fact, on factory gates allegedly anyway that said no irish need apply, and so forth like that. but i will have just one confession to make, is my great grandfather whom i just spoke was, would be classified as an illegal immigrant. he originally went to canada. he was a minor by profession, and then he basically locked over the line. and got a job with the great northern railroad when they were building it from chicago to seattle. and got himself into some sort of trouble, of which it's never been specified exactly what that trouble was, but i heard he shot a man. and got on the train and went back to chicago from somewhere

in montana. so that's my -- my mothers side by the wind was a little more addition, but that's not as interesting. [laughter] >> david, wrap it up in a minute or two picked. >> my father side was a time, mother site is mission of english, scots irish, cherokee and osage. >> okay. >> so i got a multi-breed. >> on behalf of the panel and the tucson festival of books, thank you all for coming. >> this is book tvs live coverage of the tucson festival of books. up next dan balz discusses his latest book, "the battle for america 2008".

>> all right, thank you, everybody. we are very excited to be having this event here. first of all, i just want to take a moment to thank everybody who has been involved with the tucson festival of books. i think all of us who are here have seen in a very short time this festival has grown to one of the really premier book events in the country, one of the really important pieces of our arizona landscape. and one streak may have been over last week, but we have a new streak of great festival of books. so let's give everyone a great round of applause. [applause] >> we are very excited to have dan balz here today, and we are going to have a bit of a

conversation and then open it up to question. i will ask that when you do ask a question, please come to one of the microphones so that not only the people in this room can hear you, but all of the fine folks watching at home on c-span can hear you as well. and then of course after we're done here, dan is graciously agreed to sign book copies to all those who would like what. he will be at the media signing area, tend to be. i don't know if that's how they decided it. it's right outside into the right. of course, if you're watching over you can go on amazon.com as we speak and order his book, or any of your other find local bookstores. dan balz is truly the dean of national political journalists he has been running for the "washington post" in 1978. and has a master track record as someone who is not just by covering the day-to-day events of what's going on in politics,

but really providing a level of analysis and thoughtfulness that is fairly unique. he has been called by tom brokaw somebody who goes to the head of the class when the subject of presidential campaigns. in class is the right word to use with dan for many reasons. because in a field where it has its share of it goes in prima donnas, dan, so told you they, a true gentleman. so we are very lucky to have him here today. and please, join me in welcoming here's today. [applause] >> dan, yours is i think subtitle is an extraordinary campaign. its next-door neighbor as well. and it really is one that tells a story that is so thrilling, even for all of us who have lived through it over the last few just as i say you've been covering the presidential campaigns for three decades now. why was this the race you decide

to start writing her first book about a presidential campaign? >> when haynes johnson and i first got together to talk about this, he called me in early february 2007 and he said i've got an idea i want to talk you about. and we agreed we would have breakfast the next mordecai went home that night and i said to my wife nancy who is here in the audience, i said haynes call today and have a breakfast that he has an idea. and she said if it's a book idea, just say yes. [laughter] >> she knew that haynes had written 14 books and i have written one. but we sat down that morning, and it was remarkable, because he outlined in his mind the concept for the book that he thought we ought to do for the 2008 campaign. and i said to them, hand, i am two-thirds the way through a book proposal for a book that is almost identical to the book you're talking about. and chisel we both thought at

that point. that we were at a pivot point in the history of the united states. that this was going to be a very big election. we did knowhow is going to come out, we didn't know at that point who the nominees were going to be. but we do that after eight years of the bush administration and after the clinton administration, that this was a deeply unhappy country. that the war in iraq had split the country, that we were at a point in our sort of economic history with the impact of globalization was causing anxiety. we didn't know obviously at that point how bad the economy was going to become. we felt that this was likely to be a cast of characters unlike any we have seen in many elections. haynes goes back to the '50s in terms of covering presidential politics. i start in the late '70s and early '80s. we just felt that this was going to be a significant election and a potential turning point in the history of the country. and it was our feeling that it

was a campaign that no matter what happened, deserved a book at the end of a. now we know that this was a campaign that would be covered as close as he campaigned had ever been. and not just day by day or hour by hour, but literally minute by minute, given the role of the new media. but our sense was this was also a campaign worthy of the history books, and what we wanted to do was write a good narrative history of it. >> that's a really interesting point to leave on, because your book is part of a long tradition of the presidential campaign books going back to teddy white's making the president of 1960 and others, richard ben cramer. there's been a great tradition of these kinds of books. in 2006, early 2007, the "new york times" magazine wrote a piece basically saying this of john was dead. that she just couldn't write these kinds of books anymore in an area that was, as you said,

being covered excessively by 24 hour cable news or blogs that really had much more guarded candidates and campaigns. clearly, your book as you said a counterpoint to that. what were the challenges they'll of writing this kind of book that is going to be one for the history books but also one that's been written soon after the election in this kind of error of? >> is a great question. the first challenge is to find a publisher willing to buy the book. because we number of years, this genre went out of favor of publishers for exactly the reason you are suggesting, which is by the time you got to the end of a campaign, people felt they knew everything there was to know about it. and in many ways, they did know everything they really needed to know about it. and so for a while, publishers were very gun shy. i know i approached an agent in an order campaign with the idea of doing one in his you was, almost impossible, if not

impossible to sell. and so that was our first challenge. and certainly any proposal that we put together, we tried to stress for the reasons i have just outlined why we thought this was different, when we thought this was a different campaign. the challenge, once we got biking to buy the book, and incidentally, they were a fantastic publisher to deal with throughout this, but the challenge once we were sitting down to write was okay, how do you tell people a story that they think they already know? and so we did a couple of things that we think were the keys to the. one was that we did a lot of interviews for this book along the way to try to have a contemporaneous account of events so that everything we did was not simply after the fact. so because it's easy for people in the middle of a campaign, or at the end of it, to revise history. and what you wanted to do was to get people's impressions as you

going through. about the interviews i conducted with campaign people were done with the understanding that that material would not appear until the book came out. they were basically in part for the book that i was doing daily journalism for the "washington post," but the post was good enough to let me do this on that basis. the second was to pull the campaign apart at the end of it and put it back together in ways that would create or re-create a sense of suspension in a drama in which everybody does know the indian. as a part of that is with fresh mature that we were able to understand how that was in the writing process. we have had this editor on this book, jim silberman, who is on the book. and jim said he was at one point as we're putting the book together in outline form, and had ideas on aggression into this topic or integration into

this topic. he just said remember, with the story never get very far away from the narrative. the narrative will drive this book and the key people, if you do it right, will keep people engaged, even though they know how it turned out. the third thing we did was we did not want this book simply to be an inside story of the campaign. i mean, our view is while that is interesting, it's interesting to a more limited audience. and though that is part of this book, our sense was we wanted to be able to set this campaign against the backdrop of where the country was in 2007 and 2008. it's always been my view that presidential campaigns are not simply about the candidates. they are about the country at any particular moment. they are a snapshot of where we are collectively as a country. and haynes, or his career, has only been a master at drawing a portrait of where america is at any given time.

and so we wanted to build in boaters. we wanted to build in the sort of some of the broader issues. this is not an issue driven both by any means, but we wanted to bring in the context of this issue. so it was in all of those ways that we tried to take a story that everybody knew and tell it fresh. >> talk a bit about the actual physical process of writing this book. i ran into you i think in philadelphia at the last of the democratic presidential debates. which was i thinking april of 2008, and we had a brief conversation which you were saying then was you had thought that the primaries would've been over for longtime and you would've had some time in between the primaries and the general election to actually do a lot of the work in the book. and i think there were a lot of people surprised that the primaries had gone on as long. >> the two candidates. [laughter] >> including barack obama and hillary clinton. but how did he ask a process of the book work as you are doing both for data reporting and on

this, how did you stop one from column the other? and did they told each other, and how did your collaboration work with haynes johnson? >> as you suggest, our sense was given the history of past campaigns, that would have a very active opening few months in early 2007. and then it would slow to a different pace. and that we would be able to do a certain amount of book report in that period. and even perhaps some writing. and then as we got into the fall of 2007, and from there until probably late february or mid-february, we would be an intensive period of action. and then after that, beginning in march or april, we would have some months until the summer to actually begin to write the sections about the two nomination battles. how wrong we were. but in many ways how fortunate we were, because the story, the sort that there. somebody said of this campaign, that this was a marathon run at

the base of a sprint. and i think that is a great description of it, because my first outing for this campaign was in late november 2006 for the announcement of the long forgotten campaign of tom vilsack, then the outgoing governor of iowa and now the secretary of agriculture. and it did not let up until the campaign was over. we did a little bit of writing in 2008, in the summer of 2008. but not near as much as we had hoped. we got some of what is now the opening section done, but in that sense we were way behind our deadline. the collaboration was one where we simply divided of chapters, and bible on this book was sort of mr. inside to stay close to the campaigns because that was what i was doing for my day job. and haynes' job was to stay closer to the voters and some of the themes of where the voters

were and what they were thinking. and we divided up chapters, but with a book like this, you have to have one voice that you can have a book that's haynes' voice or dance of boys. and so every chapter, if it was the lead letter on a chapter, it went to haynes, and haynes would gipj

what is your day today and experience in terms of covering a presidential campaign? what is an average day, if there is one, look like for you covered these kinds of races to? there's no average day. as you know from being invalid text. everyday as a different day. there is a rhythm to it. for me, because we were in the process of at the post creating some new elements of our coverage, particularly on the web, one of the things i was doing every morning was 800 word analysis strictly for the web, are almost always strictly for the web. so my day started by waking up

and saying what in the world am i going to write about this morning? [laughter] >> and then tried to get that done by noon. this didn't matter whether i was in the d.c. or on the road. there is generally how my day started. sometimes they would start with a political event, and then it would go off and do that. but the days are a lot of trouble. -- travel. particularly labor day 2007, and so let's take a break of 2008. heavy concentration in the early states, particularly iowa and new hampshire. you basically go live in those states for weeks at a time. and in both of those states you can see a lot of candidates at once. i mean, new hampshire, political reporters love you have to because you can see five events in a day without raking is what. iowa is a little more difficult it would always have a saying that in iowa, the next event

that you want to get to is always to our summary our. the distance or three hours if there's a snowstorm. but on sundays i would write a daily story, in addition to what i was doing for the web it very often, you all know, there were dozens of debates in this cycle. and debates tend to be an organizing principle of campaigns, in particular campaign coverage. and so it almost all of the debates i would either ride the sort of the lead news story, or an analysis of that debate. i traveled with the candidates some, but we had people on the staff who were a site specifically to travel with hillary clinton, barack obama, john mccain in particular. i floated among a lot of different campaigns. once we got past the early

states, and the campaigns at that point and had their own charters, i would travel with the candidates a little bit. but not by any every day or necessary every week that i would like to go to state for the next events were. would go to both of the conventions. in the fall, the fall is a different rhythm because again, you're driven by the debate cycle that in this case, an economic collapse, and what i was always trying to do was figure out what was the right place to be on any given day or week in order to see some campaign action, or to be able to do with people at the headquarters. so there is no template for any given day, but it is, you know, it is constant travel, constant writing. and then with this to the book on the way. >> you in -- in the transition period. and he of course being a writer

himself, and a very good one, basically sing to me like he was trying to frame your book for you. and what he said was this election really is a novel. and i think this book reflects that. and as with any novel or any book it is built on characters, and we watched them grow and change as the campaign goes along. and we see them learn things about themselves at the same time we learn about them. in the book. let's talk about a three-day characters that defined this book, the first of them is one that people here in the audience know well and have watched over the years, and that's our senior senator, john mccain. talk a bit about john mccain to journey during the cycle. >> you know, the wonderful thing about this book is now president obama said, this whole campaign was a novel. and he said i don't think i'm the most interesting character in it. and then he said, you know, there was the first woman with a

serious chance of being elected in the first african-american with a series chance of being elected. and then he said an aging, anti-sob, strike aging, he said i don't want to offend jon. he said a war hero. [laughter] >> you know, this book is a series of stories that add up to a big store pick one of the really fascinating stories and in some ways overshadowed by the long battle between barack obama and hillary clinton is the story of john mccain. the rise and fall and rise of john mccain, and ultimately fall, is one of the riches stories in the history of presidential politics. he starts out this election campaign cycle as not a prohibitive front-runner for the republican nomination, but certainly the nominal front-runner for the nomination. republican party historically has, you know, had somebody in line to be the nominee.

and that person generally has become the nominee. and john mccain was that person. he filled that role at the early stage of the campaign. but this was at a point when barack was deeply unpopular. and john mccain, in our estimation, had become once again a prisoner of war. not an actual prisoner of war in the way he did in vietnam, but a prisoner of what he was on the issue of the non--- on the issue of barack at a time when the country seem to turn decisively against the policy. so he started the campaign in a difficult position. even though he had a lot of advantages for the nomination. the second thing about the beginning of the campaign for john mccain was that he had learned from bitter expense of 2000 that he could not run the same kind of campaign that he had run the first time around. john mccain is a visceral politician and he likes to run a

very clean operation, and what was billed for him with his somewhat approval was a very big structure of a campaign. because that tends to be the kind of camp instruction to go the distance. you can be a little more your for a while but you need a big structure that they built in essence a model of the bush 2004 campaign. he was never comfortable with that operation. the third thing that happened was that because they have built this big structure, it required a huge amount of money, and they had -- they had a subject of what they're going to be able to raise that were so far beyond the realm of possibility that they literally within the first weeks of the campaign found themselves in the red and having to cut back. and so the story of john mccain in the first six months of 2007 is the story of a candidate who goes from being the person that everybody thought was going to be the nominee, to a person who, by

july 2007, was given up for dead politically. his campaign hasn't put it that he has had to cut a huge amount of static his fundraising is way behind. he is still trapped by barack. and he goes to new hampshire and some asked him to reporter says is there any circumstance under which you can think that you might not actually be a candidate by the time of the new hampshire primary? and he says, typical john mccain fashion, the only thing i can think of that would keep me out of would be contracting a fatal disease. but, in fact, the next time he came to new hampshire he came with 18. he carried his own but. he flew commercial. he flew southwest airlines. he had disappeared from this thing politically. they developed than a survival strategy. to a number of his people who said, okay, one thing we want to do is -- because they all thought he was going to win. everybody thought he would win. the one thing we want to do is

let him loose with his dignity intact. and so they thought how do we preserve his candidacy long enough for that to happen. but he went to charlie black, who is a veteran political operator in d.c., been too many campaigns. and he said to charlie, tell me, is there a way that i can actually win this. charlie said yes there is. there's a way you can win it. it is very simple. become the last man standing. and they knew that for john mccain new hampshire was still a place where he had deep loyalty and strong support. and so their goal from late august in till the new hampshire primary was, focus all your energy on and you. if you can win new hampshire, you are back in again. john mccain was blessed by the opposition that was running against him. made ronnie, rudy giuliani, mike huckabee, fred thompson, all had a moment when they might have

taken control of the republican race and they couldn't do it. so you get to the new hampshire primary, and it's a john mccain's moment of resurrection. and he seals his victory essentially a couple of weeks later in south carolina. the place ironically where he had lost to george w. bush in 2000 in one of the most bitter campaign that any of us had ever covered. so john mccain is suddenly back. but he's back in a way that he is not fully prepared for the general election. they have to take what had become a very small organization, and overnight build it into something that is far more significant. and they had great difficulty doing that. and the fall campaign, was marked by two big moments. one was obviously the selection of sarah palin as his vice president. this was an event that shocked everybody. joe biden was on the airplane. they're leaving denver after the democratic convention, one of the staff comes up and says to

barack obama and biden, well, he has picked sarah palin. and joe biden says, who is sarah palin? [laughter] >> and barack obama says, i wonder why he did that? [laughter] >> to questions a lot of people were asking. [laughter] >> including a lot of people around mccain. this was a hail mary, this was a hail mary pass on john mccain's part. they felt that they needed to shake up the campaign. that if they pick a traditional kind of person, temple and the, the governor of minnesota who is on a very short list, that it would be greeted, to come with some praise but then it would disappear and wouldn't give them any less. and so they felt they had to do something out of the box. and they decide that sarah palin was a bad choice. now, if you take it from the mccain campaign's point of view, the reason they did it

was, a., they needed support along the base. two, they need to do better among women. they had the mistaken assumption that they might be able if they picked sarah palin to attract women who had supported hillary clinton who were unhappy that she had lost. this was obviously bad thinking. [laughter] >> which they learned soon after. but i think the most important reason is that sarah palin to john mccain what somebody who wasn't like him, and that she was an average. she was as a candidate in alaska should run against a sitting governor in our own primary. she had defeated the governor, frank murkowski. she had gone on to defeat somebody who had been a governor and alaska and the general election. she had run as a reformer, and mccain like that profile. it was mccain's view that if he picked sarah palin, the two of them could say we in fact are real change. we will do tough things in washington and shake up washington in a way that barack

obama and joe biden will never do. so that was, i think i'm mccain's thinking. there was no question that this was a big risk. and they knew that. i don't think they understood how big a risk it was, or how it turned out, how i'm prepared to sarah palin was for some of the rigors of the campaign. but there's a great moment which we recount in the book that sarah palin is on sarah palin is on her way to meet with john mccain on the morning that she's been asked to become his running mate. he's on the phone with the attorney shenton who headed the vice president to selection process for him. called house and conducted a long telephone interview with her the night before to complete the vetting process. and john mccain says, give me the bottom line. and she says john, high-risk, high reward. and john mccain says, you should have told me that. i've been taking risks all my life. and that was it.

now, ultimately the campaign of john mccain was sealed by the economic collapse. i think it would've been almost no way for him to have won even if the economy had not done what it had done, but nonetheless once that happened, there was no hope for him to win. >> the one person going into@@@p

more than mccain as a prohibitive favorite to win her nomination. she opted to have the best brand in democratic politics that she had a network among both financial and organizational all around the country, with one important exception, which i will get to in a minute. she had a team of people who had been together ever experienced, and part of some of whom had been involved in winning two presidential campaigns in the 1990s. the first time any democrat had done that since roosevelt. she was smart, tough, she had gone through the crucible of new york politics, which is very rigorous and all hardball all the time. particularly with the new york

tabloids. she seemed to be the ideal candidate at the right moment. and for much of 2007, she performed that way. the early debates she was extraordinarily good. she was stronger than i think a lot of people had anticipated, including some of the people around her. and by the fall of 2007, she was 30 points ahead in the "washington post" abc poll, and she was way ahead in new hampshire. she was way ahead everywhere except i will. i was the one state where there was always resistance to the hillary clinton. and there were reasons for that. . .

and so she was struggling in iowa. in late october, 2007 she has been basically the cruising through this campaign and there's a debate in philadelphia

last day of or next to the last day in october, and she gets through this most of the state though it is a debate at which everybody particularly barack obama and john edwards are coming at her part, and she carries and handles herself quite well until almost the end of the campaign when she is asked a question about something going on in new york state having to do with getting drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants, illegal immigrants, and she gives and equivocating answer that suggests that she would do the same thing. and somebody calls her on it, chris dodd and she says no, no, i didn't say that and chris dodd says wait a minute, you just said you did say that. he jumped on her, barack obama at factor, john edwards attacked her, and it was as if everything that had been suppressed about what voters thought of hillary clinton which is to say that

people thinking she will say anything to get elected, she's not authentic, do we trust her, what does she really believe, all of this had been put to the side for most of 2007. suddenly it comes to the floor and almost overnight the campaign changes and she is on the defensive in the way she hasn't been. she then loses the diyala caucus. not just loses but comes in the third. this was unimaginable to the clinton campaign. they felt they might lose iowa, they felt they would lose it to john edwards, not barack obama. they never thought she would come in third. so the campaign at that point is devastating. they have run her through the point as the inevitable candidate, the candidate of strength and experience in a year in which change is clearly the driving force. so she picks herself up and wins the hampshire, taught herself back in the campaign. but then for the next six weeks,

the campaign around her innocence disintegrates. her staff is in turmoil. her staff was a team of talented individuals who together were a dysfunctional family. and it all began to come apart after the iowa caucuses and despite the victory in new hampshire. bill clinton who in many ways was an enormous asset to his wife through this campaign has a terrible couple of weeks around the time of the south carolina primary. nobody in the clinton campaign wanted to compete in south carolina in any seriously because they thought barack obama was going to win. bill clinton insisted they do because they thought he had a chance to do better than anybody thought. he thought because of his historic relationship with the african-american community that they could rally african-american voters and bring some more to her side. the flip side is exactly what happened. he got into that race.

there was a sense on the part of some african-american leaders that he was injecting race into the campaign in a destructive way, in a way that was harmful to the candidacy of barack obama and to the democratic party. and as a result, barack obama wins a big victory in the south carolina. the next thing that happens is you go through super tuesday and part of the rest of february, 2007, and the mighty clinton campaign, the campaign of all of the experienced team, the campaign that had presumably been through all of this before fundamentally misunderstands the role of the caucasus in the democratic nomination process. they basically allowed barack obama to run away with the caucasus. and because of the way the democratic rules go for allocating delegates, barack obama is able to pilot a disproportionate share of delegates in states that have a

very small share of joxel delegates. i will give you a very quick example. the primary state, new jersey, 107 delegates, hillary clinton wins that. she beats obama pretty easily. she gets the net of 11 more delegates out of the 170 in barack obama. idaho, a caucus, 18 delegates total, obama competes hard, hillary clinton doesn't. obama next 12 more delegates than hillary. so he built an insurmountable lead primarily through the caucasus by the end of february. at that point, the campaign, i think, is effectively over. there's almost no way she can come back. but in fact, she then becomes a terrific candidate. she wins ohio, she wins the texas primary, she wins pennsylvania. she goes on, and as obama told us in the december interview he

said she became a terrific candidate and she i think still she could not have won it but she found a voice as a candidate that she had not had in the year early stages. she was no longer the inevitable candidate or the presumptive nominee or the next president of the united states. she was a fighter and she made a connection particularly with working-class voters in those big industrial states. nobody had ever won new york, california, ohio, pennsylvania and lost the democratic nomination, but hillary clinton did. but in that final stretch she was a terrific candidate and that was one of the things that resulted in her becoming secretary of state. >> i'm going to, despite myself as design your open after everybody else as well, and so if people want to start lining up at the microphone but i will come as people wind up by last year about the last of these

three people, when we can't forget, and that's barack obama, who i think we all remember the barack obama of the end of the campaign, one with thousands and thousands of people showing up at the rallies and millions of people getting on line. but i think as you remind us, that isn't how things were when they started out in this campaign, and he was starting off from scratch. tell us about his transformation. >> in your right. it's easy to think of brought the ball as a candidate to kind of appeared onstage in 2004 the democratic convention in boston and gave that speech that electrified the convention and then just kind of road that street to the white house. and in one version of the sense that is probably correct, but there are twists and turns, and i will talk briefly about that early stage. he comes into the race and early 2007. obviously as a rock star, very hot commodity in democratic politics. but as a presidential candidate, he struggled in the early

stages. i remember particularly a four orman los angeles in the spring of 2007. it was a health care for on and all the main candidates were there. john edwards was there, gave a terrific speech about health care and have a detailed plan about how to bring universal health care to the country and how he would pay for it. hillary clinton got up and she said i could talk about this for hours, and she could come and effectively gave a rousing presentation. barack obama was there. he did not have a plan. he did not have a strategy of that audience and he watched the other candidates in particular hillary clinton, and he came away thinking hillary clinton is campaigning at this level, and i am somewhere down here and if i'm going to win this nomination i've got to figure out how to become a better candidate. but the truth was he didn't know how to do that right away and he was deeply unhappy as a candidate in that i would say february, march, april, may,

june period. there's a wonderful moment robert gibbs, now the white house press secretary -- everybody in the campaign was the candidate is not happy. and it's gibbs designated duty to help him through this. so they fly to iowa to get there and he said to then senator obama look i know everything's not great, but focus on something that you feel positive about and just let everything else fall by the wayside. and obama said to him frankly there is nothing i feel positive about at this point. you know, she did not like his own message, she resented the staff sitting back in chicago giving him instructions on how to be a better candidate, he deeply missed his family, he was physically exhausted. he said there's nothing i feel good about in this campaign. well, sitting by the side is reggie love, his personal assistant, his body guide. reggie, you cover leasing him and photographs. he's about 6-foot 5 inches.

he played basketball at duke and this is his first experience in politics. he's got his blackberry and he looks up and says boss, having the time of my life. [laughter] and obama leans in and says reggie, it's no consolation. [laughter] welcome it went that way for months. there was a meeting in the summer of 2007 at the home of valerie geren, and obama said look, you know, we are of a point where if we keep going like this, we are going to finished second in iowa and second is not good enough, we've got to step up hour game. and it wasn't until late fall of 2007. particularly i think the moment where that can and really turned around was the jefferson jackson dinner in iowa in early november of 2007 where obama gave another speech which electrified and all the ends of 10,000 activists in iowa and david gypsum, then the most prominent and influential columnist and audio working for

"the des moines register" road the next morning if barack obama wins the diyala caucus is we will look back on last night as the night that he turned the campaign around, and so we remember the moments of kind of soaring rhetoric and big crowds as you say that this was a campaign that went up and down and up and down, and even in those two weeks after the republican convention when the sarah palin take in fact was working politically and the polls began to close, on the night before lehman brothers went bankrupt there was a meeting of the obama team, and obama again said we are not getting the job done at this point. we have all got to do what we are supposed to do much better than we are doing it. so even then they recognized and he recognized that soaring rhetoric alone was not going to get the job done. >> well, let's open it up to questions and start on this side over here. >> , welcome to tucson. we are glad that you and your

wife are here with you. with your rich background can you comment on the quality of candidates and@@úkñdñ0ñ1ñ#i1ñ#i

rights that he has to win the republican nomination but nonetheless no question that he had been a mayor who had changed new york. mitt romney, a very successful governor in the state of massachusetts, and also a businessman with a very sterling record and what he had done with the olympics. so this was a cast of characters. small always has been the case. you remember times when the course of candidates were disparagingly known as the six pack, little-known candidates who left no footprints. so that was one of the things that was different about this campaign. i keep this campaign will also be remembered for what barack obama's operation in particular was able to do with new media.

this was the campaign i think the first campaign which the internet truly bloomed in presidential politics. hoard team had begun to exploit, even john mcgann to the kovacic team. but the obama campaign carried too much different levels particularly in the area of social networking and what they were doing in that front creating a kind of their own version of facebook to keep people within a sense of community and to be built to keep control of it. and one of the things not well known about what they did is they not only attracted thousands and thousands of volunteers all around the country but the in power of the volunteers in ways no other campaign i know what ever did. most time campaigns used volunteers and volunteers are told what to do by staff in this case the had volunteers with the responsibility to organize other

volunteers, and i think's that ability to in a sense decentralized responsibility and still hold people accountable was something that nobody had ever done. >> sir? skype i was like a lot of people inspired by will i am singing about the hope for obama and ann jones entel they figured have two months later, and i was really unhappy when he appointed bob gates and donato was depressed when he appointed larry summers, wondering if you have any -- [laughter] gibbs you have any clue during the campaign of hope that after one year there would be so little hopeful signs from him? >> well, it's the next great story we try to look at what has happened in the year since he was elected.

we sit here and the campaign is like star wars, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. [laughter] you know, it's what was that about? i know as haynes and i have got around to talk about the book the question you ask is one of the regular questions the we get and were their clues to this. now, i would -- i would be lying if i had any sense of where we would be a year after the election. i don't think anybody foresaw what happened and it's a reminder that there's nothing linear about american politics or politics in general. you can never draw a straight line from any particular moment and project out. things happen, even in its having. people do things. but if you look at the obama campaign, always thought even going through the campaign that there was kind of an inherent

contradiction in the message of barack obama. on the one hand, there was the message of hope and change. there was the rhetoric of somebody who had the promise, made the promise and in fact seemed to embody some of the promise of being able to take american politics to a different place that after the very deep polarization that we've been through the unhappiness that people on all sides seem to feel that there might be a moment when somebody could bring the country together. and there were certainly moments in the campaign when he was doing that. if you look back in the january, did you worry, march period, there were republicans drawn to him not just democrats. but that was part of the message. the other part of the message was an agenda which clearly

tilted to the left, a very big and bold agenda ending the war in iraq, universal health care, going after climate change in a way the would probably include d. cap-and-trade provisions. all of this pushed them farther to the left and i think a lot of people saw him as a candidate, so you have a candidate that on the one hand seemed to be appealing to bring people to the center and another candidate whose agenda was going to push the country apart. and when he got in, mayor como always had a great line i love to quote come a candidate's campaign and who poetry and govern in prose and governing is a totally different animal than campaigning. we have to make traces in governing that you never have to make as a candidate. you can talk about who you are and what you are and what you believe and what you represent

the you don't have to make hard choices and the trees is to have to make as a president from the staffing of your administration to the details of your agenda are inevitably going to disappoint somebody w think there was a sense in the period from e election might until even shortly after his inauguration that there was a moment of potential for the country to come together and in fact it pulled apart very, very quickly. the obama team and the democrats have their view as to why that happened, that the republicans decided to simply say no to everything and obstruct. republicans that you talk to the

mysterious since your republicans say obama never made a genuine attempt to reach out to cost. people are going to disagree on that depending on their political point of view. but the reality is, the upshot is that this country became deeply polarized jury quickly in his administration. >> just continuing on this and will i give to questions and the first one is obama had less than four years of national experience in washington when he was elected and i don't recall any major pieces of legislation under his name where as his predecessor and lbj and clinton, you know, they held a lot of experience at compromise, dealmaking, working people who totally disagree on a lot of things. did anybody say, did any of the political -- i'm not talking about you, did anybody see it coming that somebody with that

kind of experience base was going to run into a lot of problems in its dealing from the washington top? and the second question is about presidential campaigns in general. when i was a kid in the 60's, the california primary in june, rfk being shot, it was a really dramatic things and you felt that the primary campaign really lasted and mattered, whereas now i feel that when after new hampshire or south carolina something is all over and what we do here in arizona doesn't amount to beans and is that it delivered thing by the party to make it that way or is their something to be done about? >> let me deal with first question. certainly the issue of experience was at the forefront of the questions that were thrown at obama as a candidate throughout 2007 and 2008. now they tried to answer this initially by pointing at the work that he had done as a state

legislature where he had a record of working across party lines and of being able to pass legislation. he had not done that on the national stage. he obviously had very little time to be able to show that as a senator because he was only in two years before he started to run for president. so the question of what he be able to do that was always there and certainly somebody who has come out of the legislative branch i think that is an even bigger question to ask of them and somebody who has been the governor. it's not a surprise that we have elected more often than not governors as presidents rather than electing people in the senate. governors are executives. they learn how to deal with collections. they learn how to work with a legislature. although if you look at the experience of george w. bush, he had a terrific record of working with democrats in the texas legislature and a pretty bad record in washington of trying

to work with democrats in the congress, so those questions were always there for obama. i think to some extent those questions get pushed to the side as you get into the heat of a campaign but also the process of running for a nomination and a general election is one in which you have to prove yourself in a lot of different ways and i think the question of is somebody tough enough, strong enough, ready to be president gets answered in the course of the campaign. a person who can get through that crucible of campaigning, people have a sense that they are prepared but there's nothing like being president of the united states and its nobody is ever fully prepared to do it and it's very hard to do. the second question having to deal with the process how we nominate our candidates, over the years there has been a desire on the part of the

parties to end the nomination battle earlier and earlier. the reason being if it's going to be a nasty fight for its clean it up early and reunite as quickly as we can and get plenty of time to get ready for the general election. now this campaign was an exception to the rule because of what happened in the fight between obama and clinton. this went through every primary, and i think it made barack obama a better candidate he is certainly all-out campaign to organize in every state. but when we get into 2012 you may from into the same problem. both parties are looking at ways to try to stretch it out, started leader. i think it will start later next time also to stretch it out with a feeling that you need to give voters a second look, the the opportunity for is a good look for the re-evaluation and also it is healthier if candidates have to go present themselves not just in a couple of early

states but all around the country. but the pressure to get it done quickly are enormous. >> we are almost out of time, we have two more questions i will ask both of the questioners to ask their questions very briefly and sound bite for questions and we will get a sound bite like answers from dan. >> it was a terrific book and a terrific campaign as well and i want to add to what you just described. do you have any idea of what the next campaign is going to be? you went a little bit into it but i am frankly worried because it seemed like the last campaign was a campaign on steroids. i think it's more important to govern the and to campaign and at the same time with the new media and with the way the old media handled potential candidates it seems that nobody discusses the issues any more. >> a quick question from you as well and the indian will wrap up the questions in one answer. >> thank you again for coming to

the tucson festival of books and for your book as well. it was one of the enlightening once out of this campaign. my question is about scandal and race. it seemed as if there were two or three main scandals in the 2008 campaign. with bill clinton in south carolina which was fun for me, whether it was sarah palin talking to katie couric or the reporters generally, and -- [laughter] sorry. you were all thinking it. [laughter] and the last big one on jeremiah wright and the speech on race the president obama had to give. did any of these moments change the numbers and thinking of the campaign they dealt with? in particular the reverend floyd one, after reading the audacity to win it seems as though there's been time not considering the substance of what was happening or what he was seeg