footage available. then we'll have the candidate talking if we think candidate should be spokesperson in the ad. we'll have them talking about issues. we may have to shoot that at last second based on what happened like we did with michelle. there is lot of preparation and work done ahead of time but decisions to run are made very close to the election. i think it was klosotowitz, book on war strategy, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. that is pretty true of campaign planning as well. you don't know what situation will pop up. so we have pretty good idea for most part but actual decision made right as ad comes up. yes, sir? . .

>> that you couldn't say to yourself or sounds bad. use a voiceover then when you're into this sort of territory where we add a little more authority to it, where you are using different kinds of footage behind you. take that authoritarian kind of

-- kind of attitude today. and the one thing we don't have an political campaigns is spokesman's. i'm not a big believer that endorsements make a big deal of difference to the average voter so you don't often see george bush advocating barack obama. i think it's based more on the ad and they can all be effective. last question. >> how much should we budget for ad production and add cost and things like that? >> that's a great question. i imagine someone else will talk about this later on, but production wise would charge about 15 or 20 a day to shoot. depending on how complicated the ad is, how big the state is in terms of voice over. someone else i'm sure we'll cover that later on. thanks for your attention. good luck this week.

good luck in the future. [applause] >> we are back in an hour. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this is the weeklong campaign management institute at american university, 27th year of the program, which invites leading political strategists and researchers to train students for participation in upcoming political campaigns. the session will resume, the institute will resume with a session live at 1 p.m. eastern on selective targeting of voters. later on compiling voter for all of that coming up and we will

have a life for you on c-span2. the associate press, they are reporting that jim is government said today the u.s. should have shared its worries about the nigerian suspect in the botched christmas day airline attack. yemen saying it was tightening restrictions on student visas like the one that allowed umar farouk abdulmutallab to end the country. we had a guest this morning on "washington journal" from the heritage foundation. homeland security policy analyst jena mcneill talking about the attempted airline hijacking an attack. it runs about half an hour. we will show it to you now. spirit our guest jena mcneill with the heritage foundation which is a home in security policy analyst. thanks for joining us. >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: katydid ministrations response to what happened on christmas day trip to the administration took a look at this and find admitted that we really do have a terrorist threat in this country, and that reed they really wanted to emphasize that we're going to

start to work on the problem. i think that's important but i also want to see more details about how they're actually going to make changes. not just by adding security at airports. just starting to tackle our intelligence problems. >> host: how do you think that best will be resolved or worked towards? >> guest: hopefully, we will increase -- increase in working information building our state and local law-enforcement but also with our international partners. i think that's key for continued to work abroad to stop terrorist havens and sanctuaries. >> host: it sounds like you think it ministration has not done enough in their first year in office to get that rolling? >> guest: i think the biggest thing for me is a great example is the patriot act that president obama, you know, he came out and show support on the patriot act. he has to go to say to congress, we need is and help prevent terrorist attacks. i think he needs to go out and

stand for things that are not necessarily popular in his own party. >> host: terror alert, the latest u.s. terrorism alert. nation could emerge ças the next al-qaeda. have we paid enough xdattention >> host: have we paid enough attention to him a? >> guest: i think the board waste and there are a lot of tears sensuous throughout the world. yemen is a place or archive it does operate. i think we can't forget that and that's what we have to continue throughout the world to work with our international partners. there's a lot of places around afghanistan and other places where al qaeda is operating. >> host: what does it make you that al qaeda has taken credit for this plot? >> guest: i think it demonstrates clearly that we still have a threat and that al qaeda is still bent on trying to hurt americans. i think it's important for us not to stop.

>> host: looking at how the response of the obama administration as compared to the bush administration, do you feel there was a transition in getting things that have been started under the bush years and the obama you? >> guest: that has been a smooth transition for a lot of it, but i think you have to go back and assess our thoughts on airline security screening. you know, both administrations can't have a viewpoint we can add a lot of stuff to the process and that's going to necessary make us safer. but i think it's really important that we stop terrorists before they ever get to the airport. >> host: again, jena mcneill. prior to join the heritage foundation she worked as a research assistant for hutchinson group llc a homeland security consulting firm. founded by a former undersecretary for border and transportation security at dhs. you have background and expensive looking at border protection, border security. what lessons do we learn from protecting the border or

watching the transit of illegal immigrants across the border, how do we translate and that -- that into this situation? >> guest: i can, you can just add a bunch of stuff. stuff doesn't make the border 100% safe. it doesn't make airlines 100% safe. the threat changes, and i think you see al qaeda, when they brought boxcars on 9/11, it was perfectly legal to bring a box there at that time. i think you'll see al qaeda transitioned around. a lot of time at the boers, people smuggle, people get to the border and that's what we can't just rely on putting a bunch of stuff in technology. >> host: plus go to our first caller. barber on the republican one calling from fairfax eugenie. good morning, barbara. tranthirty good morning, everybody. i would like to say if a parent flags a child as having a problem and we issues visas were

wished, i can name at least four things we didn't do that would've kept this guy off that plane and kept anybody from getting into our country, or getting on these planes. why do we have to take everybody, writes and -- i don't want to stand in a line and make them go through my underwear. no american wants that. we shouldn't have too stooped to that, to stop this. >> guest: you know, i think you make a really great point about how we can't just focus on the airport. you know, we put a lot of people through a lot of hassle in order to not necessary get anywhere. i think this demonstrates that exact point. i think you're right. there are three things that are important that we are still wanting answers on. he was evidently in some sort of terrorist database.

he had these issues are his dad came to a u.s. consular office. all those things are questioned that need to be answered by dhs about why this man did not receive additional screening. >> host: we had an op-ed in "new york times" today. 2001 to 2003 and at the department of homeland security after that, and he writes that perhaps the biggest lesson for airline security from the recent incident is that we must overcome our tendency to be reactive. we always seem to be a least one step behind the tears that they find one security gap and we close that when. then wait for them to exploit another. why not identify all the vulnerabilities and then addressed each one before terrorists strike again? what do the bush administration due to work towards that goal? >> guest: i think the bush administration specifically worked on, there's a program called the visa waiver program. this is a great example of one of the things we worked with our international allies to have information shared agreements

and other security agreements that say, hey, if you want to come to the u.s. for better travel, you can do that. but you have to bring their own security first. so we done that with a lot of countries, and i think that that has to help those abroad to be able to stop terrorism ever entering the united states. >> host: let's go to albany, georgia, where johnny is on the democrat line. >> caller: i was going to make a comment at this seems to me that not as much as f1 has said, this is the second time they've tried to use that particular explosive, and this is the second time they failed. they are telling everybody that they don't know as much about the explosive that we're trying to make it out of no. and show that al qaeda is really not a great fighting force in the fighting will, because if they were, they would know how to use this explosive. the amount biscuit had in his underwear probably wasn't able to do the damage on the ground.

so we really victory for al qaeda by putting them on the moves and saying they know this and they know that. when al qaeda really don't know anything. they have only had two successful crashes but the one they use american aircraft in. that was england airey quitman, and the other in bali where the action had the philippine or someone there to make a bomb that worked. >> guest: you know, i think there have been 28 plots foiled since 9/11 that at least 20 plots that we know of. i think it might be premature to say that al qaeda hasn't been successful in at least trying to launch attacks against the united states. it demonstrates they are alive and will. a lot of those plots were al qaeda affiliated. i kind of disagree that al qaeda really isn't a good organization as far as being able to try to stop americans that they really are a dangerous, violent organization that i think we have to take very seriously and have to try to stop them from

hurting us. >> host: steve is in indianapolis on the independent columbine. high, steep. tranthirty good morning. thank you for taking my call. i was just want to state a fact that we have traded an awful lot of our freedoms in exchange for this security. we see that we've not a college anything. i have a letter from president clinton, and i warned him back when he was in office about this coming threat. threat. and he set me a letter back to his signature on it stating that his number one priority was to increase aviation security in airports and aircraft. alt-a. that was long before bush. what he said he was going to do, he obvious he didn't do it and they succeeded. you get to the point where you start thinking are these guys allowing al qaeda to succeed and make islam make it look like it is powerful and beautiful? because they are shirking their duties. i've got a lot of evidence that law enforcement shirking their duty to try to make these guys look better than they really are. >> guest: i think one of the

point you might have a literature is i think is really important that we continue to have policies in place that don't just keep people safe, but also keep them free and prosperous. privacy is important, civil liberties are important. and it's also important that we stop these terrorist attacks. you allude to that in your statement and would give us specifics about what is appropriate as far as screening goes, do you support the use of these millimeterwave machines and what goes too far when it comes to privacy invasions? >> guest: you know, i think it's very important that we have to look where is the biggest bang for our buck. you know, we should you spend a bunch of blood and airports and put in a bunch -- there's a lot of technology out there that would strip of us all more privacy, civil liberties to get my work 99.5 percent of the time. but i think it's important to strike that balance. specifically about what technology should be there. i will leave it to the more technological people, but i do think it's very, very critical

that we look at where we're making the realty invests in. i would suggest that's on the intelligence and, information side of things than what we have a comment on twitter, do you think we're missing the whole issue in addressing the physical aspects only quizzed the ideological aspects are totally ignored. >> guest: absolutely we have to look into that ideological aspects. radicalization in itself is something we do need to know more about. i don't think it's something that can be ignored. >> host: little rock, arkansas, paula's on the republican line. high, paul. tranthirty yes, good morning. i am 100% favor our security. i feel that it is very important. i don't mind the federal government invading my privacy if it makes flying on airplanes or riding amtrak, riding the bus

more safer. i don't mind my privacy being invaded. i would like to say to jenna that the heritage foundation is a very wonderful group. you do an excellent job, and providing the right information for the public. and i wish you godspeed in the future. >> guest: thank you. you know, it's always great to hear kind words about the heritage foundation, and you know, i think you make a point that there are a lot of people who don't mind going through additional screening. but what i really care about the most is that making sure whatever screening we do go through is the stuff that makes us complacent. >> host: greenville, northglenn. crystal on the democrat line. go ahead, crystal tranthirty she

had touched on some of the questions that i had regarding the extra security. and i do know, i mean, she can verify this for me, but i don't know whether it was in a stainless package or what bill they were trying to get through the congress, to add additional monies, millions of dollars, for homeland security as far as this new technology that they wanted to use to go to the airport for the screening where it would, in fact, screen a little bit more than what they had voted against. and it was voted down, from my understating. >> guest: there was additional money inside the stimulus for the transportation security administration. now there are a lot of questions about what that exactly what to. you know, i heard somebody

discuss it as, you know, people got fancy new uniforms. so it's difficult to know exactly where that money went towards, and with the standards we're still trying to find out exactly where those dollars online. >> host: what other relationships do we need to forge with other countries, you talked about how that can be a cornerstone to working on combating terrorism domestically as was other sees. what countries do we need to change her relationship with? >> guest: i think we need to continue the relationship with our traditional allies. at a lot of those are decent waiver countries who continue to feed us information, information sharing is one of those great things or they say we have information on this guy, you know, he's a threat. you should mature he doesn't come over, things like that. but dhs has assistance programs that they help countries, perhaps in africa and other countries who don't have the political will or fiscal will to be able to improve their own security. we help them improve their transportation security practices at airports in things

like that so when people fly and, we have a better shot that they are saved not trying to harm americans. >> host: deal is on the independent line. oklahoma city, ogallala. >> caller: good morning, how you guys doing today? >> guest: good morning. >> caller: my question is how confident do you think the american people are with the new homeland security department, relatively new homeland security department? in light of this christmas day attempt, and that's pretty much it. i will hang up and listen to answer. thank you. >> guest: it's difficult for me to speak on behalf of the american public, but i know personally, eunuch, without ever going to any kind of blame game, i know the obama administration is in charge of our executive branch. and i know that every responsible to make sure that we both look backwards, and that we look forward to trying to figure out what happened and to fix it appropriate. i hope that they would do that. and entanglement isn't always popular with their own party.

i suspect and hope that obama will really go to congress and ask for the things he needs to and make the appropriate changes in his own branch. >> host: what is the short-term and media think they should have a right out in the next couple weeks before congress comes back from the holiday break? >> guest: immediately we need to assess what happened. i think there is -- if you see the dots were not connected to doing this manslaughter man's father, to a u.s. consular office, the fact that he was in our database, you know, he wasn't additionally screened. i think we have to start to look at that specifically and really figure out why those dots were not connected. and aggressively figure out how in the future that information can be shared in a timely manner. >> host: we're looking at a picture right now of umar farouk abdulmutallab on a school trip in london and 2001. the "washington post" has gained access, what they believe to be as online personality and postings that he had. what have you learned about his personality about profiling based on what we are saying

about comments he made online? >> guest: you know, there are some reports out there that he was a lone individual and things like that. i think it's important again that we start to look at radicalization, but i also feel that this man obvious he was going to hurt people, and there are a lot of lonely people out there who don't attempt to do terrorist attacks are at it we have to treat him as a terrorist suspect, and look at why he was radicalized. but continued to view them as a terrorism suspect. >> host: dean is on the republicans line called from indiana. >> caller: how are you doing? >> guest: hi. >> caller: my question or perhaps i guess my comment is that first of all, i'm really tired of people saying that there is a lot of racism going on and i know there's a lot of racism. we need to get off that, because everybody is a human being. but any other incidents of what happened over christmas on the plane, i think we need more security instead of private area

-- or privacy area, because first of all, if i'm on a plane i don't want to fly if that plane has a bomb if i'm 40000 feet in the air and no place to go. so i think that the screening should be a little bit better. i know that they've put a lot of money, involved and there's a lot of money involved and it costs a lot. but i think my privacy comes second for my health in everybody else's health. >> guest: you know, i think you might be alluding a little too, a lot of people talk about political correctness and how that impacts our ability to stop terrorists. i think this case actually is a great example of how the terrorist watchlist was kind of a victim of that. you know, when it included a lot of names and would have stopped people from -- would have actually made this individual -- have additional screening automatically, you know, he blessed the list is too big.

too many americanamericans are being encompassed in. but others, when it got too small, you have problems where people are being operably screened. i think the obama administration has to begin to strike that balance. we can't always cave into political. we have to make sure we are keeping americans safe. >> host: should the response al qaeda be different? >> guest: i.t. can make a great point that al qaeda is not the only terrorist organization that seeks to do harm to americans. and i think we really do have to treat them, and a lot was all the same. the same things that were for stopping al qaeda are the same things that work for stopping people who decided to it to active terrace on their own or are so see what other groups. that intelligence, information should, the patriot act, all of those counterterrorism tools, they can help stop things in the very beginning no matter who is axley the perpetrator. >> host: kerry is calling from pontiac michigan on the democrats line. good morning.

>> caller: good morning. i just want to ask a question, before i deleted more security. i am for security. but i wanted to find out from the young lady, are they expecting president obama's administration to start from scratch and protecting us, or has the republican party when they were in office, do they have any foundation you know, to build on, upon? i'm kind of confused a little bit as to why everyone expects this administration, being a new administration, to have all the answers. when, in fact, the republican party was in office and the congress and senate were republican. what have they done to ensure the american people that we are protected nation? >> guest: you know, there is a lot of continuity between administrations. for all the change that comes

between the republican or democratic administration, there's also a lot continuity. we have civil servant to stay there to make sure that the programs are continued. so you know, i think there is a lot there, a lot of the same things under the republican administration are completely there under the obama administration. but i don't think we have to play a blame game but i do think we need obama administration today the appropriate steps, and that's irresponsible as the current administration. >> host: galas on independent color line. >> caller: good morning. to kind of follow along with the last caller thoughts, how can the obama administration fully protect us, gore tried to have, when the republicans have a block funding, they've got, as

was mentioned early, demint, republican debate that has blocked the gsa administrator, i don't understand it's like, you know, both parties would be trying everything, cooperation, to help the security. seems like the republicans are trying to block everything that the obama administration is trying. >> guest: well, you know, there's a lot of washington politics obviously. you know, whether it's republican or democratic administration there's always good to be those politics. and that's what we have people in place regardless of an administration. you know, those people are there. they are there trying to keep americans safe every day regardless of whether their boss is democrat and regards of whether their bosses are republican. so i don't worry as much about the change of administration as i do of just making sure that we

take the appropriate steps to try to fix the problem. >> host: "the wall street journal" reports that a statement attributed to the group al qaeda in the arabian peninsula claimed it was retaliate for what it says was the u.s. roles in yemen. some of our callers talk about their concerns that its retaliation, that is as we go to these countries to go on the offensive, that disney escalate things. what are your thoughts on the? >> guest: certainly when al qaeda gets more desperate, they tend to want to do even more attacks against the united states. but i don't think that demonstrates that we shouldn't do it. i think we have to go and we have to work with other countries to stop these places from becoming centuries were terrorists. >> host: jena mcneill, thanks much for being with us. >> guest: thank you. >> now live to american university and the next half hour or so we'll take you back to the campaign management institute as they continue the

weeklong look at politics, a program inviting leading political strategist and researchers to train students for participation in upcoming campaigns at 1:00 eastern and look at selective targeting of voters began late on compiling voter fosdick will have that for your live again about 1:00 when their expected return. back to good morning again this morning's "washington journal." >> host: talk to us about a year in review as we look at age one and one otherwise known as widely. how has our preparation and so far, and then how do things look as we head into 2010? >> guest: the preparation would have been quite wilbert the only glitch in the whole process as we all know is that the virus that was used to make the vaccine and when you make a vaccine you have to grow the virus in eggs, did not grow as well or as quickly as we wanted. and so there was a gap for a while between the demand for vaccine and the actual supply.

particularly as the children came back to go to school at the end of august, the beginning of september, and then in october when we had expected a large amount of vaccine to be able to be commensurate with the need. there was a gap, but as the weekly by and the monthly bike, that cat has now closed so that we clearly have enough vaccine for the people and we're encouraging people to get vaccinated. but all other aspects of the preparation, the rapid identification, a brand-new virus that hit us in april as we're getting towards the end of the school year, and then the big blip we saw that in which we call the first wave, and then it stayed around during the summer, during the summer camp period. and that when you have the return to school, the second wave came back that it's now going way down, as you look at the number of states that have widespread activity, the number of states have gone from just a month or so ago about 48 states

had widespread activity. now about seven states have widespread activity. so there was vaccine, you know, unfortunately i can't between the supply and demand, but that close. we've had a lot of infectious activity, a widespread virus throughout, particularly the younger individuals. and was considered in general as a mild to moderate in severity pandemic, as pandemics go. the only difference, historically, that we've seen between other viruses, influenza viruses, particularly compared to seasonal flu, is that the virus had a for younger individuals and in a seasonal flu where most of the 36000 deaths, 92% that we regularly get every year with a seasonal flu are generally in elderly individuals between the ages over 65 and usually over 80. we are seeing a disproportionate number of younger individuals

who are getting seriously ill. but in general, and the big picture it has been a relatively mild to moderate pandemic. you know, it's tough to use those words mocked a moderate when you see children die, but in the big picture of numbers, the numbers of very led cases where people died has been relatively small, fortunately and the younger people. . . loped to deal with h1n1 in the coming years? guest: one thing w3ççto make ç even now and çfrom the beginni the vaccine that we çmade for this virus was an excellent, ç almost perfect match to the circulating virus. and we know from clinical trials that the vaccine prou(qáha robust immune response that he predict çwoul be protected. the people people that have gotten vaccinated would almost certainly be protected at a

very, very high level. that's the first thing. so your question about what's going to happen now, we're seeing a big decrease in the number of cases. what we want to make sure doesn't happen, which we've seen in other pandemics, is that you get what we call another wave, namely as people come back from the holiday season, as people intermingle with their families in the holiday season and then go back to school, that you will get a third wave. we don't think and we hope that that does not happen. and the best way to avoid that is now that we have plenty of vaccine, to get people vaccinated, so that you can have greater protection than we already have. we've had tens of millions of people, probably over 50 million people who have been infected so far, over 60 million people have been vaccinated. so a reasonable chunk of the population right now is immune, either from infection or from vaccination. if we can get more people

vaccinated it is unlikely we'll have another wave as we get deeper into the winter. influenzas are notoriously unpredictable. we really don't know what will happen next year. if it goes the way we've seen previous influenza pan demming ins go, it is likely although not for sure, that this particular virus will incorporate itself into the regular cyclic seasonal influenza. we'll start seeing it not in a pandemic form because a considerable part of the population will already be immune to it but we'll see it come back and assimilate itself into the regular seasonal flu. that is the reason why we are now want to make sure many more people get vaccinated, so those many people will be protected if it recycles itself back next year. >> host: dr. fauci, update us please on the dealing with hiv/aids, both how it is being dealt with as far

as the disease spread and also of course in your neck of the woods, actually being able to fight the illness and combat it when people are infected. >> guest: well hiv we still have a very serious global pandemic. there are over 33 million people who are infected worldwide. greater than 90% of them are in the developing world, and 67% of them are in southern africa. there are 2.7 million new infections each year and two million deaths. so it is still a very, very serious problem. even here in the united states we have 56, 56,000300 new infections each year -- 56,300 new infections each year. we have to get around and stop that. it has been that way well over 10 years. with regard to treatment, treatment is superb for those people with access to therapy, the drugs we have now have completely transformed the lives of

hiv-infected individuals where when i first started taking care of hiv-infected people right here at national institutes of health in the summer of 1981 someone could woman into the clinic and seriously ill and likely dead within 26 weeks. now with the therapies we have available, if a 20-year-old person comes into the clinic who is newly infected and treat them with very good drugs that we have available, if you do a mathematical modeling very likely that person would live to more than 69 years which is an enormous advance the critical thing we have to address is issue of prevention because we are still having people getting infected. and that's really unacceptable. so we have to continue to push our prevention modalities that have been proven to be effective. it is an interesting statistic that there are a lot of prevention modalities ranging from the use of condoms, needle exchange, mother to child transmission, behavioral modification, a

variety of other things that we can use yet only 20% of the people who would benefit from these prevention modalities actually have access to them. so it is a combination of a major advances that have been made in treatment and in prevention but getting those modalities to the people that need them. so there is still a lot of challenge and much, much more to do in this very, very difficult situation we're in with a pandemic that is still raging. so a lot of good news but a lot of challenges ahead. >> release from nih, more than 1.1 million people are hiv infected in the united states. someone sin teched with the virus every nine 1/2 minutes. disproportionately effecting racial minorities and men who have sex with men. it is not only young person's disease. approximately one quarter of hiv-infected adults in u.s. are 50 years old. they account for 10% of of

all new hiv infections. what is nih's role as we look at hiv and aids compared to other department, other branches within the department of health and human services? >> well, if you look at major groups involved in addressing this, it is nih which does the basic and clinical research to develop new drugs to test them and determine how best to use them. big challenge of developing a vaccine, big challenge of the developing prevention modalities. the other agencies within hhs, like cdc, plays a major role in surveillance of disease, in prevention modalities and making sure that when you have disease that is predominant in certain area, that you educate them, that you get public health programs implemented. the fda, which is, the organization that's involved for the regulation of the drugs, the vaccines, et cetera,ma pays a very

important -- place a very important role all which compliment each other. you have programs within the federal government to get drugs available to people who can not have otherwise access to drugs. so it's really very synergistic and complimentary within the department of health and human services anywhere to the research, to surveillance to prevention to getting safe and effective drugs to people who need them. >> host: let's get to the phones. we have a lot of callers eager to talk to dr. anthony fauci. linda on democrat line in massachusetts. >> caller: good morning, c-span and good morning, dr. fauci. >>. >> guest: good "morning call" this is third time i've been able to talk to you. each time on a different subject because i'm a. concerns about influenza epidemic and trying to educate patients and encourage them to get the vaccine is the way that, anecdotally at least the vaccine was distributed. from my experience really

didn't go to priority groups. there were he had headlines -- headlines recently about that. people in wall street and lawyers in boston that kind of thing got their vaccine prior to health care workers getting them. where i work, we didn't get the seasonal influenza until mid-december, which was a private sector screw-up. because our private supplier decided to take that vaccine and distribute it to their more, their clients who gave them more business which was kind of disconcerting to me. secondly, we had residents who are elderly who, had influenza-like illness during the height of the h1n1, but the docs would not culture them. i'm curious because when i look at the cdc web site, they only count cases laboratory confirmed and i'm concerned there is some distortion about that. lastly, when will we expect this virus to mutate? i'm having trouble

convincing people that they should still get the vaccines for both influenzas. >> guest: well, you asked several questions. let me see if i can answer them quickly and succinctly. first of all, with regard to the seasonal flu vaccine, absolutely correct, people should get seasonal flu vaccine. the priority groups first should have got enthe h1n1. and you're right, early on when there was a big gap between supply and demand there was some inequities in the actual distribution. but if you look at what actually has happened, about 75% of the vaccine that has been administered has gone to the priority groups, namely those who are most at risk for the complications. so, even though early on, when you have that gap, there's a lot of stress on the system. and the actual distribution of the vaccine, as to who gets them, is the responsibility of the state and local authorities. the federal government essentially bought all the

h1n1, and distributed it to, or made it available to the states in a prorated population-related formula. how it was distributed within the states varied depending upon how the local authorities, state, city, et cetera, felt would be the most efficient way to distribute the h1n1. if you look at the seasonal flu vaccine, the seasonal flu vaccine we've distributed more seasonal flu vaccine this year than we have ever had, mostly because it was available early on because we wanted to get the people vaccinated as we were waiting for the h1n1 vaccine to be available. so a lot of people got vaccinated, about 114 million doses have been distributed. your last question about getting, when would it mutate? well, you really can't predict when viruses mutate but for sure they will and how they mutate, whether they veer away from the vaccine protection is

difficult to say. what we do know right now, and this is important for the message and thank you for trying to get that message across about getting people vaccinated right now, when we have clearly enough vaccine, essentially for anyone who wants it. there are about 119 million doses that have been distributed. a far cry from the earlier shortages that we've had. the vaccine and the virus are still perfectly matched. this vaccine is very good for this h1n1. we know it induce as very good immune response, a robust immune response that you would predict would be protective. so now's the time for people of any group, early on, we wanted to get the high-risk people first. about 75% of the vaccine did go to them but we want anybody and everybody right now who wants to be vaccinated, and should be vags nated to -- vaccinated now so you can be protected when for sure we'll know

there will be a lot more infections this winter, even though the peak has occurred and it is going down, there could be a third wave, number one. and number two as i just mentioned earlier, it is likely though not guaranteed, there will be a recycling next year of this virus as a seasonal type of an influenza. if you've got vaccinated this year or if you were infected you have a high degree of protection. >> host: go to portland, ohio, john is on the independent line. >> caller:, hi, doctor, good morning. >> guest: good morning. >> caller: i'm in portland, oregon, so it is pretty early out here. hey, my question is, we go through this every single year with this vaccine shortage. i mean, it's like, we run into people out here trying to travel on the holidays. we're exposed to a lot of different people all over the united states. we seem to have this shortage every year with every administration successively in the last 15 years at least.

i mean, can we not manufacture enough vaccine in this country? seems like there would almost be a national security issue, wouldn't it? >> guest: well, first of all, with all due respect i have to tell you that information is not correct. it is not a vaccine shortage. you're talking about seasonal flu. let's put h1n1 aside for a minute and look what happens regularly every year with seasonal flu. unfortunately, the leagues we see seasonally is distribution, some people want it, can't get it. some people want it can get it but at end of the year there is not a shortage. we've actually had to throw away vaccine where you had unused vaccine almost every single year with seasonal flu. what we do need is we need to get people into the rythym of more people getting vaccinated each year. if you look at the track record of seasonal influenza vaccines, we've gone just from several years ago where

20, 30, 40, 50 million people a year would get vaccinated to the last couple of years over 100 million people got vaccinated last year and 114 million people got vaccinated this year. so it really isn't fundamentally a shortage issue. it's getting people aware to be vaccinated, get the companies to be able to know that each year they're going to be almost guaranteed that the vaccine that they make is going to be utilized. so what we really need to do is ramp up getting people awareness, that it is important to get seasonal flu vaccine. it is a serious disease. we lose 36,000 people, mostly elderly people each year with seasonal flu when we have over 200,000 excess hospitalizations. so you're right, there is sort of a discordance between what happens with regard to the vaccine, and what people perceive as is a vaccine going to be available? we need more vaccine and more people being

vaccinated. i think awareness that this pandemic has given the american public hopefully, if there is a good thing comes out that, is that more people will be aware why it's important to get vaccinated every season. so you bring up a very good point. >> host: go to henderson, north carolina where travis is on the republicans line. good morning, travis. >> caller: good morning. i just had a couple comments i wanted to make. first about h1n1 and secondly about the hi investment -- hi aids virus. as a republican, i actually believe obama administration handled h1n1 outbreak very well. i understand, you not everything ran perfectly but i do believe it was handled to the best of their capability. second, i'm pretty young. i'm 21 years old. but, i was displaying high-risk behaviors for hiv

and aids i recently thought i contracted the virus. it turns out i didn't. but, when i went to the local health clinic here i was actually very surprised how much information, and how much help the local clinic was to get tested. and the information available, if i had tested positive. i think the real root of these problems is not, or at least for aids and hiv is not the information that is the federal government is putting out for the use or for anybody really. i think the real problem lies in simple fact that a lot of young people my age just don't care. they don't care enough about what's out there. and i think that's a real problem. >> guest: well, that's a very, very good point. i'm glad you gave that message to our audience. in the united states as we heard in the early part of the show there are 1.1 million people infected with

hiv. over 20% of them do not know that they are infected. and the vast majority of infections that get transmitted, get transmitted by someone who does not know that he or she is infected. so what we really need is for people to do just what you did. we need voluntary widespread testing so people know their hiv status. they can get counseled even if they're not infected how they can avoid getting infected. if they are infected they can get on treatment and be counseled how they can avoid infecting other people. so what you did was the right thing. we hope more americans would do that and is go out and get tested. >> host: let's talk about emerging viruses. do you think we'll see more in the future and what can we do to pick them up earlier? >> guest: well, i can guaranty you we'll see more emerging viruses or even other microbes, not just viruses. we see essentially a couple

of a year, either emerging or reear merging microbes. reemerging microbe is brand new one we've never seen before. hiv 28 years ago. sars a few years ago. a reemerging microbe is one that has been around for a while but a pierce in different form in different geographic location. just like west nile virus which for centuries existed in africa in the middle east, but just a few years ago, came to the united states and now endemic in the united states. so the answer to your question is, there is no doubt we will continue to see emerging and reemerging microbes. the way you guard against them is several. one of them is have good surveillance mechanisms. we collaborate, we in the united states with the world health organization, particularly our centers for disease control and prevention which are as good as you can guestimate they're excellent being able to pick up new diseases as they emerge just exactly the

way they rapidly picked up the new h1n1 when it emerged in april. so you have surveillance mechanisms and you have the scientific capability to move rapidly to make diagnostics, vaccines and treatment. so all of those things are in place. you don't hear much about it, but there is a constant surveillance for these inevitably emerging microbes we will continue to see as long as there is civil ages and mankind and interaction between microbes and humans because it is going on ever since the beginning of our civil ages and will continue. >> host: let's go the independent line in georgia. good morning. >> caller: good morning, dr. fauci, i'm a polio survivor. i acquired polio until 1961 when i was two years old. i'm now being effected by post-yo syndrome. i had three questions concerning polio and immunization practices. the first is our troops are being exposed in afghanistan

to people who have had polio. either as carriers or as actually people who have been given the disease and ramifications of that disease. are our soldiers and marines still being immunized for polio? and, are they able to be carriers back into our current pop you la? -- populace. a big frustration with folks in nih a lot of young parents are not i am nicing their children. >> guest: right. >> caller: so are our soldiers in a sense acting as carriers? our second question, rotary, international and many other people are funding polio immunizations but they're using sayre vaccine with which in essence, one in a million chance of getting polio vaccine actually they are immunizing to i havegy the disease. so that seems to be something we need to correct. and thirdly, i didn't know i

had polio. i was not diagnosed until fairly recently. and because of that, when i acquired post-polio, that was a real trauma i can tick event for me. i've only been effected for last two years. now i barely walk and used to run marathons. is there something being done for communication about post-polio to a broader populace than just those who know they were affected initially? because i have a feeling there is lot more folks like me out there? so thank you so much for considering these questions and merry christmas and happy new year. >> guest: same to you. i will try to quick answer. you asked several questions. first of all just to clarify for the viewers that, when you talk about polio vaccine and being a carrier there are two types of polio vaccine. there is the live a "10-8"ed vaccine that when you want to vaccinate broad populations you have the virus in weakened form replicated and you can

actually crossimmunize other people with it. over once in a while when you have just the live vaccine, people who are susceptible can get exposed for example, in unsanitary conditions to someone who's had that. if they don't have immunity they can actually get polio that way. we're trying to eradicate polio worldwide and we're almost successful. not quite. the question you asked about our troops, whenever our troops are deploid to areas where there are diseases endemic they're vaccinated against those diseases. the troops that are vaccinated get vaccinated with the polio vaccine that would not necessarily at all, in fact, couldn't be spread to someone else because you get the killed vaccine. people need to appreciate that vaccination programs like we've had in the united states have succeeded in essentially eliminating polio from our country and

from most of the developed world. unfortunately there are still pockets of polio in certain countries in which vaccination perhaps have not been adequately done or where they have been suspend. so there is a big, big push on right now to completely eradicate polio as a disease, but we need to understand when you get the injectible polio vaccine there is no chance you will spread it to anybody. >> host: tell us more about what happens if you are exposed to polio at a young age. our caller talked about not actually knowing he was exposed and now has post-polio symptoms? >> guest: again i don't want to get people confused. what happens is that, you've got to talk about real infection with polio where someone, particularly for example, if someone gets exposed to someone who has been vaccinated with a live atenuated particularly people with certain immunodeficiencies where their immune system -- when normal immune system sees

attenuated weakened virus make immune response and not get sick. some people are immunosuppressed congenitally, or otherwise would in a rare, rare instance get exposed to live polio vaccine that would normally be handled very, very well by people. they could wind up getting polio. when we see very rare but nonetheless finite number of cases of that. the post-polio syndrome is a different story. post-polio syndrome is someone who has had polio in the past who decades later, they get an exacerbation of some of the knew logical problems that were originally related to the original polio. that again is an unusual, uncommon syndrome but we do see it in people who have been infected many, many, many years ago and is called late post-polio syndrome.

>> host: let's go to pittsburgh, pennsylvania where david is on the independent line. >> caller: hello? >> host: david, good morning, welcome. >> caller: yes, i'd like to speak to dr. fauci. it has been quite a number of years since i met him last time. i met him at an aids conference here in pittsburgh. my question is, now, people like myself, i got the h1n1 or swine flu vaccine back, it was '76 last time it was out. i developed gill yom beret syndrome. was. paralyzed several months after. i'm wondering am i immune to this strain now or not? since that time i haven't been able to get the, any flu vaccine, for any type-a, or type b or whatever. >> guest: sure. well, it is clear that people who have been exposed in the '50s to similar h1n1

viruses, that are certainly different than the new h1n1 that we've seen, most of those people are elderly now, and that is the reason why elderly people seem to be relatively protected, likely, due to previous exposures to the real infection of an h1n1 that has some cross reactivety with the current one. the other group are people like yourself who were vaccinated against the swine flu in 1976. it is likely, though not guaranteed, that that vaccination, which unfortunately caused you the problem of guiallme, barre. that would likely make you immune to the h1n1. you're perfectly correct, the fact thaw unfortunately had a serious adverse event in 1976, precludes you from getting an h1n1 vaccine now,

or any influenza vaccine, as your physicians i'm sure appropriately instructed you. but, how old are you? i would imagine, 1976, if you were vaccinated then, that's, more than 30 years ago. if you were a young man then, that you're probably in your 50s or older right now, that it is likely that you are protected from previous expose shares. but you are -- exposures. you are expect in not getting vaccine this time because of your previous unfortunate experience. >> host: we have a comment on twitter, who writes, dr. fauci, please address the new strain of tb appeared in a patient down in florida. >> guest: a new train of tb. is that what you said, tb, tuberculosis. >> that's correct. tuberculosis. >> tuberculosis is generally a very treatable disease and cureable disease by standard medications. what we're starting to see now are a, what's called multiple drug resistant and

then in a rare, rare case, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis. what that means is that the might be croak that the -- microbe, the tuberculosis microbe developed resistance against standard medications we use. it is a serious disease and it needs to be diagnosed correctly early on, so that individuals can be put on more drugs, and drugs that you know are not resistant in the sense of microbe is resistant to those drugs. so that's the reason why with when we get tuberculosis patients we want to diagnose them as rapidly as possible and treat them with the full course of therapy because otherwise you have the danger of the emergence of a very resistant microbe, which we've seen in the united states rarely, but it's also seen in other countries, particularly in the developing world where

treatment is not adequate for the tuberculosis and then you get the emergence of a multiple or extensively drug-resistant tb. we've seen some real outbreaks in certain parts of south africa over the past several years which have caused a very serious problem, particularly among hiv-infected individuals, where tuberculosis is a very commonp tunis tick or secondary infection. . .

>> caller: or anybody does. >> guest: i don't how to respond to that except to say that the vaccine that is made for the h1n1 and for any of the other influences, historically are very safe, and historically are really quite effective. so you know, i have to respect people's opinion that they have, but i strongly disagree, first of all, the vast, vast, vast majority of people who deal with the cdc find it to be very courteous and very professional. i certainly have as colleagues find them extremely courteous and extremely respectful of the american public. so i would have to disagree with the scholar. >> host: last call. had is on the democrat line. >> caller: good morning. dr. fauci?

>> you can see it live every day at 7 a.m. eastern. take you live now over to american university in washington, d.c.. their campaign management institute under way. the afternoon session noon starting. live coverage on c-span2. >> in the late '80s, early '90s. >> seventys. >> yes, i know none of you are bored that you don't have to remind us. tom was a graduate of cmi in what you? 1996. before many of you were born. just getting. 1996. and has told carol and i this morning is done his presentation for 10 years. which is unbelievable. he is a personal friend and a lovely, lovely person. he will walk you through some very competent steps. pay attention. you do get to use one team ever, not every team member but you can do that. tom, take it away, man. >> thanks. thanks a much.

thank you for having me here. i will start off with a little, i got a little bit of a throat issue going on but i got sort of his bronchitis thing. so i have a coughing fit stay with the. if i lose my voice, we're going to have 90 minutes of targeting charades. that might even. i will say up front, and i apologize, i try to keep this as interactive as possible because targeting can be sort of dense subject. this is going to be one of the more unique sessions that you will have. because generally you're sitting here and you're learning broader, broader pieces of information. here you are actually taking a scale where you're going to have to leave here and create something from that. i want to teach you how to create a need to. so it's important that we keep this interactive. if you have questions as where go through this, and going to try to leave time for questions at the end, but if you have questions as where going through, and i hope you do, put your hand up and i will get to

you and we'll keep this as interactive as possible. okay. i want to give you the objective. you don't have to write everything down here, because you guys are going to have a copy for this available to you, the entire powerpoint. but i want you to look at these three objectives and keep checking back throughout this session in terms of making sure that you're getting closer to these goals. okay? you're not always going to leader after 90 minutes and be targeting experts, but i want you to know enough to be able to go and work, and eventually create work. number one, i want you guys to understand what targeting is and why it's necessary. number one. were going to talk about that first and foremost. number two, how do you create your own target? that is aspects of cmi, makes it seem like unique in terms of the number of training that i've been doing in the cycle, this is

the only one where i do that i teach people to make and that's what it's one of my favorites. but with so may people here, you get targeting, here's how you use the. you understand how to use it much better if you understand where it came from. so you need to understand how to make it. this goes for every single member of your group, okay? even if one of you eventually one of you will be the first and responsible for creating marketing data. but every member of the group has to understand what that person is doing, because they are making a lot of assumptions that you need to question. you need to understand and you need to be able to use it as part of your section of the campaign plan. and then number three, how do you use targeting to its fully integrated. what is targeting and why do we need it? any ideas of what targeting is? yesterday.

[inaudible] >> finding out where the voters live, yes. there's a lot of answers to this question. [inaudible] >> finding out who the voters you what our. where they live, who they are what else? right here. [inaudible] >> absolute. how to properly allocate resources, resource allocation is a term you'll hear us talk about what we're talking about targeting all the time your why is targeting important? why do we need to target? yes? >> because they spend a lot of my. >> it's about efficiency. if you don't target you'll spend a lot of money you don't need to spend. so in targeting something that's unique to the political campaign world? no. so give me examples of targeting elsewhere.

anyone. >> google ads. >> how are they targeted? [inaudible] >> so you're searching for something. you enter a search term in google and in an ad comes up that somehow related to what you search for. they have targeted to. did make a decision. there's a company that has a finite budget of advertising dollars that they're going to spend to try to sell their product, whatever it is. what is a service of product order. they could just go out and put an ad up on every single website, right? or as many websites randomly as they could get. would that be a wise expenditure of the resources? no. because you might be going to websites that have nothing to do with your product or how about television? somebody give me an example of television. >> which company advertise on which channel. >> absolute or to watch the football game last night?

regard to busy? who watch the football game on sunday before this ever began? no one is watching football. okay. what sort of ads do you see during a football game? beer commercials. what else? truck commercials but why were there here and truck commercials? guys watch football. [laughter] >> is everyone who watches football a guy? my wife would say she's a huge football fan. she doesn't drink beer for the most part and doesn't drive a truck, right. does every guy drink beer? i don't. i'm going to do it right here. sorry. are popular going to listen to what i have to say. is every guy driving truck? no. so why do they buy air on football games? [inaudible] >> maggiore. someone mentioned efficiency. there's an efficient either, meaning if you want to sell beer, trucks, you're better off lying in a program where there's going to be a higher efficiency. meaning of the people were watching it, a higher percentage

of the people watching it will be people who are open to your product. that's targeting. that's all it is. in the political world is as important as it is in the corporate world, meaning probably more important. in my opinion, more important. because the issues that are stake here in terms of the candidates that we are electing. you're going to have a finite budget, correct? the three resources in the campaign, you guys had this code in your head the first day. what are the? time, money and people. what do we know about all three of them? you don't have enough. their fiber in the end you'll have a certain amount of time between now and election day, you only have a certain number of people, volunteer staffers, and had a finite amount of money to spend. so in the end, how you target will not necessarily, i won't tell you every time it will decide outcome of an election, but any close election, more often than not the campaign that targets better is going to win.

okay? everyone good on this so far? we are sort of in the theory. part of this. rules of targeting. and i'm going to come back to this ad in. you don't have to write this down. you will have a. number one, targeting should always be dynamic. i need to think they should out of there. targeting has to always be dynamic. what that means is when you create targeting, and so any campaign, the campaigns in the states that you guys are looking at in ohio, missouri and pennsylvania, the campaigns on the ground that they already have targeting data that they have created. and a kind of targeting data that we are going to talk about creating now. they have already created. does that get created in a day, and then set aside for the next 11 months? is that a good idea? no. why not? things could change. things will change, right?

it's a very dynamic environment. we've got -- the economy being very bold. you have got just who knows what will happen and will. the incident on christmas day in detroit will show you things can happen very quickly, and change the political climate on a dime, right? so your targeting has to be dynamic. it has to be a living, breathing aspect of your campaign. okay? which gets to the next point. targeting should be an academic exercise. meaning this deals with numbers, yes, and a lot of times people say i don't get targeted because i'm not a numbers person. that's a copout. targeting is more about logic than it is about math. is not an academic exercise, meaning the folks who are reviewing your campaign plans in the end will be able to tell if the one person in your group who created the targeting went in a room, made the targeting as a mad scientist, came up with it as a here it as a here grew,

here's my targeting. don't question it. just use it and no one else understood it. the people who read again -- will review your plan, media, everything, will have nothing to do with that targeting. that's just an academic exercise. that person spent a lot of time running numbers, and they were not used. can't be an academic exercise. meaning this is a very important point, the targeting has to get done early. whoever is doing the targeting in the group can't spend the next we create the targeting data. you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. so you have to create something as quickly as you can, making it as accurate as possible, and then work with the rest of the group to help them use that data and understand it. and refine it. as you learn more. you can refine it, but don't put yourself in a cave and spend an entire week trying to create the data. which gets to the last one. geographic party must be integrated with polling and

individual targeting to be most useful. you can at least flag how the data will be responsive to the information that you are collecting. from polling data, talking to voters, that sort of thing. think about that as we are going through the session in terms of how you can integrate this outside data. you have a few data sources any campaign in terms of where you're getting information from voters that you have your targeting data which is based on historical election results. you've got a photo file which you guys are going to learn about next. and then you've got polling data and ideas where people are actually talking to voters that i need at your polling session yesterday. that's really it. if you have been set apart as three different sections after campaign and they're integrated they're going to suffer for. you want to start about how you can use those and together we will talk about some of that here. so there are generally three areas of targeting. three questions that we can ask about a voter, generically, and

then there are some questions from there. turnout, performance and persuasion. question number one, is one going to vote or not? right? number one question i wanted to. are they going to vote. doesn't matter how they're going to the. second question, performance. meaning partisan performance but are they likely to vote democrat, likely to vote republican? and in third, persuasion. are they someone who votes consistently with one party or the other or are they someone who tends to go back and forth and is more available to either party. are they the kind of voter that we are going to be fighting over. three basic question divided into those questions about any voter, that i know exactly what i want to do and we will talk about that now. so turnout, think of this as a spectrum here. all the way from the left side here of voters who are highly unlikely to vote, to all the way

over on the right side to those voters who are highly likely to vote. every voter, every person, polls in somewhere along the spectrum. the trick of targeting is figuring out roughly what each voter is. because where they exist on the spectrum is going to answer the question of how we want to target them. so thinking about real-world examples, what sort of person, boater, would be over here? what sort of data point, piece of information could you get about someone that would tell you that they are highly unlikely to vote? [inaudible] >> not registered to vote that they are not registered and the registration deadline has passed. they are not going to vote. they better not vote. anyone else? >> they haven't voted recently. >> they haven't voted recently. so you can look at the vote

history here vote history is collected on most voters, and you could look and see, this person has been registered for 10 years and they have only voted twice. in the last 10 years. so they are less likely to vote. yes? >> in the area and don't have a strong connection. >> new in the area. someone that is more transient, cannot lower turnout. anything else? yes? >> their age, younger voters vote last? >> h. younger voters leicester together you get the less likely you are to vote, especially in off year election appeared in 2008 we saw a huge surge of younger voters, age 18 and was one going up, younger voters who were pulled out most on the democratic side to vote for obama. but if you look at the historic drop off, presidential years, there's no single group that drops off more from demographic

standpoint than the younger voters. so that's obviously something you guys will have to consider what you're looking at your campaign plans. anything else? that's a good group at there. so what about the other end? highly likely. yes? >> older people. >> older people to have higher turnout. >> people who go to primers. >> people who vote in primaries. actually. if you're going to vote at very low turnout election, primaries might have a 10% turnout, the odds of those voters turning out in a general election are very high. anything else? [inaudible] >> right. absolutely. a civic duty sort of issue that you have iosa great example. minnesota, maine. states that have very high turnout. above national average turnout. anything else? yes? [inaudible] >> political officials. one would hope.

or they're in trouble there and you get it. you sometimes see canada's go back and look at their vote history and say this person to to declare to run in his racier didn't vote in the last eight years. why? that's a big issue. anything else? >> better educated people. >> better educated from a demographic standpoint, you would tend to see that people with higher education level 10 to vote more frequently. okay. so that's a good grouping. so you start to get an idea of how we start to segregate voters into groups and start to answer questions about them to put them somewhere on a spectrum. that turnout. the second question is partisanship. so you got from all the way over here, the voters that are most likely to be republican to all the way over there, the voters that are most likely to be democrats. and then the people in between. ideas on how you would find someone who is likely to be a republican? and be nice.

[inaudible] >> nra members. >> evangelical christians. >> evangelical christians, yes. even mind these things that some of you are probably hearing distancing nra members. there are a lot of democrats in southern states who are nra members and a lot of a lot of only did officials that after the. targeting is all about efficiency and percentages. you'll never have an absolute. even to the point if i look at you face to face and say are you voted for the democrat or the republican. you tell me the republican. that's not 100%. you might be likening all your mind might change. targeting is about playing the percentages and getting efficiency. anything else on the republican side? yes? >> the very wealthy. >> wealthy. >> people in rural areas smac rural areas, agriculture. white males.

>> okay. that's a good good. democrats. yes? >> union members. >> union members seem to be very solidly democrat. >> younger voters. >> younger voters, yes. >> hispanic. >> hispanics, yes women, absolutely. and then thinking about data point. these are mostly demographics that you guys are focusing on. they are great answer to think about data point because we will always be up to look at a file -- you can look at a file as if a woman is younger or a woman. but data point. again you're going to talk about voter files later but someone, if you're lucky enough to be in a party registration say, someone who is a registered democrat. sort of an obvious one, but true. again, caveats. you'll have in some areas you talk about the panhandle of florida, for example. you have registered democrats who tend to go to the

republicans. but for the most part its images are still going to be over 65% threshold. same thing register republicans. people who voted in democratic primaries in states that don't have party registration like ohio. they are much more likely to vote democratic in a general election. any other ideas? okay. that's a great start. so we throw it together into one big box, right? this is a matrix here and the idea is every single voter, everyone, not just voter. you can throw in any person, would fall into one of these nine boxes. and i have to ask myself and ask the data that's available to me a series of questions. and the answers to those questions will tell me which box a voter goes in. and which box a voter goes intel's main what i want to do with it.

so the questions are largely well just ask about, meaning was the party registration or how old are they, once their gender, did they vote in primaries? most of it is out there that you can go out and get it through public information. so we've only gone through that part. the next exercise is who do we want to talk to? i've taken is from a democratic perspective, but republicans can either see how your flip is, the other way. but answer this question from a democratic perspective. which sulfuric and you eliminate? because that's targeting. in a going to talk to every voter, not talking about the candidate now. i'm not saying the candidate should address the concerns and had a message that speaks to everyone and a candidate should not represent everyone. ibc they should. but from a camping stampley you need to be ruthless with the resources. you need to cut out those who just can't spend time on.

so well are we going to cut out? just throw them out. people who don't vote. and never vote, top three boxes gone. if you don't vote, were not going to talk to you. obviously there are shades of gray in this, but with the people who are not registered to vote, not citizens, disenfranchised on, you can cut them right off and on eyeshades agree with that. who else? [inaudible] >> gop. if someone is always going to vote republican, why is it passionate as a democrat would you talk to them? aqi republican leaning district or state or a heavily republican district. and a lot of them at craddock numbers of cards have been elected in very conservative district, you have to start pushing this line over all of it. you would, but the further you go over, you would certainly have a diminishing rate of

return. we've eliminated these boxes and these boxes. we have four boxes left. we can eliminate one more. [inaudible] >> always vote down. that's like the feel-good box. the voter that loves you. they're going to vote no matter what, and they're going to vote for your candidate. from a candidate respectability of the people that your candidate will want to go to first. right? because they love them. but from a targeting perspective, and if we were lucky we would have come if you're working in a competitive race, you're not going to have a whole lot of them. you want to be sure with these voters. so you tend to make this box a little bit smaller than it really is. but we're talking about someone, if you look at me on a voter fog uci vote in every election i've been eligible to vote, even low turnout, local elections. every primary election. inet and a high democratic

precinct. you know i'm a democratic are you going to semi-persuasion mail? no. certainly not top priority. are you going to give me kaw, knock my door for election and remind me to vote? probably not. i still get some of those, but for the most part i'm not going to get the same level and intensity of contact of someone who is in this boxer, who we're not sure they're going to go but we know if they vote their going to vote for us. that's a big box, right, going into 2010 because you have all these voters who came out and vote for the first time in 2010, pulled out by the obama candidacy. and a huge percentage of them will not vote in 2010, no matter what. but to a certain degree the success or failure of a lot of our campaigns will depend on what proportion of these voters do. not entirely. persuasion will be an incredibly important aspect as well. here's how it all shakes out.

there are the six boxes we've eliminated. and in the three boxes that are left and there's really two basic forms of communication with voters. get out the vote, meaning we are just power base to turn out and persuasion. so persuasion, we want to go to these folks first, right, why? they're always voting. they are registered independents, they voted in republican primaries and democratic primaries, they are varying indicators. they don't belong to either of those groups that we put on the extremes of the partisan index. the partisan spectrum. we go to them first, and then as resources allow, we would go up to her, the people are maybe less likely to vote. as resources allow. you would start here and work out. gotv, start in the middle and

work away out. this is all theoretical. does everyone get the concept of targeting? now the question is how do we actually build the data that we can use, right? you guys are going to have an actual file in your campaign that you're going to actual targeting because you're going to make it. number one, going back, turn out. who's going to vote, who is likely to go, who isn't? so how do we predict turnout? you start with a slight election-year. so if you're predicting turnout for november 2010, what election are you going to look at from a historic perspective? 2006. why? the last midterm election. so we start with 2006, the last major election. now do we just leave it at that? okay. we have to adjust and obviously,

because no two elections are perfectly identical. so what sort of data points are you looking at to make adjustments to your turnout? what do you look at? yes? >> national and local levels. you want to check my governor races smack you want to make sure that you're more of an apples to apples comparison. what else to look at? what adjustments? >> increased voter registration or decreased voter registration. >> absolutely. anything else? >> changes in party identification. >> whether or not just the mood of the electorate is changed. anything else? >> changes in the county or areas like an influx of new voters are several people leading. >> demographic changes, population changes. anything else?

okay. you guys got basically all of them. number one, demographic changes. for the most part, you guys are working in states that are not high-growth states, to say the least. but will have some high-growth areas, meaning you might look at areas of suburban philadelphia or wherever, but you have some areas that might have expressed grossberg are some areas that have expressed decline, meaning most of your urban airs, cleveland, philadelphia, it may have experienced declines. the voter registration point someone made is a good one because you would hope that you see these changes in the actual voter registration counts. meaning of vibration is dropping or increasing that you are saying it reflected in actual registration that is not always the case because county clerk cannot always great about keeping up with their registration files. . .

competitive towards the end. when we were running those numbers we went back to 2002 and there was no statewide election on the ballot. they just head u.s. house races. that is a more difficult starting point. we had to increase turnout. and finally dropped off. you want to look at your state and turn out, people voting

period and how many people come out to vote. a congressional race would be more of an issue and local races are more of an issue. yes? [inaudible] >> very good. what do you have in mind? absolutely right. propositions are big. that is something we look at. the last two or three elections cycles using ballot initiatives about propositions more strategically in terms of driving turn out. they are not as successful in presidential year elections because that is an 800 pound gorilla that will drive turn

out. there are a handful of studies that have shown those initiatives can impact turnout. you see more same-sex marriage initiatives, stem cell initiatives -- there was one in missouri in 2006, that was a big one. minimum wage has been around longer. you want to look at that too and see to what extent that can have an impact on demographic turn out. those are the factors that you want to look at. how you predict turn out, this is something you need to take note of because you will be doing it. you look at how many registered voters there were in november of 2006, how many people voted county by county, november of 2006. calculate the percentage of

registered voters that turned out. every one good so far? yes? say no if it is no. okay. the total vote divided by the registration = total percentage county by county. apply the same registration percentage to the current registration. that is your baseline turn out production. i tell people there are signs of targeting and the science is the simple arithmetic we use. the art is what comes next. applying the turnout percentage and coming up with the baseline is easy. this is making adjustments. i can't tell you there's a formula here where stem cell initiative equals turn out. it is not that simple. what you want to do is look for

past precedent in data and come up with something you can defend. keep it reasonable in terms of making adjustments. i would argue for airing on the side of pessimism. when we make turnout projections more often than not they come back with feedback and we encourage that. the feedback will be the projections are too low and here's where it is too lowe. it turns out to be much higher. the idea is they believe they're doing something bigger and better than anyone has done in the past and they will turn out more voters. but hopefully that is the case but we should never plan for that. you don't hit -- turn out voters because you think you hit your vote quote a. you want to turn out as many votes as you can. if you over project and it doesn't materialize, you didn't do the persuasion work you

needed to do. don't go in and say because you are building a plan that is bigger and better, your turn out projections need to be that much higher. be realistic but be pessimistic. >> is it fair for the 1984 elections to have a similar situation or is that -- >> good question. people ask how far back you go with the election data. for the most part from a microlevel 1994 would be too low but from a statewide level looking at potential there is no harm in that. filed that under in this case meaning this simulation, it is easy to do, if you can't get the registration easily don't spend

three hours we searching it -- researching it. in some states of ohio is a great example, you look at 2006 and see the democrats have a positive environment. republicans were very unpopular, democrats were energized. you had two high quality democratic candidates running statewide with ted strickland and jerry brown. strickland on the ballot again, a very different environment. was republican turnout depressed in 2006? was democratic turnout energized? in the end you won't know. that is why targeting has to be dynamic. to the extent that you can make educated guesses based on things like you mentioned you look at 1994 and see that turn out was significantly different. it can be helpful. any other questions on turn out?

you have your expected vote no.. for the entire state and for each county. how many people think they're going to turn out? what is the first thing you do when you get that number? you are the targetting person in your group. what do you do with it? calculate your win number from there. you know that turn out will be a million voters. the first thing you do is tell everyone this is what turned out is going to be and how many votes we need to win. then you want to make sure every aspect of your campaign plan comes back to that number. not every sentence of your campaign but when you go over your campaign plan you look at it with a critical eye and say is what we are doing here getting us closer to that number? can i justify this expenditure of resources by saying it gets me closer to that number?

if you don't have a way of proving it is helping get closer to your number, you better have another good justification. i am not sure what that might be but that is something you need to keep in mind. >> the number incorporates parties or turn out? >> not yet. we will get to that. we just know how many people are going to vote but we don't know the areas that saw democrat or republican. we went over the first spectrum basically. the first green and yellow one in terms of turn out. you can even use that data. you have a county that has a projected turn out, very low turnout. you know if someone is a voter in that county they are more likely to be in the unlikely vote side. counties are such broad areas

that you are not going to have as much diversity in the number as you would on an individual level but you will see a not insignificant difference. from a party perspective, we want to know -- we know that this party has predicted turnout of 40% but we want to know if it is likely to be in the middle. how do we do that? we have previous election results. this is not the first time we have had an election in these states. even though i said no two elections are exactly alike, almost without exception an area that is overwhelmingly democratic will be overwhelmingly democratic in every election to varying degrees. same with an overly republican area. you don't see even collections like 2008 where you had historic election, in terms of the

relative comparison of these counties the strong democratic counties with a strong -- yes? >> the inspiration -- [inaudible] >> if you are looking at one election there is an aspect of that that is unique and might not apply to your specific election. you want to use as many as possible. you have a finite amount of time. as many races as possible with the caveat that you are not going back to 94. you go back the -- election cycle. results from 2008/2006/2004. people ask if you want to use

presidential year elections? yes. for turnouts, not helpful because presidential elections are very different but i mention the beginning of the section, a democratic area is a democratic area. they will vary in degrees and we will talk about that in a minute. whether it is a presidential year or not, it will be around the same -- it is a factual turn out. we are ok using the presidential year. we want to use as many races as we can. you don't want to use and competitive races. we have a much looser definition than you would think of outside of this environment. people think of the competitive fray says something besides ten points or less. a race where someone outspent their opponents for got their name on the ballot and didn't

campaign, we don't want to use those races. you have relatively well funded candidates, you have two serious candidate and one wins 60% and the other wins 40%. that is fine. people will beef pulled out in -- when you are pulled out in 2008 you know a lot about the presidential candidates. you have to be living under a rock to not know if fair amount about the presidential candidate. race after race, most states elect their governor, governor, lieutenant governor, a state

constitutional officer and you have controller, attorney general, in texas you have railroad commissioner, secretary of insurance. race after race, the most informed voter would have a hard time finding information on individual candidates. even if you did you don't have the same issues that might pull voters away, generic partisanship to vote for the other party. in a presidential race issues like choice, guns will play more of a role but when voting for secretary of state, amor administrative position, those issues don't coming to play. the voters are more likely to vote their genetic -- generic party preference. a handful of the state constitutional officers raises have been competitive, you have

a lot of data. you don't throw out the low information races because they don't know who they're voting for. we have all been there. even though i imagine by the fact that you are here you pay attention to the process but i am sure you found yourself going to the polling place and you get in a rhythm. i am not saying every voter will vote their generic party preference. they vote based on whether they like the person's name or how many signs they saw or whatever but more often than not people referred to their generic party preference in these races. that is party performance. we are trying to get not what percentage of the vote your candidate will get from this area. we can't predict that from previous elections. we are not trying to get at the base vote meaning how many votes your candidate gets. we don't get that from these

elections. we are trying to get on average, democratic these areas are. how did you calculate it? you get these results, number of results for the democratic candidate and a republican candidate, total ballots cast. divide the number of democratic votes by ballots cast and the republican side the republican candidates by total ballots cast. that is the percentage of the vote they want in that county. calculate that for each candidate, each county, only for the races you are using and average those percentages together. you might have ten races that you used. average those 10 candidates together.

everyone clear on that? again, i promise you it is simple. this is as complex as it gets. that is party performance. everyone good? persuasion. we talked about how likely in this case areas of geography are or how likely they are to be democrat or republican. next question is the areas that are more likely to be persuadedable. i have an example here. i chose maryland for proximity . i have an example here. i chose maryland for proximity purposes. this map shows you color-coded democratic performance. the red area in the panhandle are the more heavily republican

areas. the blue areas in the d.c. suburbs are the more democratic areas and areas with the lighter red and blue are the areas that have party performance closer to 50%. we are in the silver swing area. i didn't put my house on there. we see have a democratic areas in montgomery county and prince george's county with some more democratic cleaning areas. not a lot of red here. here is the neighborhood. you have these two precincts next to each other. the very high democratic performance. this one is more in the middle. we put the democrat performances on here. this has 50%.

i made the numbers more round than they actually are but these are real precincts and they really are around 50%, and 70% in this case. part of the simulation. imagine you are a regional field person. you have a few volunteers. you need to go door to door and talk to voters and talk to as many swing voters as possible. you only have enough resources in this saturday afternoon and to get one of these precincts. which precinct do you want to go to? answers? the one with 50%. agree, disagree? most people are nodding their heads. i hate doing this. is a trick question and i do it

every time to prove the point. people say the 70%. the answer is we need more information. we don't know enough yet. i will give you more information. i never had anyone give that answer. when i tell you to pick one you will pick one. i admitted, it is unfair. i broke down -- we talked about the races you use for party performance. they averaged together into one democratic performance in this case. i included a few races here. the controller raise -- the u.s. senate race 52%. we average those together and came out to 50%. look at this precinct. 85% in the controller raisece,

in the senate. you want to go down here because there's so much volatility. even though the average is up 70% some democrats are getting 55% and some are getting 80%. i made these numbers round for simplicity's sake but it is not uncommon to see these. generally even in the campaign going to this precinct first it is a misconception that just because an area centers around 50% it has to have a lot of persuadeable voters. just a lot of republicans and democrats who are committed to their party. that is not always -- you could just as likely see a precinct here with that sort of volatility and one up here.

to be honest, they are 90% democratic, you will not see this volatility. this will almost always be an african-american precinct. when you get below 60% or 70% you can do this. is important to understand the data that goes into it. what we need to do is create an actual index that tells us how volatile a precinct is. it is not enough to know if it was 50% republican performing. we want to know how reliable that number is. the art and science, you can say this precinct is 50% so we will get 50%. how much better than that can i do or how much i have to worry about doing worse? want to break it down. we want to look at the historic volatility in the precinct like

we did with those races. you have to use multiple cycles. we use the same races as party performance to make things easy. it is not intended as a primary indicator of individual persuadeability. if you are putting together a persuasion candidate and you are going to knock on doors i never recommend that you just take the persuasion percentage for each voter based on decreasing they live in and target them that way. there are number of factors like integrating targeting with voting and you want to look at other indicators. if someone lived in a persuadeable precinct doesn't mean you will talk to everyone of them. you may have one voter in a persuadeable precinct who voted in every republican primary, donated money to several republican candidates. are you going to talk to them? no.

from a broad perspective putting together your resource allocation planning and your vote goals the data will be helpful. as a secondary indicator you have the university trying to narrow it down to something more manageable based on your budget, it can be helpful. how do we calculate it? take the highest percentage from each election. 2008, 2006, 2004, take all the races you have that year and look at who was the highest vote-getter in terms of percentage, the lowest, only using those reasonably competitive races, throw out everything in the middle and subtract the two. the difference between the two use your persuasion percentage. if you do it for three years you have a number in 2008, 2006 and 2004. add them up and divide by three. to give you an actual example,

this precinct here is all one election year for the sake of simplicity. how do you calculate persuasion in this precinct? governor's race at 48 as the low. senate race 52. subtract them, 4%. you do it for three years and average them together. what is the persuasion for this precinct? 85/55. here is the theory behind this. these are on the same ballot. one democrat got 85%. one democrat won 55%. that difference tells you simple arithmetic that 35% of the voters had to have voted democratic in this race and republican in that race. the theory is if someone has shown a history of voting for

both democrats and republicans in a past election they are more likely to be available to either party in future elections. it is never 100% but you have a higher density of swing voters in that universe than in a universe of voters who only voted for democrats or republicans. there's a first elections for every one where they cross over in different parties. you don't have a completely pure universe where everyone will cross over or no one will cross over. but you are going to have higher purity of the universe in this area where you have more people who have swarmed over.

yes? >> [inaudible] >> don't include local offices unless you're looking at a local race. there are mechanical reasons for that. you are looking at statewide races. in this case you are looking at counties. if you're doing this in the real world your going to the precinct level because that is the most granular level you can. you want to look at this precinct in the st. louis media market or this county in the st. louis media market and the kansas city media market and say this has 20% persuasion, this has 50% persuasion. this is legitimately more persuadeable than the other where if you use the different formula you may have a local race that is artificially in place of persuasion in a different area. if you're looking at a different race it can be helpful. any other questions? >> if you are doing three or four race is how you would fund

the difference. >> go through this exercise for each election year, the high versus the low. again, when we talk about integrating this with the data, when putting together a persuasion--which voters we are going to nail and all that, you rely on your polling and your id. from a macro perspective, this persuasion percentage will be helpful. let's give you a live look at what this might look like. this is a fake.

how many voters have you pulled down? what percentage you expect to vote in the november 2010 election, how many voters that equals out to and the persuasion percentage we just talked about, persuasion index and how we calculate that, the performance of the republican performance and shares. you have a copy of this. don't worry about writing everything down. simply multiplying the voter registration by the press -- projected turnout percentage. i think everyone is clear on that. the persuasion index is something i haven't mentioned yet. we talk about the persuasion percentage. averaging together you came out with 18%.

if you multiplied that 18% by the expected vote that give you a persuasion index. the persuasion index is turning that into a number of actual voters we expect to turn out on election day who have had a history of voting for democrats and republicans in past elections. so it is actual numbers. a lot of people like this number better because you might have a county with a persuasion percentage that is superhigh like this one here. 22%. that was 23% down here. very high. when you look at how many voters--especially when you get to precinct level you want to start looking at raw numbers of voters because from a planning perspective that is very important. an area with very high

persuasion but not many voters will not be that important. we create that persuasion index. last part of the share. you will see this is where my graphics are odd. you take this number, go over 2500. you have 2500 projected ticket splitters in this country in adams county. you divide that by the state number. there are just under 29,000 ticket splitters. is everyone with me so far? you divide the county index by the statewide number and that gives you that county's shift. what this 4.3% means is 4.36% of the ticket splitters in the

state reside in this county. everyone good on that? you can tell county by county, these numbers don't add up, in terms of the actual a arithmetic here. divide each county to get killed by the statewide persuasion index that tells you a share. that is helpful, if you look at a county and you see that it has 25% persuasion share that tells you one in four of persuadeable voters come out of that county. when you put together in that plan, you should look at how you are spending your resources meaning where you are setting up your regional field office of legal where you are buying your television, whewhere you're spe

money. something is out of whack. the numbers are wrong for how you're spending your resources. does everyone understand that? is not a hard and fast number and the expected vote share next miscalculated the same way but using the expected vote instead of the persuasion index. thumbs up? >> to calculate the persuasion index you are using numbers from

the past three? >> remember how we calculated the democrat performance, you were using percentages. you were not looking at raw numbers. an end these indexes are important because we multiplied the percentage we created by the expected vote. the expected vote is based on the current registration, you brought it into the future. we talked about how to calculate that. start with the 2006 number but make those adjustments based on the factors we discussed. don't spend forever doing that. spent some time researching it and making those adjustments. very important whoever is doing the targeting. right up an explanation of everything you do if not for the rest of the group, is important for yourself. you will get lost in the numbers

and say why did i do this? you should have a document to explain how you got your numbers. it should probably go in your plan so you explain the target. any other questions? >> do you adjust the turnout percentage by the state and total? >> we dilly -- generally do it by county, almost never buy precinct. often by groups in the county. you will obviously have the option because the media markets -- the media markets will cover entire counties or at least every county is assigned to a media market even though some are bleeding over. you can create the same targeting. it is a good idea in my opinion if you have the time to do it.

a sign it to each county and aggregate it. you can make adjustments if all three of your states have the same number of counties going county by county might be tedious for the sake of this simulation. media markets might be more helpful. media markets will be useful to the rest of your plan. if you know the persuasion care of the media market that gives you an idea the persuasion resources you should be spending in each media market. any other questions on this? >> should this be shown in a large chart like that? >> that is my opinion but i do not have any say on that. >> once you figure this out there will be some counties

imposing on others. we don't need to have all 100 counties. everybody would be for all the county's just having the targeting session. >> would you want to do this for your opponent as well? >> that is a good question. let's get to the next slide. that is a very good question. you have got all that data which is a good start because you have been able to go back quickly. you have been able to identify areas of the highest turnout. those that tend to be lower than 60%. you identify areas that are more solidly demographic and those

are more republican. this is a very democratic state. and won't tell you which it is. you don't see republican areas here. you have got that part of it. because you have the expected vote here of 254,000 people you can figure out 50% or 52%, a comfortable margin. but this isn't enough. you know how many votes you need to get state wide. in the end that is the academic number. you need to know how many votes you need to get. i have seen a lot of people fall into this trap. people often take a 52% goal and apply it to every county so it adds up to 52% but that is obviously wrong. let's talk about how you figure out what percentage of the coat you need to get in each county.

you normalize it to 52%. that is a fancy term for looking at what the statewide democratic performance is. you compare that to 52%. you find the difference between the two and that is the adjustment you apply to every single county. i will show you an example in a minute. if you are lucky enough to start in a state where you calculate the number of points at 52% that happens to be the case to make it easy on yourself because it would be obvious. what is your vote goal in each county relative to democratic

performance? the democratic performance because 52% statewide, if you run with democratic performance in every single county you hit 52%. if your statewide democratic performance is 50% what is your goal relative to democratic performance in any county? democratic performance plus 2. you took the different between your vote goal of 52% and subtracted from that your democratic republic and performance. the difference was 2. you apply that to every county. this is as dense as the math gets or is as dense as it gets. you start there. if you are lucky enough to be in a state where the democratic performance is over 52 you can run behind it everywhere and it your goal. if it is below 52 you need to run a little above democratic

performance to make your goal. all three of your state and i am not trying to give away the answer because there's no perfect answer to what the democratic republican performance is because it varies based on the data you have but you are not going to have a stake that is 56 or 57 or 62% democratic performance. there are three swing states that should be in the neighborhood of 50% give or take 3 or four percentage points. >> you may adjustments -- you start with that. something that can tell you for a candidate is no candidate is even with party performance. what sort of adjustment would you make? where would you expect your

candidate to run stronger? where should they be stronger? their home town. their home district. any other factors you need to look at? you have a democratic candidate, in operation where you believe you can be stronger, you believe he will have a stronger turnout operation. anywhere else? [inaudible] >> high persuasion index. there is potential to go higher. if i need to run further ahead of party performance potentially because conversely you know you are going to run further behind in your opponent's home town, areas that they have more of a natural strength. look at areas with higher persuasion and say we can make more votes here. anywhere else? you want to look at your polling

data. it will tell you where you are stronger. you might have an issue advantage and might look at previous candidate percentages. if you have a candidate who has run statewide before, where they were stronger in the past will be areas where potential you expect to do better and areas that they are weaker you have to worry about them being weaker. these are the things you look at to make these adjustments just like the turn out. i can't give you a perfect formula where being from a home town = 3%. doesn't work that way. you start with something that is rational and defensible and not totally out there. in a real campaign you would continuously checked those numbers against what you're seeing in the field and those numbers constantly change. this is an area where it has to be dynamic. if you set a quote bold 11 months before the election and

don't change it you are in trouble. to give you an idea of what that looks like, we had 62.5%, very democratic state but we expect a competitive election. we know we can run 10% behind democratic performance in every county and still get 52%. all i did was took the performance and subtracted .5%. the goal is 46.one. the actual number, we take this and multiplied by what? the vote bowgoal percentage. someone said it. it is 52% statewide. the goal is only to get 42% of

the vote and some of the goal is to get 54%. that is the base line. they didn't make adjustments. that is what you start with and make basic adjustments based on your candidate's regional strength. any questions on this? okay. i am going to wrap up with this and take questions. any more questions you might have. targeting should always be dynamic so you get what we talked about, updating your target numbers based on the data we talked about, looking at the comparison between 2006, and 2010, making sure your vote goals are dynamic starting with that formula and making adjustments based on rationale that you can put on paper. it should be an academic

exercise. make sure everyone in the group understand what you did and what you did it. make changes. do it fast and get it done and get it to another member of the group and help those members use it. finally, the geographic partering has to be integrated for to be most useful. understand how you are using this. if our plan is to goal here, year and here and you're putting together your time line and calendar, we get a pole back from the field january 15th. by january 17th we want it updated and that goes to our field directors and we update our quotas for ids and whatever. we want to make sure your plan is to integrate into your overall plan. that is it. i want you to understand why it

is important and how to use it. questions? yes? [inaudible] >> not exactly. i wouldn't say the persuasion chair of an area is 25%. the statewide points are in that media market. wooley 5% -- we are going to change it. >> when do you need to register new voters, you decide to start setting your money there. >> it comes back to the vote

goal. in an off-year election following the sort of election we had in 2008 where so many registered voters -- you would think voter registration is not as productive and exercise as it would be in a presidential year election. trying to get them to come back is not an absolute. a high-growth area that might be favorable you might look at. in terms of your dynamic vote goal, these are the numbers we need to hit in each region of the state and your poll is coming back time after time and you are falling short in certain areas and your persuasion numbers aren't hitting you might draw the conclusion we need to expand the electorate whether

that means drawing more voters in and it is an efficient expenditure of resources or going after more first-time voters you need to look at the data and see what potential there is. those are the numbers you want to look at. you put that in the context of your actual vote goal. >> [inaudible] you didn't mention gender demographics or age demographics. is a chart like this going to have to be created for each of those demographics or is there a way to filter that? >> the question being to what extent we use racial demographics. the geographic targeting data will only refer to partisanship and doesn't look at underlying factors. you looking an area and see 90% performing and ask yourself why and that is an african-american area.

for the most part from a geographic targeting perspective it is not as important in terms of why we got the numbers. the number is what it is but from a contact perspective is important to know the demographics. you start with the broad strokes of geographic targeting and when you put together a contact plan it is not enough to know then this person is 90% probability democrat. we want to know their race and gender and as much about them as we can. it is generally where you would go to look at the voter files to see who they are demographically and you are pulling them to see what it is telling me about these demographics in terms of messageing and what messages will be more successful or focused groups. you start with the geographic or look at this area of geography in dealing with strict numbers

of democrat or republican. other questions? >> low intensity like ballot races, how many races should we calculate if we're going back to 2004? the presidential races, how many should we go down to? should we do a few or statewide? >> the ideal situation in this scenario, more time in a real world scenario, we use all of them that fit the criteria, the ideal scenario is we go to the secretary of state and department of elections website to easily download and cut and paste. if you find you have to punch it

or it is in cumbersome fashion, you do as many as you can within reason. you deal with the professor here in terms of how far you should be going with it. the more the better going back to that side. as was pointed out you want to eliminate as much as possible. one other thing that reminds me that you would probably want to look at is for those of you where we have a candidate who has run statewide before and we have a few of them in these state, it would be valuable to add in to your spreadsheet a comparison of their historic performance to the party performance. if you were looking at --

jennifer brodeur ran statewide in ohio in 2006. break out the percentage of votes they got and compare that to the democratic performance, that will be helpful. >> working for senator specter who may not match up with anything. any way to deal with that? >> yes. for the most part i would assume -- this is something that in the end you would want to confirm or deny with polling, he will perform strongly in democratic base areas. in philadelphia it would be incredibly odd if he did not run close to the democratic performance numbers even though he was a lifelong democrat. taking into account his history

and geographic strengths, you could assume in the philadelphia suburbs that he should run more strongly because democrats for the most part even though many of them may not like him indiana will like him better than the democrats. i don't know the answer to that. it seems to be a reasonable argument that he could compel some of the moderate republicans, pro-choice republicans who voted for him in the past as a republican to vote for him as a democrat. he might make adjustments for that. in western pennsylvania there might be more conservative democrats -- just as they did for ed rendell. there is no perfect scenario. note candidate runs perfect with democratic performance. the past race will be last -- less hopeful.

i would still look at it. any other questions? thank you very much. good luck. [applause] >> we will take a short break. a couple scheduleing changes. we were supposed to deal with research. he will be in tomorrow. we are going to do after peace that we are going to do now. on new year's eve from 10:45 to 1:00 we will do the management organization budget. we will get out of here a little bit later than we planned.

so that means next monday we get up earlier than we planned to pick up that schedule. ok? alright. perfect. [inaudible conversations] >> this is the american university campaign management institute's 27 food year of researchers training students to take part in political campaigns. finishing this session at 2:45. fifteen or 20 minutes or so and we will have live coverage of

their next panel on compiling voter files. now i look at items in the news journal. >> host: looking at what may happen in the wake of this. a new call for body scans at airports looking at this idea of a device -- do you think you 'creening that is high resolution look at what might be under people's clothes and went -- what might be hidden. let's go to georgia where bill is calling on the democrat line. what do you think? what is the balance between privacy and security? >> caller: a i am a first amendment person.

i don't fly anymore. i drove a truck to texas for a friend and got stopped at the airport. they need to get the credit people looking for these folks. >> host: can they do more work on the investigation? sounds like you were profiled. do you think that was fair? >> caller: you get profiled all the time. i don't care about profiling. i am concerned about protecting lives. >> host: let's go to saudi on the independent line callinglly the independent line calling from new york city. >> caller: i don't understand

that even the video, this system of ours, always try to find something to blame, our president. he is doing the best he can. i travel a lot and i am 95 years old. i travel by plane and train. i can't go through the regular search because i have a pacemaker. i have to go through in a wheelchair in a different section. they touch me all over. privacy and everything else, i don't mind.

how this man got on the plane and he was not thoroughly searched. if they searched him half the way they searched me at 95 and in a wheelchair, i don't see how -- i listen to all of the stations. i am sick of this racist -- you must remember america was born in genocide. and the birth of bigotry and it comes all over. i hear these people talking about the president didn't come out and do nothing. .. tha)president reacted as he in hawaii on vacation with his

family, i am reading from "the new york times" that he ordered his security team to keep up with the terrorist, and fáhe o okseek w3those who çç are threatening us,ç if plotti attacks on the u.s. home land. so president obama gave a response and sally talked çóaboç her own experience getting screened through the airports. @ >> in part to make certain that potential attackers do not know

what to expect. many passengers welcome that. but that careful unpredictability has made life far more confusing for thousands of travelers. it was extremely strict, what was traveling with a 5-year-old daughter. she arrived at 9:30 a.m. and did not reach the screening area until nearly seven hours later. let's go to wichita, kansas. >> caller: hello. yeah. we're terrorizing ourself. you know, the terrorist you say you heard about that. are you ready? this is noble. yes. we are terrorizing ourself. every time something has happened, the terrorist got online to post it. and then the news media are here.

you know? we broadcast across the nation ends across the world. so they are winning like that. in effect, we're terrorizing ourself. you know? they don't have to do anything. when the old security and homeland security, he was always talking about chatter. it was chatter. and they would walk these yellow, orange, red, and different code colors. and then they -- we terrorize ourself by believing everything that someone post online. terrorist has that. the news media is picking up and running on tv. >> let's go to the democrats line. thanks. >> caller: yes. i think the -- we're leaveing out freedom and justice. which one is really what -- which is what really this country was founded for.

we need to apply what we already have. we have so many laws that we've paved, so many taxes to write these laws. and we're not applying those. what we really need to go to what we already have, the constitution. and this country was founded for freedom, for people who were fleeing tyranny. and it seems that we're going back to the tyranny ourselves. we've been putting ourself back under the same tyranny that was brought to us. that we came here to escape. we need to apply the laws we already have. we don't want to be put under this kind of fear for the rest of our lives. my thoughts, my dad died at almost 104 years old. there was a time that was nowhere like it is now. we don't want to be like another country.

we don't want to be terrorizing ourselves and terrorizing the world with these false things. i don't think that we are -- we need new laws. no, i don't. >> host: host. thanks for your halls. let's take a look at comments president obama made yesterday addressing the security concerns. president obama: first i directed that we take immediate steps to ensure the safety of the public. we made sure that all flights still in the air were secure and could land safely. we enhanced screening and security procedures for all flights, domestic and international. we added federal air marshals to flights entering and leaveing the united states. we're working closely in this country, federal, state, and local law enforcement with our international partners. second, i've ordered two important reviews. it's critical that we learn from

the incident and prevent future acts of terrorism. the first review is watch list. which the government has had in place to identify known and suspected terrorist that we can prevent their entry into the united states. apparently the suspect in the christmas incident was in this system but not an a watch list such as the so-called no-fly list. so i've ordered a thorough review, not only of how important related to the subject was handled but the overall watch list and how to strengthen it. the second review is screening policies, technologies, and procedures related to air travel. we need to know how the suspect was able to bring dangerous explosives and what additional steps we can take towards future attacks. >> let's go to roy in virginia. hi, roy. >> how are you doing this morning? >> host: well, thank you. what's the balance between

privacy and security? >> caller: well, it's the rule of law. that's how guide. but, i want to comment on the young man and his problem with not having his ducks in a row. which he will regret. america has a line that you follow. the law and the letter and the spirit. that's what makes us dominant of the whole world. that's all i have to say. >> host: okay. we'll take a look at how the new york tabloid papers are covering this story. the "daily news" looking at the young man that was accused of smuggling on a bomb and bomb-making materials. and let's look at the "new york post." taking a look inside, absolute chaos at new york airport. fliers say tsa has gone plain

insane. they have stories of people that were traveling. >> different rules for different airports. depending on where you are coming from in the country. let's go to the next caller, calling from manhattan. mark is on the republican like. >> caller: good morning. how are you? >> host: good morning. thank you. >> caller: i wanted to say that people should be searched. if their x-ray machine is possible, if the sniffing machines that sniffs out bombs is possible. we live in a country where other people just want to kill us. they want to make a point. they want to bring us down.

they want to terrorize us. other people do. i do not feel as a republican or really a conservative that this is uncalled for. that we should be searched when we're getting on a aircraft in particular international flights coming into this country also. just because i oppose president obama does not make me a racist. i am very sorry that many people feel this way. but i have the right to disagree with someone no matter what the color of his skin. and it has taken him four days to make a statement from christmas of what happened till yesterday. this is a constant thing with him. napolitano should be fired from her comment. she's trying to backtrack this is not what she meant. it was clear what she meant.

glm >> host: okay. mark was refers to the comment on the sunday morning talk show, talking about how the response was and she says that she's was taken out the of context. this is from the "washington times." a photograph of her saying our system did not work in this instance. she made the comments yesterday. no one is happy or satisfied with that. an extensive review is under way. she made the comments on the "today" show yesterday morning. we'll go to ray on the democrats. >> caller: how are you doing in >> host: fine. thanks. what's the difference between privacy and security? >> caller: well, i think the balance is going to have to more towards privacy. because i think there's not much you can do more in the way of security really beyond the scanners. after that, you're always, you know, i think you're always fighting the last war. if you are going to start filling in the limbs or breast implants pretty soon.

those scanners aren't going on to work. then you will have a lot of conservatives making the claim that we need to engage in racial profiling, or they are going to claim it's religious profiling that will come down to racial profiling. that's going to create the class of citizenship where some people get third and fourth protection and everybody gets lesser. >> washington journal is live every day at 7:00 eastern. we'll take you back to the campaign management institute with the last session. live on c-span 2. >> 1982. i know way before any of us were born; right? 1982, literally one the favorite and nicest people. introduced me to voter files. thought me a lot of what i know. what's he's about to show you is phenomenal. he's now the director of business development at

catalyst. obvious salutely on the forefront in the universe. sorry. in the solar system. they are on the forefront of microtargetting and the next generation of how you're going to use a lot of the data that tom was just talking about. so, bob blaremire. >> thank you. good morning. good afternoon. you know that how many people here have ever used a voter file? that signifies some progress in this business. when i first started doing this program, it was almost no one. there aren't too many. i like to start out with a joke. there aren't too many voter file jokes. if you have any, feel free. i grew up in indiana politics. there's a story there by the old gentleman who was probably the best well-known democrat intown. everybody is kind of mr. democrat. one day he was spotted by another democrat going into the

voter registration office. and the guy goes in, follows him, see the gentleman is changing his registration from democrat to republican. so he's perplexed by this. when he waits, he said, sir, you are our hero here. mr. democrat, why would you change your registration from democrat to republican? he says well, i figure, i have to figure it this way. i found out from my doctor, i don't have much time to go. if somebody has to go, i'd rather it be one of them than us. let me walk you through voter file 101. i'll talk about the basics of creating a voter file. and then sort of the modern microtargetting and how that works and how that works in this day's campaign world. and give you something which i think is pretty cool. which is evidence of this stuff

really works. i've been doing this for a long time. it's been a long time of not really having proof. you always believed it works. now we can really show some evidence that it does. we build voter files to be more efficient, to save money, to be effective in our communicating with voters. why do we communicate with voters? if you and i walk into each other on the street, what do we talk about? lounge, we don't know each other. we don't know anything about each other. we have very little to communicate about. if i want to persuade you to do something, i need to know something about you. i need to be able to speak relevant. in order to do that, i need to know something. if we meet at a baseball park, we talk about baseball. i know something about you. i can perceive your gender, age group, probable race. but i can't perceive much else.

we need to narrow our communicate to make it relevant. you know, it makes sense to us that older people care more about older issues than younger people. it makes sense to us that, you know, generally men are more into sports than women are. young people care about young issues more than old people are. there are certain assumptions that we make when we try to frame our communication that those assumptions are made better if we have information. if we have a lot of information, we have a better chance of making those assumptions accurate. so the more information you know, the better you can communicate with your voters. the better you can decide who to communicate with. what you see here is a quick let's of the various steps involved in building a voter file. where you have to acquire it at the local, could be the state, county, towns. we have to make sure it is run against postal software, so the

addresses are standardized. we create households. generally we create household based on last name and address being the same. you run a process called national change of address. how many here have ever gotten a piece of mail with a yellow sticker because they changed their address. that's the national change of address process. we apply that so basically we can deliver mail and phone calls and so on to you more accurately. we attach phone numbers, we match the commercial database where we have a lot of commercial and census data. so this is a voter file. i need to pull this out of the middle here. can anybody see this? this is -- is it working? can you see it in way? okay. you can see that. 184 million voter profile records, 1.2 billion ballots cast. that's voter history.

80 million unregistered people. people who are 18 and above throughout the country that don't match the voter file. specialty lessons that we've acquired and matched in, aviation, doctors and nurses, farmers, teachers, hunters and fisherman. there is an effort, you may remember in 2004 called america coming together. it was a coalition of progressive organizations trying to influence the presidential campaign for the democrat. that operation is known as a.c.t., we have from that almost 4 million a.c.t.ids and 5 and a half from the kerry campaign. ids being a phone call or some information to record what they say. their issue preference. membership records from our clients. over 54 million records of who is a member.

266 million contacts to 15 million unique people. 264 models, scoring two and a half billion records. all of that goes in the mix to create a pretty robust and enhanced database. so the traditional voter file. again we have name, address, phone, contact information gender and gauge. that's very typical of the voter file. sometimes the voter file will include party registration. there are 20 states that don't have it or don't register by party. voting history, telling us whether people vote in given elections and race. >> do you think it's 11? >> i think it is. this gives us some idea. in lancaster county, pennsylvania, a traditional voter contact. where tom talked to you about

ncec and the precinct target. this will start with the precinct base where everybody is a target or they are not. what the voter profile helps us go in there and exclude republicans, for instance. 65% and above in democrat. or we can identify democrats in heavily republican precincts. that's how we work the voter file in conjunction. now we've gone beyond that with enhance voter file that i described in the building blocks. where we have the traditional information. additional information, commercial information, like in this case, whether or not to use the internet, how long they have lived, marital status, income. census data like percent of blue collar, white collar, or racial percentages. and historical ids when they

support a candidate or party or issues. and specialty data, like i pointed out, hunters, fisherrerman, things like that. so you have as a result, the enhanced voter file. more than just the precinct and the basic voter data. they identify the democrats in pennsylvania as a party register. modeling predicts which are turnout targets. or the modeling can also find weak democrats. and modeling can predict which infeints or d or rs. >> you know, bob, i enjoyed your company based on that presentation. >> hopefully everybody else does too. we'll do quite well if that's the case. voter profile registers democrat

or republican. you can fall asleep. then it's very much the same. modeling predicts which republicans strongly a pose the iraq war. or identifies republicans who strongly support choice. again, these are just examples of the types of things modeling allows us to do. taking all that information to create really new intelligence from that information. so it's important to know if thundershower modeling is not a miracle, -- to know if modeling is not a miracle, but a tool. it can't predict the outcome or the election. modeling a tool that helps us target better on the individual level and prove and expand and contract target universes and approve our ability to match the message to the voter. now if we go on and you have questions about individual types of data, like ethnicity, race, things like that. i'm happy to answer those on a individual basis.

let me turn now to what i described earlier as the 2008 progressive footprint the. this is where we have real evidence that this works. so pretty graphic evidence. in 2008, the campaigns that used catalyst data and logged on to 335 million individual contacts, phone, mail, and in person. 226 million unique individuals, 7 and a half millions unique voter registrations. this is an example. this is what the map looked like at the end. where you sea blue and the intensity of the blue is where the democrats did better than than they did in 2004. and where you see the red and the intensity of the red is where the republicans did better than in 2004. and the black is the progressive contact, where people were contacted. now this is a way of showing you

by the calendar how the contacted added up. here we are in the fall of '07. iowa caucuses, new hampshire primary, nevada caucus, florida primary, super tuesday. john mccain becomes nominee, obama's race speech in philadelphia. fens primary, which would be april. west virginia primary in may. hillary collinton con cedes. the obama speech in berlin. democratic convention, republican convention, lehman brothers collapses and aig, john mccain suspends, the dow falls 800 points, last presidential debate, obama prime thyme and

the election. so you can see the progressive footprint is pretty extensive. if you know your map, you'll see it's most extensive and hardest hitting in the battle ground states and least hard hitting in the states where you wouldn't need to, like illinois. you know? or new york. or california. these are states that were pretty safe blue states. here's what we're going to look at in two universes. what we call the spore rat tick voter voter voter -- sporadic

voter. we were looking at people who were called, for turn out as the left of the grid. you can see they turned out in higher numbers. democrats and overall. and in terms of media, low and high, heavy-paid media being television radio, lower paid being liz and me. direct mail, phones, and in person. ohio, well, we talk about microtargetting, it usually means we create models. we have create add number of models that we use extensively in 2008 and continue to be used. in ohio where they don't have party registration, our clients are generally using the partisan model where the democrats and republicans are left to right at the bottom. aped the turnout model that we created. low turnout at the top, high turnouts at the bottom. if you look at the map, a heat map of activity, where would you like to see that concentrated?

low turnout for democrats; right? high turnout moderates. does that make sense? now we take the map of the contact in ohio. and we see they are pretty well concentrated to where they ought to be. the contact that you see down here is for activist and fund raising. but low turnout for democrats, and high turnout in undecided. campaign that in if 2004 to the kerry campaign's contact. and we see the lack of models. it show that is contact. they didn't have the same data to utah. so the contact are all over the map. and they tended to concentrate on the most democratic people. in this case, democratic ids came from ohio voter in

primaries. that doesn't respect even half. this would be the people that always vote. the hard to the right. they use the partisan model. you are obviously able to target a lot different. those who are likely to vote, and those who are likely to be democrat. we go back to north carolina, we look at our turnout mod the. we'll compare that. turnout up here with the scores here. see the one blimp on the left. anybody have any idea what community that is? represented by a very low score but a pretty good turnout? no. not as simple as that. it's demographically, it is african-americans who have a poor previous voting record. but they turned out in 2008. so therefore, the score gave them very low numbers because of previous history. but they voted. this is what the map looks like

again, a different take on the progressive without the blues and reds. again, you can see the states where the progressive footprint is almost invisible in new york, illinois, texas, california. that's it. any questions from anybody? basically, what i think is cool about this. you always believe that common sense is that it works. you are far more likely to get somebody to do something if you ask them than expecting them to do it on their own. there are far greater likelihood to get them to do what you want if you ask them effectively. that's what campaigns are all about. persuades i have mail, phones, in person, all forms of voter communication. and they are done better if we use actual information. so the beauty of mail and in person voter contact we don't have to say the same thing to

all of you. if you all watch the same episode, y'all see the same add. but with mail and in person and phones, i can say something different. and i can tailor my communication based on what i know. i can also decide to not contact because what i know tells me it's a waste of my money to do so. so it hopes you not only pick the cherries where the cherries are, but to know how to best pick the cherries. what kind of questions do you have? yes, sir. >> how does your group go ahead obtaining the contact for tens of millions of people? is it a coalition of various groups? >> no, the way it works. it's a good question. the way it works is someone subscribes to our service. they go online. they down load is off the voter. the subscription service allows them to have access to data. the kind of subscription determines what kind and what

states. if they download and when they get responses, they upload those back into the system. so they can tailer who they are going to choose from later. one example would be early vote. a huge phenomenon in this country. people that are voting early. it's a moving target that starts much earlier. so if you want to do this efficiently, you want to refrain from contacting people that have already voted; right? that makes sents. our job is to help you know who they are. we went through a process that had people through the clients. and america votes and a number of progressive organization had people in 23 states picking up early vote data. uploading it into an online tool that we had. we had all night cruise processing that data. so we can encode the file and obama and our clients can omit those people from their voter

contact. so it was by, while if you're a client and you are uploading data, no one has access to that data but you. you can permission to others. but we will also use that behind the scenes in creating the models. the creation of the partisan has been huge. because i've operated for years. i told you, i was raised in indiana politics. indiana is one of the number of states that does not register by party. but people vote in partisan primaries. we can select people based on voting in democratic or republican or only voting in democrat only voting in republican primaries. but that covers maybe half of the electorate. the partisan model for the first time gives me a handle to go after the people that are likely democrats. everybody in country on the likelihood on being a democrat. so it's real easy predicted model to use. we have others.

we have a turnout model. we have selected gun owner, likely hunter, environmental activist model, progressive activist model. there's a number. and they are being created all the time. it is to me the coolest new thing in this business. which i am doing for -- since 1912. for a long time. i got started in the crazy business. i came here to gw as a freshman in college in 1967. i wept -- went to work for the united states canada, who's son evan bayh is a congressman now. we worked until 1981. we lost the election to dan quayle. i hate to add hit it, but it's true. bounced around for a while, and ended up being offered a job in this crazy business. which really didn't exist.

the company that i was in was doing computer services, but not really with voter files. they needed somebody getting voter files so they knew which members were registered or not. it was pretty basic stuff. there was no one to go to to tell me how to do this. it was kind of fun. it was kind of investnd venting it in many -- inventing it in many respects. we started the voter profile project. where the party would and candidates would use it all over the state. it became -- it was a great concept. and it's still going on now. and it was great concept because all of the sudden parties had a role in campaigns that they didn't have. candidates were getting access to data that they didn't have or better than they have. and vendors like me at the time were having access and getting into canada's campaigns that we otherwise couldn't reach. it was really good all the way around.

it helps move the process. now after going through the 2000 campaign where y'all know about the hanging chads and what happened in florida. congress passed the help america vote act. which was designed to get -- ideally to get all of the voting systems in the country alike. part of that was to make sure that every state had a statewide voter file with a minimal amount of information. well, that was huge progress for people like me. because i used to build the main voter file by going to all 518 or 516 towns. hugely difficult. and, you know, my own state of indiana, 92 counties. had to get them. sometimes you had to keep the list. now there are very few states where i can't get a statewide file from the secretary of state. and there are more responsibly priced. what states are you doing this year? >> ohio.

missouri. and pennsylvania. >> ohio, missouri, and pennsylvania. pennsylvania is a good file. you get it from the secretary of state. ohio, you can also get from the secretary of state. download it. i believe it's free. it does not have party registration. it does have partisan primaries. they have a little quirk in the ohio file that they give you a party field, which is really populated with what's your last primary was. that can be somewhat misleading. because in 2008, a lot of people voted in the in the primary who may have voted in the only republican primary is part of that. i caution people in using their data. >> that's what in the party field. >> that's what's in the party field. we don't call it a party state, because it's not. we use the partisan primary da pa. but again, the campaign used for the partisan model instead. missouri? missouri is kind of the worst of the three in terms of voter file

world. i've been talking about missouri. missouri doesn't have party registration, does have partisan primaries, but doesn't give us that information. so we know whether people vote, but we don't know which primary they voted in. so again having something like the partisan model is very helpful in a place like missouri. missouri is the battle ground state, all three of those are always. and the big states coming up right now too. yes, sir? >> the indirect targeting and microtargetting, is it more the future of the guy graphic -- geographical targets of the people of the past. >> yes and no. we are no longer saying here's a precincts. go after everybody. when i moved into my neighborhood where we moved because of the school because we intended to have children. here we are a young couple with children. there are four sisters living across the street in the 80s.

we're a were different demographic. if you go to everybody in the precincts, you are going to try to say the same things to both of us. that's not very efficient. geographic targeting has it's place. we can take information like the ncec information that they compile to tell us something. how does the precinct perform. we know a lot of people who register by party don't perform. if democrats reformed as democrats, florida wouldn't have republican governor and senates. florida is 2/3 democrat. so a lot of people register as democrat, then they make enough money and become republicans; right? you register as a democrat so you can some day live as a republican. that's very partisan, i know. but that's the way it goes. yes, ma'am? >> how does information on people who volunteer for campaigns and for parties and people who donate in small or

large amounts been integrated if it has at all. because i know when i used the voter file, we took primary voters and called them to be volunteers. which is not the greatest way to go about things. >> it's a way. it's like again if you have more information, that way is going to improve. yes. a lot of those clients will upload that data in there. plus we will acquire and having acquired throughout the country donor list. because we create add progressive donor model. you go to the secretary states where we can download. and we can create a file of people who give the democrat candidates. candidates of all levels. we add it to the data to try a create a model. you can't always. you have to be able to give a certain level of significance in the data. and it's worked pretty well. right now we are finding the best way that works is to save

-- to get your prospect list within run the model against it, and go with the higher score. it'll make your prospects work better. in fund raising, the most important piece of information is do they give? not what proo file. do they give? your point is yes, you can upload that data to have a bitter chance of getting volunteers and donors. everybody wants donors. there's no secret to that. the key again is knowing enough about people to make the proper assumptions about what they will do. that's what we're talking about. how do we get enough information so we can make accurate assumptions about who we should talk to, and what we should say. because ultimately, we're trying to get people to do something. maybe no more than trying to convince them to vote. maybe we're trying to convince them to vote early, register, volunteers, money, all of those various things that we want, are

affected by how well we ask the question. and we're going to ask it better if we know something. if i start talking to you about football. if i start to use redskins, aped you don't like football, i've lost you. i have to try to talk to you about something you care about. i can best do that by knowing something about you. >> on a ground level when you are canvassing or making phone calls. how would you -- how would this inform the way that you talk? if you have a group of high school kids or random volunteers, you have a lot of football lovers, but nobody likes football. how do you engage those kinds of people in your canvassing or phone calls or any other contact that your volunteers might be having? >> a lot of that depends on how the candidate is and what you are trying to do. usually when they try to channel your activity and what they say

and what other say to voters based on time in canada and the candidates issues to what we know. their issues periodically like a homestead exemption. it helps homeowners. don't use that issue when you talk to apartment owners. that's not helping them. that's not doing a thing for them. if it's doing social security reform, don't go into the high school and talk that. they don't care. there's no formula for this. it's always how do you use the campaign, what's it about, what it stands for, what its issues are to motivate people and get them to use what works. it was very much a leader in issues like choice. he wrote one the last pieces of gun control legislation before the brady bill many years ago. we had some very intense

opposition, right to life community, the gun people. but that also motivated people to come to our campaign. but our job is to make sure they didn't go out and talk about those issues. that wasn't going to do us any good to talk the general public about those issues. because those are issues that usually work to your negative, not to your benefit. so you try to find out what works. in our case, he wrote title the. and that worked a lot. a lot of women in girls and high school and college got into athletics couldn't have done that without title 9. the 18 year old vote, why motivate because of the 18 year old voting amendment of the constitution. you use what you have. again, make it relevant based on what we know about people and what we're asking them to do? somebody else have a question? yeah? >> you said your voter files

made up with 90 plus organizations. you said the obama campaign was part of that. is the democratic and dnc or do they have their own? >> yes and no. they have their own separate file. but when obama became the nominee, there was an integration because the dnc and us. for a very simple reason, obama was a client. obama is now the head of the democratic party. democratic parties have a lot of id data. we have a lot of id data and models. we wanted them to have the best of everything. plus the obama folks could look at our, could run the statewide data. they wanted to make sure the data was the same for the state people on their online system. so it makes sense to have the integration. we went through that. we're trying -- we very much want to work with democratic party on it right now. one the beauties of what catalyst can do, we sell to

anybody. we have chosen to sell to democratic community. including 501c3 who will not buy party data. many of the progressive organization have 501c3 that are doing tax exempt. they cannot buy party data. so part of the motivation for setting up catalyst when it was created was to help serve that community. we can sell to democrat and provide datas to democrats. the democratic party, we think, we'd like to see them integrated with us and us integrated with them throughout. it hasn't happened yet. put in a good word. >> we have to do budgets for our campaign. how many does it cost for the statewide race? >> that question is asked every time i come here. it's a tough one. because it varies enormously. it varies less now than it used to. i can tell you that.

i can give you some thumbnails. again, california is little bit more expensive than delaware, you might guess. because most of the functions of processing data are charged at a per 1,000 basis. so delaware that has 600,000 voters, 500,000, compared to california with 22 million. there's obviously, it's hard to tell you what the cost are. now ohio, pennsylvania, and missouri are probably comparable. they probably are not that different. the first cost of buying the data. if you are -- if you are buying it from a vendor like us, it may be easier. it's going to be one flat price first state. if you are working with the state party, it may be free. if your republican, i don't know what the deal is. because i don't know how that works. but if you are building yourself, i assume that's the best way to answer your question.

if you are bidding it yourself, you have to buy the data which can be anything from free, which many states are, or florida is $10, california is $30. alabama is $27,500. it varies enormously from very cheap to not so cheap. arizona is free to the parties from the state from the counties. but a dime a name to vendors. making it $300,000 if you buy it. which no one does. just, they only have to sell it once, they'll do pretty well. so that is a -- you can see that's an enormously various cost. then you have to go through and you have to process it. you have to standardize it, you have to create households, run it through the national change of address, add telephone numbers. that's even if you forgo the adding commercial data and

census. i merged my own companies in 2007. i was the vendor of both the ohio and missouri. i can give a sense of what they cost. they are in the neighborhood of somewhere between $50 and $60,000 to build the file. so the whole concept of sharing obviously makes sense. no campaign should do it alone. if you can share it with other campaigns or if it can be done bit party and shared by everybody. most of the relationships i help develop with my clients who are democratic state parties, we would develop a cost of filling the file and updating the file over a two-year circle. then say look at all of the races that are out there. there's assume 1/3 of them will want access. how can we allocate the prices so it's cheaper for them than

doing it themselves, but accumulating the cost we'll cover the party's nut. and it works really well. the parties in most cases would make money from filling their voter files. it's impossible to give you a flat answer of what it costs. because it depends on the state. pennsylvania would be the most expensive of the three, ohio would be second, and missouri would be third. my guess is missouri these days, you can probably get missouri in the neighborhood on your own, $30 to $40,000. ohio, i would say in $40 to $50,000. in pennsylvania $50 to $60,000. those are in round terms of doing it ourself on the commercial market. catalyst, we sell the subscription. where if you go on a subscriber, you pay the flat rate of the state. regardless of the state. so you can see it depends on the model, depends who's doing it.

it's a very hard question to answer. >> no other questions. we're going to talk about different pieces of data. there's certain things i like to caution you on. i touched a bit on it earlier. party is something that's nice to have. don't go overboard on making assumptions about democrat being a democrat and republican being a republican. that's another party. but it doesn't mean the democrat reforms as a democrat all the time and republican is a republican. but it's an important piece of information to have. and by having everybody in the household's party, you have a profile of that household. is a pure democratic, pure republican, mixed democratic/republican, independent, how? what's that household make up? how many people are in the household? that tells us something very

different than the individual information tells us. when we are doing mail or phones, we're targeting households. yes, e want to reach individuals, maybe just an individual in that household. we only want to deliver one piece of mail to a person's home. we only want to make one phone call. yet again, in my own household, my wife does not use that last name. we look like two households. same address, same telephone number, different last names. if you don't to that, then you have roommate, group houses, apartment buildings that come without apartment numbers. look like huge houses. i once identified a convent as a household. that's wrong. there were like 900 nuns. you try to do the best that you can. the downside in my case is yes, there might be two pieces of mail coming to my household. if you do your phone program,

you still only make one call, by making sure you can select that number once. so knowing the profile of the household is important. date of birth is hugely important piece of information. when you think about it, our gender and our age probably say more about who we are and how we perform in society than any other two individual factors. i would say close up behind that is race. age, race, sex, hugely important. a lot of voter files, most voter files have gender and age. only, i think, only 11 southern states have race. florida, south carolina, north carolina, louisiana, alabama, mississippi, -- >> georgia. virginia does not. >> georgia. virginia does not. arkansas does not. tennessee. that's probably it.

there are other pieces of information that we add on. telephone numbers are probably the highest individually priced item and the most problematic. how many people here do not have a landline? you are now seeing how problematic it is. i can't reach you on your cell phone. now that's coming. how we use that is still up to some debate. but basically, when i do the phone match to voter file, i'm getting white pages listed landlines. therefore, most of you people are not going to be on it. you're not going to be in my phone program. i better hope i get you by mail. i have to tell you one the big challenges these days is how do we reach the 18 to 35 year old. how do you reach you? you don't watch commercial television. i can't get you on the phone. you don't read your mail. you are never at home where i can walk to you. so if i don't get you on a

social network or maybe mtv or something. it's hard. i have sons 25 and 22. and i ask them that question. and they don't give me good answers. good question. they'll tell me. you know? because it's a difficult itty. it's difficult for the pollsters. it's hard to adequately sample young people. because you can't get adequate phone coverage. we're doing exercises right now to identify which phone numbers that we have that are not landlines. we know we have a lot of cell phone numbers. we just don't know which ones they are. california, for instance, something like 0e9d% of the voter names that come in on a voter data have a telephone number. that means when you register, you put down your phone number. you might have put down your cell phone and put down a number 40 years ago that you haven't had for 30 years. but there's a phone number on your record. we try to verify that they are

accurate. we have a huge number that we don't know. either because they are unlisted number, or because they are cell phone. and that makes it hard. that makes it hard. telephone numbers is something when you enter into the process of the campaign, you are fully aware. not only can you not get telephone numbers, you are the never going to reach everybody. even if you 100%, you can't count of reaching everybody. the beauty of mail is that you can pretty well be sure that your mail can get there. it's hard to do that in person. of course unless liz sends the mail. yeah. >> what is the percentage of the -- it can't be 100%? >> including what? >> as close to 100 as we can make it. that's the idea. with 260 million people, voters and nonvoters, now we actually have some dead people on there too. as i say to people when they have a big list and they complain there's dead people.

i promise there are more tomorrow. [laughter] >> kind of works that way, doesn't it? well. you know, it's a moving target. it's very hard. people don't evaporate on a list when they die, unfortunately. >> how do you eliminate those people. feedback from your clients on the campaign. >> some. mostly it's from getting a social security death index file. which does not give us the kind of information that allows us to comprehensively identify dead people. it tells you name, birth date, death date, zip cope. we use the zip code to narrow it. if the voter file has birthday, the combination of full name and birthday. if you think about it, no matter how many here have a common name, when you spell out your first name, middle name, last name, and birthday. there's unique.

i'm sure there's more than one john smith born on the same day in a given state. but there aren't that many. most names aren't that common. so it's hard to identify dead people. we add other information on. we like to get race. when we can get it from a voter file. we try to identify race and ethnic data electronically. model through surveys and all kinds of other commercial data that allows us to identify likely race or likely ethnicity. now people will argue whether or not that is valuable information. ethnic, race, i think is. race is -- african-american, caucasian, hispanics, asian, pretty much sums up. but ethnic is much more county of origin, french, irish,

jewish. it's very, very hard to get these no matter how good the service is you employ, i think he's a pretty good service. a combination of surname, first name, and geocode. a stein. in of milwaukee might be something than one in new york. however that works to try to have some separation between the surname and something more complicated than that. but there are limitations. not only to do it people not vote according to theeth anything necessity, i would submit most of the time they don't. there used to be an italian in the community. you can sure italians or irish will go today. that's in our history. not so much anymore. but people still like to use it. and make assumptions. whether i agree or in the, they are going to use it. i like to point out there are

limits. shaquille o'neal is not irish, robert e. lee was not asian. there are names that can't be categorized accurately. i was involved in a campaign in florida. a women by the name of cuban born, her name is ms. kennedy. she was married to the mayor of miami. foreign birth, marriage, it's hard. when people start to ask me questions about ethnicity, it's like a red flag that they want to use it and have the conversation to say let's be realistic about this. the people who are from samoa, do they vote alike in america? i'm not sure that's true. it's another piece of data that helps us. all of the data helps in modeling. what else? voter history, voter history, i

think is huge. i happen to believe that voting is habit forming. the more you vote, the more you are likely to vote. the people that don't vote, are less likely to vote. as simple as that sounds, i think it's largely true. the voter history tells us which election people show up at. and in the primary, it'll often tell us which primary they choose if they are not a state that has the closed primary and forces that choice. now, i can't tell you how many times i've had a candidate that will say to me, well, i just want the people that voted for obama. and i remind him, we have a private ballot. secret ballot. i can tell you that they voted. i can't tell you who. it's amazing how many people get caught up in the data and don't think about that. i know you voted. i don't know who you voted for. i can make a lot of assumptions about what i know about you. but it's not necessarily

accurate. so the whole idea is, i mean. the point i tried to make in starting this, you want as much relevant information as possible to make decisions about how to -- who do you communicate with, who do you not? and what do you say? what does it take to persuade that person to do what i want them to do. whether it's register, give money, vote, volunteer, whatever it is. that's all this is. and this process has come a long way. it's publyically available data that you use to create prop files. every campaign waste 50% of its money. we just don't know what 50% it is. hopefully if you use voter data, you are being far more efficient on how you spend your money. there are a lot of ways to do it. there are ways to do it vendors, there are ways to do it

yourself. the one thing you don't want to do in any campaign is waste time. every campaign has different resources. everybody thinks money. you can always get money. but you can never add time. you are always on a shrinking calendar. anything that you do in the campaign that causes you to waste time. like building the voter profile and finding out it sucks. that doesn't help. you -- i like to throw that out as good advice. anything you do a lot. if you have any brains you do it better after a while. i like to think that those of us who do this and have done this for a while are doing it better. :

i talk to young people all the time, eight track cartridges and tapes. when i was at my company, catalist the personal i went on craigslist for my equipment.

eight track cartridge drives. they ended up at the dump. nobody else has a question? >> a two prompt question. first, are you collecting data as far as the programs of contact? for example, the democrats predicted will if they reach you by e-mail people if they reach my grandmother's they should probably be -- >> the answers are yes and no. the channel is increasingly important. we want to know the best -- acquiring that information is a slow and laborious question. you can model it possibly but it is hard. the beauty of an ongoing on-line

service is it keeps accumulating. it doesn't go away. e-mails, yes and no. we attach an entire file. the reason for that is we didn't know how to make a decision about who has the best female. i don't know how to make this judgment. we would carry their flag, not there e-mail address. go on line and do a query and get an account of what matches that clearly. then we have a system for referring that. we get the e-mails in our database and that is available to others. if somebody gives me a file,

having that e-mail on the background in the database helps naturally. e-mails are extensive and turn over quickly. you have got to be careful about how you communicate with e-mail. lot of people don't even pay attention to the spam laws. if you can't stand that you are going to get blocked. so many campaigns think this is the true way to communicate. it costs nothing to communicate and they find out they are not going through. it is a bunch of garbage. it is not true. aol and msn and yahoo! -- it is important. to shop. get as many e-mails as you can but have a system for sending them out that is guaranteed to

get through. so you have something like 1 eighty million e-mail flags or something like that. there is a lot. >> follow up on a question from earlier. are you making progress in incorporating the media -- [inaudible] is there a future where you can look on a voter file and it has things like myspace? >> i think there is. we have a couple programs -- there is a way to go on facebook and get your old address book matched to tell you whether or not they are registered and communicate with the unregistered people for mort

register replications. also a project called ican this where you can go through facebook to download 25 neighbors in the targeted universe for you to contact your self. it wasn't a full-blown program with back and forth or anything like that. it was just a way for people to use social networks to get involved in some level in the campaign. keep in mind, we just went through this exciting election. youtube and facebook didn't exist in the previous election. what is going to be around in 2012? it is frightening when you think about how the world has changed and how fast it is changing. your point is a good one. there will be the ability--not

only how to contact them by e-mail or phone, do they watch television? do they have a cable box on the tv that shows them watching cnn which means i can make sure i send a message to a particular person in his box and not the box across the street? that is coming. you will also be able to select people and communicate through the social networks. who is on myface or facebook, i don't even venture a guess about what is going to exist in 2012. i feel like youtube and facebook have been around forever and i am an old guy. maybe it is my memory. a good time to be entering into this world because there's a lot

of stuff going on. the whole concept, way people share programming and developing software and developing applications, one of the things i found in my company when we created a service company i had to have leverage. the democratic party used one for the activation network. catalysts -- catalist is mutual. once we get that, it democratized process. instead of people depending on -- to get it right using the voter files they do it themselves. at first i didn't want to be part of that. when people ask for something they ask wrong and i help get it right. now if they are doing it

themselves how many people are doing it wrong on line and they still don't know they did it wrong? i can worry about it anymore. people all over the country are on line and developing new applications. there are always new applications. what will happen is in the next election or two we are going to update voter files people still people who vote every day very quickly, very automated passion. at the end of the campaign you have every right to expect that you are not going after anybody who already voted in that voting space because of that system will be there and coming off of the file. it is going to get better and better. the first computer in this business had two drives and when my boss got me a 10 mb hard drive i thought i had died and

got to heaven. then i had my company and month -- budget decisions was buying more space. space was expensive. buying a huge hard drive would usually be a unit to connect your servers. of 54 gigabyte hard drive for pittance and it is getting bigger. now we are talking in terms of terabytes. storage is no longer the expensive item it used to be added helped the process quickly. people get into it without being involved. it has changed very rapidly. i am sure all of you are better on your laptops than i ever will be. i watch my son navigate and i venture to say that your children will blow you away with what they do with their laptops.

it is a changing and exciting world to be involved in. data will always be necessary. you still want to have direct communication with individual voters based on what you know about them and that is what this is about. you have some sense of how you are getting a hold of it. any other questions? >> thank you very much. [applause] >> we will be back at 9:00. anyone want to talk to ernie? have fun. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> all this week on c-span interview swiss supreme court justices. tonight anthony kennedy and samuel paulino. justice kennedy was on the court for 20 years and talks about the process in reaching a decision. alito looks at the role of the junior justice which he recently handed over to justice sonia sotomayor. see those interviews at 8:00 eastern on c-span. tonight, look at the best books

of 2009. several news organizations have published their lists and we will look at books written by republican congressman ron paul and linda gordon beginning at 8:00 p.m. on c-span2. to view the best of list visit booktv.org. >> c-span thursday, tributes paid to u.s. and world leaders including the dalai lama, ted kennedy, ronald reagan, walter cronkite, colin powell and robert byrd. then a look at what is ahead for the new year. vladimir putin discusses his future from his annual call in program. and the global economy. the creator of the segway and co-founder of guitar hero on a entrepreneurship and the art of political cartooning. >> michele malcolm is our guest on booktv's index.

the author of four books including the best selling culture of corruption, takes your calls. three hours with michele malcolm on booktv. part of a three day weekend starting friday. next, a discussion held earlier this month on recent developments in the financial markets. journalists from the washington post and wall street journal compare how they covered the economy in the past year held at the university of the virginia. this is 1 hour and 15 minutes. >> we have a special panel presentation tonight after dinner. has the financial crisis change the nature of economic news? we are all familiar with the anonymous saying that while depressed you can't tell people what to think but it can tell them what to think about. we have heard a great deal in

recent months and weeks about the subject of debts and deficits. that is the conference. standing here tonight in this splendid building, i wonder what some of the founders of the republic might have thought the subject of our discussion. how do we govern through debt and deficits. both of them had some acquaintance with the subject of debt and deficits. alexander hamilton for example, the first secretary of the treasury, is said to have said, quote, a national debt, if it is not excessive, will lead to a national blessing. mr. jefferson, who didn't always follow his advice to others, said, quote, never spend your money before you have it.

i have often thought too that what we have here tonight is a discussion about how people's fox, ideas, opinions and reactions to the news events of the day are affected by the 24 hour, seven day a week coverage of that subject by the media. tonight we are here to find out. we have a panel moderated by bob franken, an emmy award winning journalist, syndicated columnist and political analyst. he served as a correspondent for cnn and ms nbc. bob franken who i have known for a number of years was recently inducted into the society for professional journalists in washington's hall of fame. our second panelist is margaret brennan, and anchor and reporter

for bloomberg television news in new york. she was a general assignment reporter for nbc and a contributor to nbc's today show and nightly news as well as an best nbc. she is also a graduate of mr. jefferson's university of virginia. alan murray is managing editor and executive editor on line for the wall street journal. he was previously managing editor of a wall street journal and author of the weekly business column. he has served as washington d.c. bureau chief for nbc and the wall street journal. we are very fortunate to have alan on our governing council at the madison of public affairs at the university. a member of distinction for many years. next we have robert sanders, contributing editor of newsweek and the washington post where he has written about business and economic issues since 19707.

his articles also appear in the los angeles times, boston globe and other reading newspapers. his latest book is entitled the great inflation and its aftermath, past and future of american capitalists in case you are wondering about a holiday gift. paul sullivan is the economics and occasional correspondent for the cbs news hour. the answers questions on the business desk. recently he has become a fellow at yale's berkeley college and the brady johnson political economy at yale. for those of you in our discussion this afternoon, you know that he was a lively moderator in a panel that preceded dinner. with that i will turn to bob franken and ask him to conduct a discussion among our panel members on the question of has the financial crisis changed the

nature of economic news? >> president jefferson. other slightly less notables. are will make a deal with you, no jokes about tiger woods. but they do make a point. people are almost desperate to pay attention that type of thing and are encouraged to do so by certain television. there is so much that is probably of greater consequence these days. what we have when it comes to financial reporting -- we have represented here the best of times. people who are admired because of their ability to take these arcane and complex principles and explain them in language that people can understand. unfortunately people often don't take the time to understand

them. what you have often times is media coverage that is the self-defeating media frenzy. i guess i would ask and start with you, whether you feel like you are seeing that in your riding singing to the death? >> it is fading. i am feeling there is a vote in myself as to whether to get interrogated. it is 4-1 and i am the one. i fell down. i don't. i think there is a real hunter for information, for journalism but i think people feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they are getting and they have a hard time sifting through all the raw data, the onrush of events and figuring

out what it means. many readers or viewers think there's someone somewhere knows what it means but there isn't. this sensation of not -- feeling not understanding what is going on is, in fact, one of the events we are portraying. part of this economic crisis, a large part of this economic crisis was that the events on the ground lead to a way that was not anticipated by the people who are supposed to be in charge and the people who are supposed to understand what was going on. i don't sense that there is apathy out there or in difference but i think there is confusion that reflects -- the fact that there are so many

different sources of information that even somebody who is serious and ernest will be bombarded by lots of stuff that you can't make sense out of. >> this is going to be less a panel discussion that conversation. what i wanted to do was ask you to participate in the conversation. if you have something you want to add or a question you want to ask starting now feel free to walk up to the microphone and feel free to interject. the panel becomes everybody in this room. what they would call in congress the committee of the hole. >> that is exactly right. when you look at the long historical view over the last 20 years peepers new i think there are more talented financial journalists today than there have ever been in my career. i graduated from school in 1977.

thank you for not mentioning it but i went to the university of north carolina. may be submitted with an alcohol problem wrote the financial stuff. when i went to washington in 1979 the first thing i did was find bob samuelson. you and your colleagues do wonderful stuff. what you have done, there has been an explosion of really good, smart financial journalists. there has been an explosion of everything else too. i agree with bob. the question is not the media -- the whole concept of the

mainstream media which may have had been 25 years ago when you had three networks and a couple news services and papers that mattered has no meaning today. you have so many different sources of information. the problem is not that there isn't good information, the problem is what people are choosing to consume. i don't know what to do with that that is a matter of consumer choice. a lot of people for whatever reason seem to prefer to consume news, information that supports their own predilections and by s.es and they create little bubbles around themselves. technology makes it an easy thing to do. you can do that.

>> people are exploiting that. the journalistic model. >> and doing very well. you can find enough stuff on washington post to read all day long. or the other direction, you can go to half a dozen blocks and never read anything that challenges your view of the world. that is a problem for society. maybe this is self justification. the media is putting lots of stuff out there. if you want quality information about what is going on in the world of finance you can but you have got to do it. >> a lot of the media stuff -- there is an old joke in our business about television, the marching orders in television news are get out and scratch the surface. unfortunately we are not talking

about a subject that can be adequately presented by scratching the surface. you probably have to deal with this every day. >> there are two points in here. it is not the democratization of the media in that anyone can really express their own views in twitter or whatever. 140 characters that you can get something out there and people are following it and investing in it. there is democratization. any invoice can be heard but there is the self selection process which is allowing people to hone in on the information that they want. i would like to think there's a little bit of a reaction to just the opinion that saturates cable news in particular in the past

few years. anecdotally i have had a lot of people say that they are really tired of that. they are tired of the noise and are looking for the nuggets. how do you get a news organization that can afford to give you the nuggets right now in this environment and publish papers and get those things out there? >> call the nielsen organization and get a box in their house. that is not what the nielsen numbers are showing. >> there is a bet on this with the paper for content but that is another topic. talking about this idea of scratching the surface, is something i struggled with because bloomberg news is wonderful in that i have been given the platform and the leeway to do so. i can go beyond 1:30 on air which is unbelievable.

your average television report is 15 minutes, 32 minutes at the most unless you are a president. in your average television report. that is a countermove to the trend we are talking about. i had a wonderful experience of -- not only was i talking at nbc to two people choosing to seek out financial content but talking to people at home who were forced to understand financial news all of a sudden and that was scratching the surface. it raises bequest and of how much bonus should be put -- to be distilling down to the point that people do need to know and not just reflecting what people want to hear. >> not just journalists the people who tell the journalists what they should be covering which is not a problem with cbs.

>> i have been at the news hour since 1985 and it is true that within a couple years of being there, i thought i would never take another job anywhere else in television because it would be so confining and it would not allow me to do what i do. even so, the length of a typical news our piece is shrinking. we still go longer than that please. [talking over each other] >> i felt as if i had a member lot off. you can see why i do this job forever. it is not singing to the deaf

but the attention deficit disorder that is the issue. i had a piece a few years ago, 18 minutes. >> i am tweeting. >> george burns said he loved the news hour. egos to sleep to it every night. he may have been watching that peace. i don't know. there is a shrinking of the sound bites and the news the we do and there's pressure to do so even by people who are enthusiastic because there is a shortening of the attention span within the culture and i don't just mean whatever super mario is today, the latest version of videogames. but it affects us all and that

is tremendously problematic because if you are talking about trying to explain something, people who are here today, we had moments in the panel where as an aside, i would ask somebody question, what do you mean by that? it took a minute and 20 just to do that. that is obviously a problem. >> people are presented with the idea they don't have to think beyond a minute and 15. the willingness of the politician to exploit that, you end up with situations like we had this summer. you have the town meetings. we will not call this a town meeting. we have people who were completely ignorant and acting in disruptive ways because you had been pushed partly by the

lack of information they got in the immediate and that avoid was filled by a politician who was willing to exploit it. seem to be willing to read what you write. you have a lot of people who do pay attention and a lot of people who should but do not. >> and of those people actually read a great deal. it is not their unwillingness to read. it is what they're reading. >> you're not going to get great economic reporting. >> laws that support their -- >> preached to the choir. >> this affirms the idea that each boy should be heard, and people get stronger convictions when they are not getting anything that counters about. -- each voice should be heard, and people get stronger >> market pressure, i mean, alan is exactly right, by the way, about the quality and quantity the of economic and financial

journalism. when i started out as a reporter for "the washington post" in the late 1960s, i was hired as a city reporter, and i was told to report to work in two weeks. so ben bradley, who was then the editor, said, well, we have an opening on the business page, why don't you take it. i was just 23 and had just been hired and i thought it was not a good idea to tell the editor to shove it, so i took it. but he didn't, i didn't have any background in this. the entire business section was five people. the last time i checked, which was a few years ago, it was 80. it may be lower now, but suppose it's the 50 or 40. still we're talking about 10, 15 times what it was back in the late '60s. and people who come into it usually have some background. i remember giving a lecture to a guy at "newsweek" about ten years ago on depreciation.

mr. kaplan will appreciate this. and he stopped me in midflight, and he said, i have an mba, i know about all of this. and the idea that a reporter would have an mba in the 1960s was just absurd. [laughter] but the multiplicity of information sources, news sources or whatever creates an enormous amount of pressure -- not all of which is bad, but some of which is bad -- to reach conclusions, to distill things into understandable sound bytes or whatever you want to call them because that, there's a competition to get at least the illusion of as much information in as short a period of time as you possibly can. so there's this consistent pressure that operates on everybody, and you see it in the shortening of things. when i came to "newsweek" in 1984 and started writing a

column, it was about 1100 words long. it's now 700 words long. and i don't want to say that all those missing words were gems, but you have to take stuff out when you write at 700 and not at 900 or a thousand that might be good to leave in. >> what you don't know is how many people in the old days got to the end. [laughter] >> that's right. my editor. [laughter] >> well, if you speak about the market pressure, and the market pressures are, it's sort of circular. you have a circumstance now where various market pressures translate the internet as much as anything else and all of technology are driving the ability of traditional media to afford the kind of expertise that they need and the kind of investment in people that they need to properly present a subject as complex as the economy and can the concentric one, health care, and i,

frankly, sort of like to combine them when i'm talking about this. instead what you get is what i said before, demagoguery. >> uh-huh. well, and i think there's also the question of with not just market pressures which is a fair point, and it's the obviously a relevant one because, i mean, it's hard to name a news organization that hasn't -- it's hard to name an industry that hasn't had one this year, but absolutely news organizations that i know of have all felt a lot of market pressures particularly within the past two-and-a-half years, even the financial news operations who all of a sudden got shoved from, you know, the back section to the front page, the story of the next two years to come. but i think we also have to talk about just you can't just blame the add generation. i mean, that is what consumers are looking for. you opened this talking about news organizations, market pressures wouldn't be there to put that stuff on the front page or put it in news class if

people weren't logging in or tuning in to see it. so there's also, i think, this question now for news is how much do you reflect what consumers are looking for, what they're seeking out and how much do you report are on what they need to know? like, do you just give them the ice cream, or do you give them the broccoli with the ice cream to get them to read it? >> well, you make the broccoli taste like ice cream. >> right, which is sort of where we've come can. >> first of all, i think there are two separate be issues that have to be separated. one is the way that technology has enabled more sources of information than we have ever had before, a plethora of information. consumers have more choices than they've ever had. if they want to watch a 30-minute video or an hourlong video, and they want to see what paul's doing, it's easier to do that -- >> didn't you watch the piece online?

>> every bit of it online. >> this was a piece that -- >> we, we have, you know, i like to think we do fairly sophisticate canned stuff. we now have 20 million visitor a month. that's three times what we had just two years ago. it's ten times what we had hat hat -- at the height of the print paper. so good information is out there, there are more sources of it, and people have more access to it than they've ever had before. and at the end of the day you sort of have to believe that consumer choice is a good thing even if you don't particularly like the way some consumers are exercising their choices. >> there seem to be a couple of things i would wonder about. one, isn't there sometimes the mistake made that people have a tendency to look at media as separate entities? it's newspapers or television or your ipod or online when really there's sort of this seamless -- >> it's all one. >> it is all one. but i don't think necessarily everybody has caught up --

>> i think young people understand that. look, we're dealing -- our business is to try to get and keep your attention. that's what we get rewarded for. some of us are buffered for it and pay for or that with a lower audience and a lower salary, stuff like that. it's a perfectly good trade-off in my mind, but it's there. if you're going to get an audience and you're going to use television -- an increasingly popular medium because fewer and fewer people read, certainly fewer and fewer young people read -- >> read papers. they read the internet. >> well, they do -- can yeah. that's fair, and maybe that's -- they don't read books as much. >> but what -- >> from everything i know. so they read shorter things, okay? but let's not argue, that's a good point. but if you're going to tv and tv or video is what you're dealing with, how do you get somebody's

attention when you're trying to keep them watching when they have 500, hundreds of different options and they can go get a beer and every other darn thing you're competing with? people have learned the techniques that work on the brain, and one of them is that when something moves in the frame, we are programmed, presumably, from the end of our evolution in the pleistocene to think that maybe it's a predator or, you know? i mean, i hate to be overly simplistic here, but there's plenty of hypothesizing that that's what's going on. so if you -- so that's -- why do you think all that stuff ceeps moving and the crawls and the this and the that, and it's all happening? and various other techniques. when you talk about making ice cream into broccoli, yeah. even somebody who works for the newshour is constantly thinking about, how do i keep you interested?

what surprise do i offer you mow? yeah, what any communicator does. >> and in some form always has, right? >> well, sure. it's the same thing as selling any product, and what happened was that for the longest time there was no real competition for that product -- >> exactly. we were like the auto company. >> right. but there's a tremendous benefit to keeping people's attention, and you can keep people's attention with techniques which have nothing to do with teaching them anything about the world. that's all, and i think that's a classic and age-old struggle, but it's one that i think may be increased by the nature of our ability to manipulate minds at this point. >> see, now, i didn't think anybody would take me seriously. [laughter] >> my name's -- [inaudible] and i have a question for the panelists. you know, in the old days there was this kind of -- i'm kind of exaggerating a little bit, but there were guys who kind of produced information, and there were consumers, and kind of you

guys, journalists, were kind of the gate keepers, you know? i'm exaggerating a little bit. but what's happened now, for example, with bob, for example, when you write now, you have competition not just as a democratizing as lots of people producing it, but you have, you know, paul krugman who's also in your sphere. so i want to know what does that do to you? so question to paul, for example, if, for example, simon johnson were to start hosting a show, what would that do to you? it's a bit like a semiacademic who is kind of an anchor himself. what does that do to you? do you feel threatened? is this, you know, good for you, bad for you? how do you respond to it? >> richard, do you want to take your krugman first, i'll take simon? >> i, you know, you're absolutely right. i mean, for years and years i've written about the glories of markets and the the benefits of competition, but i always assumed that i would be exempted

from the glories of competition and the benefits of markets. and all of a sudden they have come flooding through. [laughter] and i have to say i don't like it. [laughter] i wish paul krugman would go back to princeton. [laughter] i wish all the economists that have set up blogs would unplug their computers. [laughter] but, unfortunately, this isn't going to happen. and i think there are two effects, i think. one is and is that the the rewards to run of the mill journalists in terms of salary and income are simply going to go down because there are a lot of people -- i mean, the stars and the people who can basically say i draw this kind of audience will be well rewarded and perhaps even better rewarded than they used to be. but the run of the mill people are basically competing with lots of folks out there who are offering up their opinions

either for free or at a reduced rate. and a reduced rate meaning somebody else is really paying their mortgages and they're paying their food bills or whatever, and they're -- whatever real economic reward they're getting, most of what they're getting is psychological. so is that's one effect. but i would say the second effect is -- and i agree with alan -- it's unfortunate in some ways for people like me, but the pressure to with all competition, i would say, improves, probably, the average product and puts pressure on people like me to make our stuff relevant or seemingly relevant so that we can cur vief in this -- survive in this very competitive marketplace. but it's also going to offer a lot more diversity, and that is to say you're going to have a lot more junk and a fair amount more high quality stuff.

and in general it's a good can result. but as i say, i would prefer to go back to the bad old days -- >> but this gets to your second point which we haven't talked about this much -- >> i forgot, what was my second point? >> it had to do with what technology is doing to the economic model. so, i mean, as a consumer being able to read paul krugman or simon johnson or, you know, having all those voices of people who want to analyze things and tell you when they're thinking and are willing to do it for free on the side to make arianna huffington happy or whatever reason they do it for is a good thing. but the question going forward is, okay, but a lot of us really think it's important to society that there be people out there who are paid to find out the facts. you know, who aren't doing this on the side, who aren't being paid to do something else and just do this to the -- as a, to build their name or to help

their real business but who are paid to go can out and do the hard reporting that it takes to find out what is really going on. and that's going to be the challenge for the next ten years coming up with business models that enable organizations to support a large group of reporters. >> but isn't part of the problem that most people don't understand or certainly don't celebrate journalism? it's the old thing, used to be i couldn't spell journalist, now i are one. used to be anybody could decide they were going to be a journalist, and journalism itself is dying. if your mother says she loves you, check it out. that seems to be the diagnose. >> i don't, i don't -- there's no problem hiring journalists these days. there are lots of good journalists out there eager to work if somebody can, if somebody will pay them. >> as opposed to the person

who's really an advocate for one point or another? >> well, you asked the question about simon johnson, how many people here know who simon johnson is? only a smattering. so he's former chief economist for the imf, a brit, a -- in all the years that i've interviewed economists and that's 32 now, the single quickest, funniest combined with most insightful that i've ever interviewed. so the answer to the question how would i feel about simon having his own show, i would be jealous. i would figure i would be on the show, so i wouldn't actually worry about it all that much, but to what you were saying a minute ago, alan, i would be concerned that simon who has a point of view, a point of view i often agree with actually, but if simon has a show, the oz of

financial daytime tv, let's say, which as we both know is the kind can of thing he absolutely could do, it would take viewers away from me if he was doing some of this explanation, and at least i'm forced to work in an organization where it is real reporting, on the one hand, on the other hand, check out your mother's claims, particularly about yourself, by the way. and so i would, i would feel -- i would feel the world might well be a better place for having simon in it as well to the extent that i thought that even-handed journalism was being taken, you know, the viewers would be taking away from that to him. i might have, you know, misgivings. >> well, the news has become commoditized, and what you're

buying or tuning in to is an individual brand, i think, more and more these days because you've got so much choice out there. so that's what my impression is of a network's decision to bring in a name like one of the, or a few of them that have been bandied about here because people have an idea of what they're going to get when they tune in or when they read that thing. and i think there is a premium put on quality of that information that's being delivered, but that's different when you -- people do want to hear opinion viewpoint and what not, the journalism that we're talking about being endangered does require a tremendous amount of investment. and that is what is in danger. i don't mean to say, though, that there's not true value in the pennsylvania reed zachariahs or anyone else out there because they are giving you a very interesting view point, and those are the same people that a

journalist would call up and say, what do you think about this? right. now they get their own shows, and it's cheaper in the long run. >> i'm here from the university of virginia. i want to follow up on some of these points being made with the language having been we've talked about facts. my question has to do with the separation or the difference between fact and opinion, right? one of the things when we go to the grocery store we can look and see how many fat, how much calories in it. what has happened, i think, to some of the media is there is a, no longer is there as clear a separation between fact and opinion. now, i can look at what the stock market did can, i can read a box score and see how my team did, and that's not very arbitrary, right? but if i pick up "the new york times," "the wall street journal," itune into the newshour, i know there's a

selection because there's too much to cover. but at what point in time is there a responsibility on the part of media to explicitly acknowledge or to try and keep editorials on the editorial page and to separate editorializing from the reporting of the news? i wonder whether you think that these things have been increasingly merged or have increasingly come together, and as a result of competition for viewers, as a result of competition for advertising? >> well, isn't part of the problem that reporters are not, should not be autothe may on the thes, just reciting who, what, when, where, how, thank you and good night? there's also context. but the selection of what goes into that context, it would seem to me, is going to offend somebody to whom he would like to see a different conclusion out there. >> but the thing you were talking about is sort of a curious by-product of 20th century america. i happen to believe in it. i happened to believe it was a

good by-product of 20th century america, but it was pretty much unique to us and that period, and it does now -- things do now seem to be head anything the other direction. i just came back from two days in london, and you read the papers there, it's a very different kind of journalism. no effort to make that separation that you're talking about between, between news and editorial. i think it's a good separation, i think it's something that should be maintained. but there is the problem that margaret talked about which is technology does make facts easily, readily, rapidly duplicable. so, you know, yes, somebody has to spend the shoe leather to go out and find the facts, but once they do, it's pretty easy for everybody else to get onto it. so personality, voice, unique analysis, being fareed zachariah, being paul krugman tends to be an important way to get your readers to identify

with you and come back to you because they can get the basic facts from a thousand different places. >> and you get more of a reaction. i mean, if you go can up on, you know, if you look at the comments on blogs -- not now necessarily the blogs themselves even -- but the comments on the blogs it's a tremendous amount, it's a tremendous amount of vie tube ration, of attitude nicing, of posturizing, you know, and i know it from my own question and answer site, you know? i get a few comments, i'm just trying to answer people's questions, i have other people help me try to do it. i got linked in by a woman named mercken tennessee megan mccartal to a libertarian the blogger. and then i got 50 comments, you know, on the blog, on this one post.

the rudest bunch of, you know, just whole bunch -- [laughter] some of them intelligent, i'm not taking issue, you know, with them disagreeing or agreeing, but it was bill crouse. it was the a different purpose than what i, at least, was trying to do on this blog. and i -- on this web site, if you l. and i think the it just shows that of course it's easier to, you know, cop an attitude and get response to that attitude and that tends to be self-fulfilling to extent that you go for consumer choice. >> but if you're -- >> can i -- >> dvd. >> but i want to say one more thing about this because i now work for rupert murdoch, and a lot of people think rupert murdoch is the guy, you know, he created fox news, and fox news had this attack on cnn, and there was a great deal of fear at the time he took over "the wall street journal" that he might use us to compete with

with "the new york times" the same way he used fox news to compete with cnn. i'm not talking about the editorial the page, you couldn't do anything to drag the editorial page further to the right than it already is. [laughter] in fact, rupert has been a moderating influence on the editorial page of the wall street journal, but the news pages. and a lot of us were worried about that. and it hasn't happened. why hasn't it happened? well, because rupert is a smart business person, and our audience appreciates the fact that in the news pages we try -- sure, we provide analysis and we try and put things in perspective, but they know that we at least attempt -- it's not that we don't have personal biases and it's not that those biases don't sometimes seep into the reporting, but they know we're at least trying to go out and find out what really happened, and you our audience,i think, really appreciate t that in part because they are in business, and you can't can afford to be getting biases, you

want to be getting good information. what does that tell you? that tells me that at the end of the day the kind of journalism you're talking about will survive if people want it to survive. if there's an audience out there for that kind of journalism, then that type will survive and thrive. >> but that's the big if, will people want it to survive when they can get their news entertainment by what you described, with these blogs where it gets more and more vie tube rahtive and seems to contribute ultimately to a national hysteria that makes honest consideration of difficult issues more and more impossible. >> look who you're talking to, i mean, you're talking to bob samuelson, alan murray of newshour -- >> bloomberg. >> yeah, i know. i go to bloomberg, now, regularly for my news. i go to the that -- >> usually the stories of the nuggets that spur -- >> yeah, i know, but all i'm saying is that this is appealing to a narrow --

>> [inaudible] >> it's appealing to -- we should just acknowledge it's appealing to a very narrow separate tunnel the of the american public here, and what you keep talking about is the general level of discourse as opposed to the discourse taking here tonight, for example. >> right. but the general level of discourse is what matters here. every individual has a vote, and most individuals, frankly, don't pay the kind of attention they should to the people, the product of the people who are on this panel. >> i think my theory here, though, is in terms of what we're talking about with frustration of mixture of opinion and what not into everything. you are always getting some sort of opinion throughout. i mean, how many times have you heard walter cronkite cited for being number one, how wonderful that was to take a stand. you knew where to turn, when to get decide who's credible, who's not. and i think that's why people are responding to personal brands if not network-based

ones, because they want to know in some way what they're going to get. maybe it's seeking out their same opinion and someone who thinks like them, but maybe it's just seeking out the person whose brand they personally believe in. but that, i think s going to lead to a more multimedia model where it may be turning to tv for scratching the surface to then compliment where you get can more of the information and flowing through more and more. i think there's going to have to be that kind of consolidation if there is going to be a viable media model because we're all fighting for a smaller and smaller piece of the advertising pie unless you look at a different form of pay for content the or some ore model -- other model. >> jerry baliles for the miller center is. it's been very interesting to listen to the panel discuss the the increase in media outlets over time. the expansion of financial

reporting depending upon your medium. the number of reporters themselves who are engaged in analyzing and reporting on financial issues. my question -- but you've also mentioned that the amount of coverage given to a, let's say, television financial story may be no more than a minute and 15, 20 seconds. my question is this, what is your perception given this expansion of media outlets, the increase in financial reporting, what is your perception of public comprehension of the financial situation in the country? do they simply read your headlines, watch your lead story and then turn the somewhere else? is that the basis of their understanding? or is it your perception that they really don't understand because it really hasn't been

explained to the media for which they turn to the news, the distinction between budget and deficits? i'd be interested in your perception of however you report the news, how you think the public accepts and comprehends it. >> well, my view is that i don't mean this disrespectfully that most people don't know very much about anything. and there's a good reason for that. it's because there's too much to know. and i'm always surprised -- i shouldn't be anymore -- that when i go out and talk to people who are very bright, who are very engaged and who are very interested in knowing what's significantly going on how little they know about the subjects that i report about every day. and i think the reason for that is that unless you are personally engaged in many of these issues or subjects, it's

the almost impossible to know what you might want to know. and the current people i'm talking about are doctors, lawyers, government -- mid-level and high government officials in state and local governments. people have their lives to lead. they can cannot spend them and pretend that they're in graduate school and that every day they're going to spend three or four hours going through the stuff that they ought to go through so that they can remain informed about the major issues of our time. so i don't blame people, i agree, i think, with everybody here that there is more information now available, easily accessible than there has ever been before, that people who want to get the information can, but it's very difficult to assimilate all this stuff. and i'll give can you an example right now. we have this health care debate. and my brother, who's not a journalist and who does not live in washington but is much more

perceptive about these things than i am, we were talking a couple weeks ago, and he says, is it your impression that nobody understands really what's in this bill? and i said, well, yeah, that's basically the truth. i'm learning new things about what's in these bills every day, and i am certain that even the people who are dealing with it seven days a week, 24 hours a day don't know everything that's in these bills. and this is just a kind of a microcosm of the difficulty of staying kind of up with things. i -- it's not what i cover, but i'm avidly reading, now, most of what i can find on afghanistan. and i am completely confused about what we should do in afghanistan. i think the case on both sides is compelling, and i'm sure, also, that i really don't have the foggiest notion of what's going on in afghanistan.

it's just there's a limit to what people can know, and i think that we ought to -- there are only 24 hours a day and 365 days in a year, and that has, the internet has not changed that. >> and, well, what has changed is the world has become much more complex. it's a much more complicated place. we're talking about the financial crisis, so at this conference we did in london, alistair darling was there, and he said during the course of the interview that after lehman prepares and the crisis in september he was talking to a very senior, very well-respected london banker, and hi -- he said to this banker, so have things changed at your institution? and he said, yeah, things have changed a lot. he said, for example, we are not going to buy any security we don't understand. [laughter] he said, wait a minute, why didn't you do it before? these are very complicated -- you know, it's just, it's just a much more complicated world, and even people who are in the

middle of it don't understand what's going on. >> well, you're saying it's too complicated, and it sounds like it, then i have a really tough question about journalism, what's the use? you're talking about the futility of journalism, that it's bigger than us, that we can't explain what's really going on. is that what you're saying? >> i think we have a -- when i started in the business back in the late '60s, i had a model in my mind that if we bring the right facts to bear, that the system is ultimately rational. may not be rational day-to-day can or week to week, but if you bring the right facts to bear on a situation, that policy will go in the right direction. you persuade people this is an educational process, i don't believe this anymore. [laughter] >> [inaudible] >> but what i believe, what i believe is that when people have made up their minds about something, it's almost impossible to change their

minds. it's not that their minds can't be changed, but they can't be changed by just facts and evidence. they have to be changed by experience. before world war ii, americans were avidly isolationist. so we fought the second world war in half a century, people decided that what they had done between the wars was not a good idea. being isolationist was bad, but that wasn't because franklin roosevelt convinced them, it was because in my view, at least, they could see that the policy had been an abject failure. i think that people who haven't made up their minds about something that debate can change. so what's the virtue of a free press? the virtue of a free press is that democracy is a very messy system. and a free press is a part of that messy system. and the system would be worse off if we didn't contribute to it. but it's very difficult, at

least i found it very difficult, to say that we have made things better in a very specific way. and to the question about bias earlier, the the problem with bias in my view is not that there's more of it -- because there obviously is in the blogs and whatever -- but most of that is harmless in the following sense; people know that this is bias. nobody pretends, you know, the liberals that go out and shout at conservatives don't pretend they're moderates, and the conservatives don't pretend -- you know. it's like going to a grocery store and buying something with sugar or not. you can read it, it's there. so when people know what they're getting, it's not dangerous. it's the unconscious bias that we all have in what we select, what we decide is news or what we decide is not news, the

sources we go to or that we don't go to, it's those unconscious biases that we pass on to our readers or viewers, those, it seems to me, are the most dangerous things. and i think my view of a danger for what we used to call the mainstream media now is that this splintering process is subtly driving some major news organizations either to the left or the right. there's a kind of self-selection process that goes on here. and what academic research and common sense suggests is that when audiences, when your audience becomes of a particular political type the, you start aiming news for that audience. it's just, you know, that's commercial survival, it's the kind of feedback you get. and so i -- that's a danger, i think, for what used to be the

mainstream media. and i think the journal has resisted that very well. i'm not sure that some of the other great organizations have resisted that as well. and i think alan's reason is probably the main reason, is that the people who are reading it, your audience, they are political in some sense, but before being political they are engaged in business every day, and they want information that they can trust. >> what's the point? >> yeah. >> well, if he quits, then sarah palin has the whole editorial page. if we quit, margaret and i, then we leave the field to lou dobbs and larry kudlow and jim cramer. so it would seem just as a defensive posture you would want to surround and not ask questions like that, which are -- [laughter]

but i think beyond that at least for myself and, again, i understand i'm in this rarefied, you know, niche, i think of the point as being a point of trying to educate and not just educate people who happen to watch the show. that's a million or two a night. jeez, i never thought i'd be talking to more people than would be talking to me. seems an incredible privilege to have that small an audience by broadcast standards. but beyond that i think very seriously about -- perhaps at this point my main mission is to get the pieces and excerpts from the pieces that we do into the hands of high school teachers or who use this, who half to teach the all of americans and who have been facing a tremendous problem all these years, which is economics, a topic that most people shrink from because of the the numbers and the way --

>> do you know that's happening? >> i know that's happening. >> the scary thing is not the size, 1.2 million is is a good size, it's the demographics. i was doing washington week in review when the aarp be canceled its sponsorship because they said the audience was too old. [laughter] you know you have a real problem on your hands. >> that would be a crushing blow. [laughter] i could see that. but, no, of course i do know it's happening. i don't have a -- we don't have a nielsen count on high schools, but i've spoken to groups and, yes, the teachers are desperate precisely because students aren't reading books anymore or anywhere near as much. so there's lots of video in the classroom, and, yes, if you have educational video which a little bit of broccoli, little bit of ice cream, a little, you know, some stuff moving on the screen and trying to explain stuff, yeah, so i think that's the point. >> okay. so when somebody was making the point this is really too big to

comprehend, it's our job to try and take out the points that are most important and make them comprehend something that people can understand. >> he's been doing it his whole career. >> that's right. >> and i should add i think that there is a good in pursuit of the truth. i mean, that by itself in a free society is an important value. and, you know, i'm sure i'm not yeting at it -- getting at it, but i'm looking for it. and that's what i try to do, that's what paul tries to do and make it accessible to people in a format which is digest bl. what i was trying to suggest is that that by itself is not necessarily going to lead into the guarden of eden. >> no, and that's really the important point, that people don't always make rational use of this information. so i was talking earlier about the credit default swaps and the collateralized debt obligations and stuff like that that even the the people buying it didn't

understand. but there was a lot going on over the last three years that was easy to understand, and i think everybody did understand. how many people didn't sort of scratch their head a little bit when they heard that mortgage companies were making 100% loans no one down and, by the way, you don't have to prove you have a job, and you don't have to prove you have an income, and, in fact, we'll qualify you based on the first year's payment even though in two years' time the payment's going to double? everybody knew that was going on, and they chose not to react to it not because they didn't know about it, but because it was in their interests. they were playing the game. you know, they had houses, too, and they were taking money out. i think when you have moments of sort of national mania like the one that we went through for a couple of years, and we did it again during the internet, i think it's a little too similar policic to say people didn't know what was going on. i think people found it in their

interests to keep it going. >> i think financial journalism, journalism period, but financial journalism has shown its relevance in the past year and a half because it went from the back page to the front page, and all of a sudden there's just this tremendous hunger for it. i think there are questions to be raised about pre-crisis or mid-crisis, how the quality of it was, was there work done? there's a fair amount of criticism that's already been thrown and leveled there, but that's why i've -- because i've struggled with this question myself of did financial journal i ists, did the networks, did the print journalists, did everyone altogether the really do do their jobs? but then you go back and you read the journal, you look elsewhere, and you do find a fair amount of people that did really great pieces which really didn't draw in any kind of attention at the time because people don't can want to hear a negative story. they just want to hear about, oh, my god, this is an

amazing -- >> [inaudible] >> all the growth is great. but people don't want to hear the warning signs. >> and just to take that one step further because we were hearing this question about is it all just becoming opinion the people who criticize those stories say, yeah, the facts were in there, but you didn't say this is a frigging outrage. [laughter] well, it's not our job to do that. it's our job to tell you what's happening. >> by the way, i did a story in 2006 about, you know, where two even-handed, two people talking about whether there was going to be a housing crisis or not, the guy who said there was going to be was nouriel rah binny, the other was ed car denny. i was denounced at least in one place for having, you know, trying to cause can pbs tries to cause housing crisis. [laughter] yes, they had cardeni on, but it was clear the the presenters

favored the position of nouriel roubini. >> but are media really doing the job now, now that they're given the opportunity, because people have been so directly affected by this 1234 are we really doing the job -- not the people on this panel, but media in general, doing the job of letting people know what needs to be done, what regulations need to be put in place, all of these kinds of things that, perhaps, will prevent the next bubble. remember, we went from one to the next very quickly. you get the impression sometimes that nobody is being warned away from the next bubble. >> well, i do think there is a problem. we went through this 30-year period of increase confidence in the markets and the ability of markets to self-correct, and most of the journalists who are writing these days -- can i

mean, it's their entire professional life. it became sort of the acceptable wisdom that markets may go a little bit straight, but generally they correct themselves. and then we have this event that i believe in some fundament always calls that into question. and that may be a problem. you're asking all of us, not just journalists, but all of us to rethink the conventional wisdom of three decades. and i don't think any of us have really fully, fully come to grips with that yet. >> but beyond even that there is the concept of regulation, the issues that might be raised about taxation, about the the separateification in our economy, all of these different things that i don't get the impression that media are really addressing, and they become very easy to deflect by the the people who have the money, are making money again and all this kind of thing. >> well, you have to remember

that at the end of the day the the people who really have the podium are the people who we elect into office. that setting an agenda, creating a framework in which issues are discussed or not discussed, much of that work, i would say most of that work is done by elected officials or their apone tees. i would say that there is more agenda setting outside the political class now than there was 30 or 450 years ago precisely because of the the rise of ideological can cable channels and plett call and partisan web sites and blogs and whatever so that to some extent the language and the conversation cannot completely set by our political class. but when i came into the business and when alan came into the business, we did not think it was as he said what we were

supposed to do was he were supposed to provide information to help people understand what was going on in the world, but we weren't supposed that anybody has erected out. we would sometimes drift into that because we all think we're crusaders and we're going to make the world better, but in general there was a sort of restraint that -- and some people thought it was too much. but even today when a lot of that self-replaint hasty soofed, really the people who set the confrontation for subject matter are the people whoa elect to office. >> but don't we -- and when we're choosing them, rerye on information about them that the media should be providing and the context of their -- >> well, and, you know, probably alan has a better sense of this than i do. but, i mean, most major

newspapers still do and used to do menty of, sort of, issue stories during elections. these are long and sometimes ponderous stories. they are not all that well red. we do them because we think we ought to do them. and, again, i think when people are making this -- >> by own view of politics is, you know, there are some people who are avid conservatives and some are avid liberal, and basically they knee how they're going to vote before the candidates show up. but there's probably a middle 50-70% who are not that terribly political and who make a lot of their decisions based on gut peeling about whether they can trust the person and whether the person shares their values or whatever. and, you know, we would like to think that we live in this rational world where people sit

down and study things and become experts and then make up their minds. but herbert simon who was a well-known economist who won a pulitzer, i mean, a nobel prize a few years back which came up with this term, and he said, be satisfied. and that is we're not ration l a, but we try to make an educated guess and balance things out in a very kind of crude way. and we add to the information they get, and hopefully we add for the better, but i don't think we can think that politics is a completely or ever will be a completely rational process. >> particularly in an era where media manipulation is so easy to do. i mean, the campaign ads, the negative ads, all this type of thing. they work. >> yeah, but, i mean, policy is

itself so complex and so quickly changing in this environment that it's unfair to the suppose that there is, there are the resources except in very special places to do the kind of reporting about policy that i thought you were suggesting a few minutes ago. the -- whatever they call the stimulus bill, the american -- >> recovery -- >> yeah, the aar -- arra. the -- i mean, that thing was more than a thousand pages long, and i tried to read, you know, i read parts of it, but it's, i mean, nobody's going to pay me even the minimum wage to work as long as it's going to take for

me to totallity yeast that. -- digest that. right now i have to make a decision all the time which is, have you read that bill yet? barney's bill? >> i take the fifth. >> yeah, i mean f he hasn't read it, who the hell in america has red -- read it? >> i do think we're getting back to the business models again. there are going to be a group of people out there who really pant impartial erik good, reported, fact-checked information, and they may have to pay for it, support it in some way. and, you know, that's what we're doing, that's certainly what bloomberg does, you have groups like propubely ca which is trying to do it in a nonprofit way, raise money for people to support investive seniorism. that's the big we that is going to be solved.

how do we get them to pay for it, then how do we have a kind of hybrid model that allows some of the benefits of that to also spade out to a broader mix? and that's what we're all wrestling with. >> that's what i do, i work for this indirect kind of -- but as those of you who watch the show, it's more and more underwriting, you know, it's more and more little ads. there's a real encroachment going on at the pbs newshour with regard the this which also raises the question can it be independently endowed, for example, so it does not have to cow to semimid verytizers still called understand writers. >> and remembering and that main immediate that, by going to say mainstream, but the main media are very much, in fact, us pent bl to the -- us pent bl. they certainly have pressure to

deliver ratings and circulation, and it's sort of develops that the best way to do that is to have the bill o'reillys, the keith ownerman's -- ownerman's on the air. there's no appetite to find out why it is that people have lost their savings or their homes -- >> there's an appetite title. , the question is how broad is the appetite, and how do you turn -- i happen to love broccoli, so i don't like this -- ice cream into broccoli, how's that? [laughter] how do you do the various things that you'd need to do to appeal to a broader audience, how do you get it into the schools so that people are more receptive to it when they actually become consumers on their own and so forth. >> i would just point out the economist is doing quite well, and the economist is a magazine that is completely devoted to

information and substance. so there is an audience -- >> doing quite well with whom? >> [inaudible] >> right. >> in a way the problem was that the whole model that mass advertising is the way to sport the media is in retrospect, that's what drives you to do tiger woods and britney spears, you know, because then you need the -- it's not about the value of the information, it's ant how do you get the most eyeballs. but if you can get the conversation off of simply how do you get the most eyeballs to what kind of information can i peru that is valuable enough to somebody that they are willing to pay for it, bloomberg does that in spades, "the economist" does that, that's what we do in a different sort of way, i think that's what the news hour does. that's what it's about. but it's getting away from the tryny of the mass advertising not el.

>> in the last 16 hours the top three stories on bloomberg has e been about tiger woods. that's just a consumer, that's just the behavior. i can show you the metric there. it's all tiger. >> not on the newshour. [laughter] no, i'm not saying -- >> that's not dominating the coverage, that's not what i'm saying. that's not what i'm saying. i'm not saying that's what we're leading with, i'm saying the information that people are seeking out -- >> although is that a measurement of people who are, who subscribe to boxes, or does that include -- >> no, no, no, i'm talking about people who pay for the content content -- >> host: the most read among the terminal crowd. >> and then for free on the web. >> but certainly most popular on the rail -- >> [inaudible] so it's not -- >> yeah, but they're not paying -- >> it's everyone, it's the

consumer. >> they're not paying $20,000 to get the tiger woods information. >> no, their employer is, but -- [laughter] >> they just want to see what bloomberg has to say about tiger woods. >> we have to come up with a way to find out exactly how tiger woods created the derivatives which drove us into the ground. [laughter] >> well, you're being facetious and, of course -- i hope to god you are. but, no, in fact, the techniques of trying to figure out how you get people interested in something that they wouldn't otherwise be interested in is where you were talking 30, 40 minutes ago in which can all of us have tried always to figure out how to do and have very different check anemics for trying to do -- techniques for trying to do it. as alan was suggesting much earlier, it's always been. >> in television i used to dread it when people would say you've got a minute 30. i just got a nod and said you've

had an hour 30, and i've enjoyed this very much. thank you all very much. [applause] >> c-span thursday a look back attributes paid to u.s. and world leaders include canning the dalai lama, ted kennedy, ronald reagan, walter cronkite, colin powell and robert byrd. then new year's day a look at what's ahead for the new year. russian prime minister vladimir putin discusses his future from his annual call-in program. presidential adviser austin goolsbee on the global economy, the critter of the segway and the the coco-founder of guitar hero. plus the art of political cartooning. >> fox the news contributor michelle malkin is our guest this weekend on booktv's "in depth." the author of four books including the best-selling culture of corruption takes your calls, e-mails and tweets. three hours with michelle malkin can sunday live at noon eastern

on booktv, part of a three-day new year's weekend starting friday. >> now a house hearing on two bills aimed at improving the use and capacity of the broadcast spectrum for wireless and other services. the meeting of the commerce subcommittee on technology and the the internet is two hours, 15 minutes. >> subcommittee will come to order. this morning the subcommittee convenes a legislative hearing on two measures related to the availability of the wireless spectrum which is essential to the meeting our future needs for mobile communication can services. the movement of personal communications to mobile servicess