it's impossible to say you need to have these people calling these people, but you try to get it as close as possible. and then on the back end we have sort of those deliverables that i talked about. usually the day after the calling ends, depending on how big your sample is, then you'll get the top line results midday the next day. and then usually, you know, you'll get the banners, the breakouts maybe later that day or possibly, you know, a couple

days because that takes a little more time to run. if you're doing a baseline poll, there's not this huge rush to get the numbers out. with trackers, you know, we work at night, 8 a.m. on that first conference call of the day we're going over numbers, we have them ready because it's important to make snap decisions on what the tracking poll's saying. but you're ten months out from an election, getting the results the day after the polling's done is not so important. so i like to take at least a few days to really go through the data the, start getting a picture of what's going on so that i'm talking intelligently to the campaign as opposed to saying, well, that looks like it could be interesting and all of a sudden people are making decisions based on a hunch that ended up being, you know, incorrect. and it happens where a lot of times, you know, my sort of first reaction to something in the data will turn out to be not founded or, you know, then i start looking at something deeper. well, i'm sort of seeing this

trend in women, i think. and then you start looking at it, and it turns out, oh, it's not actually women, it's more an education-based trend in what's going on. and that's what my job is, to really figure that out. then there's usually a presentation of findings where, you know, it's really going through everything. these are the issues that are important, this is how we should talking about it, this is how voters view these issues, these are your target voters, these are your voters who are undecided, these are your independents, these are the voters there is no way in hell you're ever going to win regardless of what you do, don't even bother wasting money trying to reach out to them, they're just not going to be in your camp regardless of what you do. so that's your, that's the big piece. so, i mean, really what you're bringing out from a campaign standpoint is this is what we do know, this is what we need to know, and then the rest is really being done by the pollster, obviously with input

from the campaign and other consultants, you know, the mail consultants, the media if they're on board should be weighing in on the polling because they have different ways of looking at things and, you know, i'm just one person, and someone else might have a good idea of how to word a question or an issue that might be important that i'm not thinking of and, you know, just got to eat my humble pie and take their advice and go with it. no, it really is a collaborative effort, and what you really don't can want is at the end of the day that your mail consultant, let's say, all of a sudden doesn't have the answers that they need answered with your poll because they weren't included in the process. you just really want to make sure everyone who is on board is part of the process to make sure that everyone is getting the questions answered. >> would you do the baseline poll before somebody declares

candidacy or afterwards? and i guess along the same lines how do you get, how do you find your clients and how do potential clients find you? is it a networking thing or you develop a reputation over time? >> sometimes you're going out and, you know, you hear about someone who's considering a run, and you try to sort of find a connection into them. it sort of works in a lot of ways and a lot of times, you know, existing relationships with other people who work on campaigns, i mean, there are campaign managers who i've worked with in the past who will get on a new campaign, and they give me a call and say, hey, i'm on this new campaign, would like you to do the polling. a lot of times a pollster tends to be one of the first people hired, but other times a media consultant was with this candidate beforehand, and i've worked with them in the past, and they recommend that the candidate or the campaign manager give me a call. things like that. sometimes it's reputation,

sometimes it's past experiences and past working relationships. for the announcement, again, it all depends on what is happening in the campaign. so if you have a candidate who is absolutely 100% going to be running for, you know, senate in minnesota regardless of what happens -- new jersey regardless of what happens but you made a decision that you're not going to make an official announcement for three months because you want to wait until the papers to get the signatures are officially polled, and you think that's a better time to get more media attention, you know, whatever the decision is made that there's somehow a lag in now and when the official announcement's going to be made, i mean, again, i would say, you know, as long as the money's there, this is information that you need to know. and the one thing you can never get back, ever, on a campaign is time. and i guarantee you that on every campaign you work on, you're going to be a week out from the election, and you're going to say, i wish we had another week.

and then you're going to think back to that time in, like, january or february when you were kind of not doing things you maybe could have been doing, and you're going to pull your hair out and, you know, what you wouldn't give for that time. so the earlier you can get an understanding of what is going on, where you stand, what you need to be talking about, the better. and, you know, that also applies because, okay, maybe in your ideal world, you know, st. patrick's day was going to be the perfect day to roll this out because there's drinking, and we think the beer connection is great because this guy used to own a brewery. but, you know, two weeks beforehand some big news item hits, and all of a sudden, you know, people know you're thinking about running and reporters are running up to your campaign, what does your candidate think about x, or they're actually talking to the candidate which could be even worse, what do you think about this, and you have no idea what you should be saying, what people will think, how should you be framing this message in a way that's going to resonate

with the largest number of voters, so you're going to give an answer that may or may not be right or effective. and if you had done the research and had that understanding, you're going to be able to adapt to what happens on the ground because no campaign ever actually works the way you want it to. there are always hills and valleys, and that understanding is going to sort of let you get through those changes. and, you know, and the earlier you get an understanding of where you are and where you want to go, the better informed you're going to be to be able to make those decisions, you know, is this an issue that we need to address, is this something that can help us, hurt us or something we should just ignore because it's going to go away in a day or two? if you go on guesses and assumptions, at the end of the day i would always rather be making my decisions based on fact and knowledge versus asummits. summits. other questions? anything?

are we -- i timed that. [laughter] [applause] i planned that. >> we'll take a quick five minute break and then get yourselves into groups. [inaudible conversations]

>> c-span transcribe wiewts in-- tributes including the dalai lama, right-hand reagan, colin paul and robert byrd. then knew year's day, russian prime minister vladimir putin discusses his future. presidential adviser austin goolsbee on the economy, the critter of segway and the co-founder of guitar hero on

entrepreneurship, plus the art of political cartooning. >> now, possible future threats to the united states. scholars and former presidential advisers spoke at this university of virginia conference. it's about an hour, 45 minutes. >> welcome back to panel three of when walls came down, berlin, 9/11 and u.s. strategy in uncertain is times. this is the 2009 william and carol stevenson conference here at the miller center at the university of virginia. i am not kathleen mcnamara, as you may have guessed. [laughter] i am john owen, i'm on the

faculty of the department of politics here at uva. i'm very glad to be, what, emceeing? no. i'll be the whip cracker here on panel three to make sure everything moves along briskly and we all keep within our time limits. and let's get right to it, if we could. i do want to thank ann mulligan, though, for all she's done to make this happen, and she seems to have left the room but thank you, ann, very much. the format will be as in other panels, after i am done in about 30 seconds we'll take our panelists in order, and let me introduce you to them briefly. first the professor of international relations at the university of southern california's school of international relations, she's a historian who studies international relations in the 20th century. she's just come out with a book,

1989: the struggle to create post-cold war europe. and this book just received the 2009 daad prize for distinguished scholarship in german and european studies. and she's currently at the american academy in berlin and came over for this event, so thanks for coming all that way. second, to the purchase's left is professor bruce cummings who's the distinguished service professor in history at the university of chicago. professor cummings is a well known expert in modern korean history, 20th century international history, u.s./east asian relations, east asian political economy and american foreign relations. author of many books and influential articles. next year yale university press is publishing his book, a dominion from sea to sea: pacific ascendancy and american power. our third panelist to professor

cummings' left is william wolforth who is daniel webster professor of government and chair of the department of government at dartmouth college. among his books, the most recent one, world out of balance: international relations theory and the challenge of american primacy. he's an influential, interlocutor in a number of debates including what it means to be living in a ewan polar international system. he is editor and chief of the journal security studies as well. so our first speaker will be mary elise ceroti. so i'll hand it over to you. >> great. thank you very much. as john just said, i've just come out with this book 1989, so i've got sort of so many details and only 15 minutes in which to tell them, but i'll try to restrain myself, and then i'm happy to take questions on any

of the topics that i touch on briefly in my comments. this book is an international history of 1989, it builds on an earlier exceptional work by phil which is still the best study of u.s. foreign policy in this period. i had the advantage of more sources having written this book more recently, so i had the opportunity to go to russia, to poland, to germany, britain, and france and to look at their documents on german unification as well as look at the materials in james baker's collection and also in the bush library which is also in part thanks to phil because he chose to footnote his book with the documents to which he had access. they were not available at the time, but as a result of his decision to the footnote them, it's been possible for scholars to request them under the freedom of information act, and they are now available. so there's a really extraordinary source basis available on 1989 for historians. it's in some ways unusual because often documents are kept closed for 25 or 30 years, so if

you're a contemporary historian, you have to wait 23 or 30 -- 25 or 30 years after an event to have a look at the documents, then it takes you four or five years to work on them, then there's this 30-35 year gap between events and archival-based historical studies, and that's not the case yet. there has been decisions on the parts of individual governments to release documents early, so it's possible to leapfrog over events for which we don't have the documents and move forward and do serious historical scholarship already. when i realized these sources were open largely because of the personal decisions of policymakers like kohl, like gorbachev to release them, that was when i decided to do this book. and the book is very much concerned with the same themes with this conference. the book is not an end of the

cold war book. there are a number of excellent end of the cold war books out there already, of course, mel leffler's first and foremost among them. that was not what i was trying to do. what i was trying to do was ask a different question, which is when international order collapses, when you have these dramatic moments that reveal that long-term social, economic and military pressures have come together to produce a moment of great change, what does the day afterwards look like? how as policymakers do you respond to that? how do you try to master the chaos, how do you try to move forward? that was the question that interested me, specifically with regard to 1989. i should add on a personal note that i had a somewhat unusual perspective on the two events of interest to this conference. i was an undergraduate on a year of study abroad at the free university of west berlin in the academic year 1988 and 1989.

and while to my everlasting regret i went back to the united states to go to graduate school in september of 1989, i nonetheless had a good sense of -- i certainly didn't know the berlin wall was going to come could down, but by then yod the mass flow of refugees, so i clearly had a sense both of the original cold war context which was still very much in place at the start of my year in west berlin in the summer of 1988 and then a sense of the changes. fast forward to 2001, and i was serving as a white house fellow. my first day as a white house fellow was september 4, 2001, so the first week went fine. but then, of course, the events of september 11th occurred, and as before when i was a student, i was in no way in any position of any kind of authority as a young person, just a spectator, but a spectator with a seat fairly close to the front.

so for these two events i have personal recollections of the context, but then as a scholar it's been very gratifying to go and look at the original documents of what was really going on at the real center of events. so that's enough about the background. let me just give you a sense of what is in the paper and then more generally in the book. in both, obviously, in the book at more length i've first tried to establish a narrative, a sequence of events. it's a story full of a lot of chance and contingency, particularly the opening of the berlin wall which was accidental. that is well understood in europe but curiously, not as well understood in the english language literature. i'm not sure why. it's well described in phil's book, but you keep seeing things appearing that talk about the conscious decision of the east german government to open the wall which there was not one. and it's important that it's accidental because it catches everyone unawares so everyone is starting on a level playing

field, and the date on which it occurs is significant because it happens early enough in the, in gorbachev's trajectory n his tragic arc that he still has enough time to determine the outcome. now, of course, the wall was going to open at some point, at some point, but if it had happened a lot later, if it had happened after gorbachev's authority had fallen apart, perhaps at the same time the coup was going on in the soviet union, there's a lot of what if ifs. so the fact that it opens when it does by itself is very significant. when i looked at the documents from all these countries about this time period, i saw again and again that policymakers who described what happened after the wall came down used the language of architecture. bob zoellick did it again last night in his comments. gorbachev, of course, had been talking about a common european home, kohl started talking about two germanys under a european

roof, baker was talking about a transatlantic security architecture, so i kept seeing these met fors again and again, so i decided to follow the lead of the historical actors and use that as the lead for the book. and this is also the way that i addressed the question of how do policymakers respond in the aftermath of these dramatic events. so what i decided to do was think about what happened after november 1989 as an architectural competition where you had different architects proposing different blueprints in a highly competitive fashion to try to succeed, to try to be the one who could put down the blueprint for post-cold war europe the fastest. and the metaphor, i found, worked well because as you know if you win an architectural competition, if you -- your model is selected, that doesn't mean you get to build anything. because people sue you, the contest was unfair, the site

turns out to not be acceptable, so then there's a long process of realizing your model, and that was certainly the effect here as well. so in looking at all of the documents, i saw four kinds of models that were at one point or another seriously proposed. i should say i'm just trying to establish policies here, i'm not trying to say that these were all equally likely. but i found it very helpful to compare the path that was ultimately chosen with the paths that were not. in other words, with the counterfactuals. and the four major models that i found after the wall came down can were, and i'll describe these in more detail, restoration, revivalism, heroism and pre-fab. restoration is an architectural term basically meaning to copy something exactly. it means to basically rebuild something exactly like it was before. the center city of warsaw comes

to mind, it's an attempt to do your best to recreate something exactly as it was before. and i saw this in the immediate response of the soviet union which was to say 1989 is 1945. world war ii just ended, we are the four powers, we are going to have a four-power conference, we are going to have a peace treaty, and that's how we're going to resolve what has just happened. and briefly the other four powers play along. there is actually a four-power-only meeting in december 1989. it completely shocked both the east and the west germans who felt like they were being treated like a protectrate. there's a speech by a russian leader saying, well, we've just defeated the nazis, now we have to reconstruct germany. it's a little surreal to read. helmut kohl rapidly proposed his model which i've called

revivalism. now, it's slightly different. it means building something that is informed by an older style but that is modernized, updated, something that thomas jefferson would have appreciated if you look around this campus, you can see very much how he admired roman architecture. so helmut kohl decided he needed to counter this notion that it was 1945 and that he didn't matter, and he proposed to revive a confederation in november, november 28th he proposed via his shocking ten-points speech which no one knew about in advance with the partial exception of the white house that there should be a confederation of just two german states, and over the course of decades he thought if he were extremely lucky at a minimum two decades but probably a lot more, over a long period of time two 21st-century germanys would

eventually grow together in unity. so he proposed this revivalist model which he thought was very viable, not least because the area known as germany had existed in a confederate state for quite a while, and this model was undone when he himself decided to withdraw it. he himself went to east germany and realized that he could push, he could aim higher, he could be the chancellor of german. germany. so he himself with a great grinding of the gears undercut this and decided to push for rapid german unity. the russians in response to this abandoned the restoration model and proposed what i call a heroic model. the term heroism in architecture unlike in everyday life is a very ambiguous term. it's a kind of foolhardy architecture that might reach for the skies but require the destruction of everything at the ground level to accomplish it. it's a term used to describe design exercises of the mid 20th century often in the service of

awe her totarian regimes that were badly misguided. so he had a very vague vision of a common european house that never became specific quickly enough, and it was interesting to hear both bob zoellick and phil talk about how the u.s. knew that he hadn't firmed up his ideas and, therefore, they needed to move quickly before that could happen. and what eventually wins is what i refer to as the prefab model, prefabricated architecture. that is the vision of kohl and bush to the take the prefabricated institutions of western unity, the transatlantic alliance or nato, the european community, the west germans which were supposed to self-destruct, take these structures and duplicate them in the east. now, it's important when i say this to say i'm not trying to infer by calling them prefab

that these were somehow inferior goods. quite the contrary. these are some of the most successful institutions that the world, international relations have ever seen. and prefab, actually, is currently a very fashionable term. i'm not shy trying to imply it's inferior goods, but these structures were created shaped by the cold war, created by the west for the western alliance in the cold war. they were basically then duplicated and put down in the east. now, that is a perfectly fine solution and, indeed, i see it as possibly the only workable solution in this time period, but you then have to be honest about the problems that creates later which is, is that prefab structure specific for the site that you've just put it on? what problems are there with that on the new site? and so one of the problems that we see now still today is that de facto there's been a perpetuation of a front line with russia which did not have to be the outcome of 19 # 9 and

1990. so i'll close with two quo quotations from james baker who was kind enough to let me see his papers as part of this research project. james baker argued that russia as the heir to the ussr, if it embraced free markets and democracy should be part of nato. in other words, if you're going to make nato into an organization to support political development, then you should extend it to russia. james baker also said that every achievement, every solution to a big problem contain thes within itself the seeds of a future problem. and i found that to be a profoundly wise statement because the solution, the prefab solution -- which worked very well -- does contain the itself the seeds of problems that we are now seeing today in our relations with russia. thank you. >> thanks very much. bruce cummings. >> i'd like to thank the miller center and especially mel leffler for inviting me to this conference. i commute from charlottesville

because my wife works here, so it's nice to have an excuse to be here when i'm supposed to be in chicago on monday, tuesday, and wednesday. monday and tuesday. my paper, i think, has a fairly simple point that was also made, in different ways by phillip with walter slocum at the previous panel which is that the assumptions and premises that policymakers bring to bear whether on predictable events or ones with a high project or ones -- probability or ones that are utterly surprising tend to be very important in the way they filter information. i go on in the paper to talk about concepts and metaphors and how we sort of build up our assumptions, but the simple, the simplest line in the paper is the one about the plastic dummy that has sand in the bottom. those are the assumptions, and we push the dummy over, it comes

straight back up. now, in the paper i take four case studies fairly briefly, one is 1945, the shattered world of 1945, the second is the fall of the berlin wall that we've been talking about so much about, and 9/11 in post-cold war north korea. obviously, as a historian i bring to bear a different perspective to the world of policy making and by inside the beltway debates. i've never been a policy be maker. i've participated in a number of beltway debates, i don't remember winning any of them, but i have read thousands of policy papers in the course of my career both open and formerly top secret papers, and that has taught me to be very humble before the task of making life and death decisions in conditions of imperfect

information and often not enough time. i think george cannon probably excellifies the major point of my paper. george was a person who had studied the turn of the century ofdiplomacy roughly around 1900. he had come to basic assumptions or logic that was fundamentally real politic, that is what he brought to bear when he not only entered the foreign service, but became head of policy planning in the state department in the late 1940s. and even though, you know, there may be a billion e-mails in the bush administration, the most recent one or a million papers in the truman administration, i think it's true that someone who knows what they're doing and has a clear logic that fits the events of the day and has access to a president or to a secretary of state like dean acheson rises

above the daily flux of all the papers and these days e-mails. and george, as you all know, had a parsimonious theory that there were five industrial bases in the world that gave a country fundamental war-making power on a major scale. we had four of them in our zones, and the russians had one. and containment was a fairly limited business of keeping things that way in the post-war world. he also, of course, as others have pointed out today believed that through a deft and artful containment that the soviet union over time would be forced to see the error of its ways and would change its system if not transform it or collapse. he was wrong for 40 years, roughly, from 1947 to '89 or '91 and then suddenly he was right.

as i say in the paper, this also is a typical situation. i believe i've been right for 20 years that north korea's not going to collapse in the post-war era, but if it collapses tomorrow morning, i'll look like a fool. i'll get to north korea a little bit later. once these things happen, of course, something that a logic, a world situation that george and others think they understand for four decades suddenly transforms itself when the object of your attention disappears. everyone has an explanation. the reagan arms buildup did it or bureaucratic class that trot sky and others criticized coming into power with stalin did it, a whole host of other reasons can explain the collapse of the soviet union, but none of them have the the virtue of having predicted it. i then get into a, maybe a question that hasn't come up yet

today. not how do we know when we're right about strategy or something like that, but how do we know when we're wrong? and i think one of the most important aspects of trying to understand the world is to learn from our mistakes and learn from those times when we're wrong. there are a number of ways to figure this out, one of them is history. it slaps you in the face, and you realize suddenly that your assumptions or your punitive understanding of the world is, in fact, wrong. i think many people on the left on a world scale from 1989-1991 had a rude slap in the face from hagel's cunning of history. there are other examples, however, in the last 20 years where people get slapped in the face. a second way of thinking about learning how we're wrong is to use mikhail gorbachev's phrase,

life will teach us. when he was forging ahead from 1985 when he came to power until 1991, he often would -- people would say, how do you know if this is going to work, and he would say, life will teach us. i think that's a profound judgment because we all, hopefully, live long lives and as time goes by we find out whether our predictions, our theories, our strategies carry any weight or not. but i think the most popular method of finding out we're wrong is to have history prove it to us, and then we don't change one thing in our basic fundamental assumptions or beliefs. all you do is redefine the issue. i think many people on the left did that in 1989 and '91, but i think we all do it all the time. that's the plastic dummy with the sand in the bottom part of

our consciousness. i think that history or life in gorbachev's sense can show us we're wrong, and even so we continue with our basic assumptions because our world view, our assumptions our constituent to a world view. they embody our life experiences, our character and maybe even our soul. now, i don't have time in this presentation to talk about each of the four cases that i take up in the paper, but again, with dean acheson present at the creation and in 1945 you see someone who had evolved a very clear logic not for containing the soviet union, but rather for reconstituting the world economy after the collapse of the world economy during the great depression and, of course, world war ii. in the paper i talk about his 1939 speech at yale about two