think we'll get into nice grooves. tomorrow they get the chance to go .500. we'll going back to amber standing live in the orioles clubhouse. >> probably not the outing you waned but the save in the end. >> i'm glad i got out of the way. i'm sorry for the baltimore fans that had to grind through that. it will be smoother after this. >> you get the first two strikeouts, were you feeling good after the first two? >> i had to go pitch by pitch. i lost it there navarro, the 9 9th guy. you've got to attack him. i went out and around him a little bit. it got me in trouble. whether i had two outs or two strikeouts, i've got to go back to what i was doing. you have a short memory but want to improve yourself and

get the student to show you're able to do in. one thing for sure we're going to be in these games all year. we've been playing play good baseball. >> there was a point you knew you were in trouble. you walked ayou have the mound. the players were giving you motions. did you notice that? did you pick up on that or not? >> i really didn't pick up on seeing in em. i could hear them. it's good for me. i was trying to keep it down, get it done, get out of there. it's full throttle. >> congratulations. try to make it not so exciting next time. >> i definitely will hold it down next time. >> here's a look at the orioles box. reaching base for the first time in the three game series.

jones went 0-5. nolan solo home run. mat wieters rbi score tonight. orioles won 5-4 over tampa bay rays. we'll go back to florida where amber is standing by with brian matusz. >> you knew you would have a little bit of jitters. towards the 3rd inning what happened in there? >> i came out really nervous today. it felt like the debut all over again. i was able to work well with matt today. i got out of my graph -- my groove a little bit: it threw me off completely. i'm happy with the the way i battled and was able to stick with it. i was able to grind through it

and get through the inning. in the 5th i was able to feel comfort and will relax. that's huge for me knowing i was aable to settle down and make adjustments. >> there was personal establishments you have when you realize if you get into a jam like that again you can get out of it? >> definitely. that's what i'm taking out of it. i minimized the damage for the most part. i'm really going to remember that and take the positives from today's game. >> brian matusz with his first win this season, sixth overall. opening day tomorrow. >> it's going to be interesting. look at wells, four home runs already. he's going to have to pitch around this guy. >> see you in the field. it starts here at 2:00 on masn.

shot a 68. his best run ever at the maste masters. at 50 years and 187 days young, fred couples is the second oldest to lead any round of the masters, and the oldest to own the outright lead. ye yang is one shot off the le lead. after his round was over, tiger spoke to mike tirico. >> it felt good to get on out there and get into the rhythm and the round. just kind of go about my

business. >> the reception, how much of it did you absorb ask what did you think of it? >> it was unbelievable. all day, the people, i haven't heard them cheer this loud in all my years here. so it certainly helped, it helped keep my spirits up because i was missing a bunch much of putts out there. in tough conditions like that, it helps when you get the crowd like that. >> did you hear anything negative during the day? >> absolutely not. the whole idea was not to give any shots aaway today. >> guess what, you're on the first page of the leaderboard. >> how about that. >> you surprised? >> a little bit, yeah. i mean, i would think that a couple under par would have been a good start. but granted, everybody seemed to go low today. 30-plus guys under par. the golf course, even though it was windy, it could be had tod today. >> for the round, tiger had ten pars, two birdies, three eagles and three bogies. he hit 9 of 14 fairways, 14 of

18 greens and putted 31 times over the 18 holes . >> we caught a break from the weatherman here thursday. round one of the masters. 2010 edition. we thought that rain might slow us down. it did not. we thought the wind would make scoring conditions brutally bad in the afternoon, they did not. so at the end of the day, we have 1 men under par. with andy north, i'm scott van pelt. tiger told our mike tirico, he was surprised to be where he is. are you? he's such an unbelievable talented player. he gets it done. he hit a lot of quality shots. he got off to a good start that was very positive. hit a good tee shot on the first hole. good tee shot on the third hole. nice wedge into the third and made the birdie. also needs one under par. i think that got him into the

round and under >> having said that, given the fact that he clearly brings with him a good bit of mental baggage to shoot the number he did, and to know he had putted a little better, he could have shot his all time low round here, wasn't that just a tadd surprising? >> i thought he'd have a chance to shoot under par. if he got under, that would be a good start. he's never been in the 60's before on thursday. so the fact that if he had been one under, that wouldn't have been such a horrible start. the fact is now that he's set a whole new standard. he's going to go out there and try to play some golf that will be special. >> if that's not surprising, is it not just a wee bit surprising that among the men at the top of the leaderboard, we have fred couples who is 50, tom watson who is 60? these folks were lighting this place up. you know tom watson as well as anybody. i'll ask about him first. he said he thought he was a ceremonial imofler here. but you got a little insight that the fire in the belly belies that comment?

>> tom is such a competitor. he may talk about being the ceremonial golfer. but if he gets on out there and plays well, you can click into remembering how to play this golf course. he got off to a good, solid start. he had some wonderful shots and made birdies finishing up. so i'm sure he's enjoying his dinner tonight. >> fred couples was the man you had among your three that you narrowed down this week. he's rolling on the champions tour, and rolling on the green. when he putts, he still has the length of anybody out here. is he a four-day story here potentially? >> i think he is. i truly believe he is. he has length. usually as you get older, you lose some of that length. freddy's hitting it as far as he's ever hit it. he's putting maybe better than he's ever putted. he's got more confidence. i think he's going to be there until the end. >> last quick thought. you can't mention that leaderboard and not point at phil mickelson. he comes here not with the finishes that say he's ready to win, but the history that says i

certainly can. >> he has that history, and he's played a lot of good golf. he just hasn't been consistent. so will he go out and figure out a way to play four good rounds? if he does, he'll be there in the end. >> i tell you, there are probably a lot of people who paid attention to the first round at the masters that might not normally pay attention. i have he a feeling they'll all be sticking around. you couldn't have asked for much more here at round one at augusta national. >> coming up on espnews, derek rose and the the bulls stumbling toward the final nba playoff spot. lebron james, the last regular season game ever at the igloo. how sidney crosby and the pens made it a night to remember. >> butler lost the national championship game on monday. how the bulldogs scored a big win on thursday. - at subway... - there's something... - for everyone.

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>> a half game out of the playoff spot. the bulls hosting the cavs. they gave lebron the night off. cavs concerned about their stars getting hurt. and antoine jamison gets hurt here in the fourth. had to leave the game. so no shack, no lebron, no antoine jamison. but the cavs had mo williams and went for 35 points and ten assists. cavs up one. moments later, derek rose on the drive. no good. but noah there for the tip. he had 17 points, 15 boards. under 15 seconds to play, anderson varejao gets the ball at the top of the key. not exactly where he wants it.

the history of unafraid white people slumbers unpopular forgetfulness though white slavery like black slavery most people are valid and mixed up human genes on a massive scale. the important demographic role of the various slave trades is all too often overlooked as a historical force. in the second place the term caucasian has a designation for white people originates in concept of beauty related to the white slave trade from eastern europe and whiteness remains indebted in duty found that art history and popular culture. today most americans envision ms. whiteness acid visible so ethnically divided. this is the scheme anthropologists laid down in the late 20th century by this reckoning there were only three races: delude, me go right and

caucasoid but countless ethnicities. today however biologists and geneticists not to mention literary critics no longer believe in the physical the existence of races. thank you. now you tell me if any of this remains on my forehead and those little bits of white stuff that stick to you. [laughter] it's not funny. [laughter] it's true. where was i? though they continued to recognize the power of racism, the belief that race exists and some better than others it took two centuries to reach this conclusion after countless racial schemes had spun out countless different numbers of race is even of white racists and attempt that classification produced frustration.

although science today denies race standing as objective truth and the u.s. census faces tax gnomic meltdown -- [laughter] we shall see -- many americans cling to raise as the on schooled superstition so long as racial discrimination remains a fact of life and statistics can be arranged to support racial difference, the american belief in the system will endure. but confronted with dr. lee existing american population, its distribution of wealth, power and beauty, the notion of american whiteness will continue to evolve as it has since the creation of the american republic. now, i think i will read you the whole book. [laughter] chapter 1. [laughter] greeks in civilians. were there white people in

antiquity? certainly some dustin so as the categories today could be read backwards over the millennia. people with light skin certainly existed well before the times but did anyone think they were white? or that their character related to their color? no. for neither the idea of race or the idea of white people had been invented, and people's skin color did not carry useful meeting. what mattered was where they lived. with the land to add or die? with a year or prone to impotence, hard or soft? could they be seduced by the luxuries of civilized society or were they were years through and through? what were their habits of life? rather than as white people, northern europeans were known by a tribal names, said the ins and tilts.

but if one asks, say, who were the sabaeans the question sets off on a slippery slope for overtime and especially in the earliest times in the search for the ancestors of white americans perforce fleets back to nonliterate peoples for whom no -- left no documents describing themselves thus we must shift through intellectual history which americans claim as westerners keeping in mind long before science dictated the terms of human deferments as race will be for racial scientists began to measure heads and concoct racial fury ancient greeks and romans had their own meanings of describing the peoples of their world as the inuit more than two millennia ago. and inevitably the earliest accounts of the story are told from on high by rulers dominant that particular time. for power affixes the markers of

history. furthermore attempt to trace biological ancestry quickly turns into a legend, for human beings have multiplied so rapidly by a thousand or more times and some 200 years and by more than 32,000 times and 300 years. evolutionary biologists now reckon the six to 7 billion people now living share the same small number of ancestors lived in two or 3,000 years ago. these circumstances make nonsense of anybody is pretension to find a pure racial ancestry. nor are the notions of western cultural purity any less curious. without a doubt, the sophisticated egyptian and persian society is deeply influenced by classical culture of ancient greece with some still imagine as the west pure

and a unique source. that story is still to come for the obsession with purity, racial and cultural, arose many centuries after the demise of the ancients. now i'm going to read very fast. and here we are at chapter 28. the fourth enlargement of american whiteness. agitating and media dominating as america's civil rights and black power movements were -- and those movements helped shelve the idea of what might race as opposed to several -- most of the country's white people might have doubted that the of people had much to do with them. they might have thought that they were individuals who succeeded by themselves and that

race had always meant black people who had not. in fact, by the 1960's the whole races of europe discourse had fallen completely out of fashion and the races of europe discourse, the part i read you really fast. books such as william ripley's races of europe, published in 1899 and important for a quarter of the century. books such as william ripley's races of europe once essential reading on race were now remained as useless. and if you were jewish, calling choose a race would send you a straight into the anti-semitic call on. reminders that jews and italians had been labeled as racist a generation earlier might have prompted a report that race was used word loosely in the past. this is true.

but every use of race has always been a loose with applied to black, white, yellow, brown, red or other. no consensus is ever formed on the number of human races or even on the number of white racists. criteria constantly shifted according to individual taste and political need. it was clear, however, that in the olden days, the 20th century -- [laughter] -- in the olden days, jim crow had kept the colored races apart from whites and african-americans largely hidden behind segregation failed. shortly after the end of the second world war, the end of legalized segregation began to propel black people into national visibility as never before. concurrently, other changes were soon to deeply alter american sense of the very meaning of race. little noticed at the time the

openness of the mid-1960s went beyond the black and white color line. the immigration and nationality or heart seller act of 1965 was specially crafted to counter earlier nordic minded immigration statutes especially in terms of asians. it also allowed for white immigration from the western hemisphere and africa there and lay the seeds of demographic revolution. new immigrants of the post 1965 era overwhelmingly from outside of europe were up ending american racial conventions. asians briefly rising in a number were rapidly being judged to be smarter and eventually to be richer than native-born whites. latinos form 13% of the population by 2000, edging out african-americans as the most numerous minority. the u.s. census without peer in

scoring the nation's racial makeup had begun to notice latin americans in the 1940's by counting of heterogeneous peoples with spanish surnames and hastily lumping them together as hispanics. though an and possibly kroyt measurement it survived until 1977. by that point, the federal government needed more precise racial statistics to enforce civil rights legislation. to this end, the office of management and budget issued statistical policy directives number 15. sorry, your was a change worth noting. in the racially charged decades of the early of 20th century governments at all levels had passed laws to segregate americans by race. the jim crow segregation was supposed to be separate but equal in practice it worked to

discriminate by excluding non-whites from public institutions, whether from libraries, schools, swimming pools or the ballot box. the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 began to change all that so that by the late 20th century the rationale for counting people by race had more often to the means of keeping track of civil rights enforcement. statistical policy directive number 15 set the terms for racial and ethnic classification throughout american society by directing federal agencies including the u.s. census to collect data according to the four races, black, white, american indian, alaska natives and asian pacific islander. hawaii and was added later as a concession to protests. and when ethnic category,

hispanico latino, which is not racial. elaboration was good for civil rights but it opened the way to chaos. under these guidelines the hispanic la t-note classification portended the enormous turmoil. now that there was a non-hispanic white category, did there not also exist hispanic white people? yes, no, and other. faced with a given choices on the census of 2000, 42.2% of latinos checked some other race rather than black or white, from nearly 6% of americans into a kind of racial the boat. in addition, the u.s. census of 2000 had to increase a deeper and more personal recognition of multiracial identities. for the first time respondents were allowed to describe

themselves as belonging to one or more of 15 at racial identities. as so often in the past adding confusion, the list of reasons included nationalities. this expansion now allowed for 126 ethanol racial groups or for the purest 63 races. it did not take much analytical ability to see that any notion of race lisieux diluted as to its punch and taxonomy was rapidly buckling much further under the weight of interracial sex. nothing new here. americans disorderly sexual habits have always overflowed into neat lines and driven race thinkers crazy. asians and native american

indians had the highest rate of interracial marriage but others including african-americans now often married and had children with people from outside of their racial and ethnic group. by 1990 american families were so heterogeneous that one seventh of whites, one-third of blacks, four fifths of asians and 1920 deaths of native american indians were closely related to someone of a different racial group. that was in 1990. with 12% of young people calling themselves multiracial it is expected that by 201510% of whites and blacks and more than 50% of latinos, asians and indians will be married to someone outside of their racial group. by 2015 the whole thing may have collapsed. with so many non-white and white americans marrying willy-nilly, the barriers between the progeny of european immigrants have

largely disappeared among white people three out of four marriages had already crossed ethnic boundaries by 1980. a generation later few white americans had for grandparents from the same country. william ripley had predicted the southcom and my team await a hearing about all the inharmonious mixing of frattali and minn and onerous schwinden. [laughter] but he now has been forced to reconsider his prediction that such a racial mix would make americans hockley. [laughter] we've already seen the lower starting in the 1940's when ethnic began replacing race as applied to the descendants of european immigrants the use of

racial groups for white people has become a category partly because white people are so mixed up. finally the prerequisites of me your whiteness account for less in the present situation while the stigma of blackness just one drop suffice to curse the white looking individual also seems less mortal. back in the 20th century white people were soon to be rich or at least middle class as well as more beautiful, powerf and smart. george bush did away with that. [laughter] sorry. that is not in the book. [laughter] to flee to. as citizens and scholars the said what needed to be known and monopolize the study of other people with themselves hardly being marked or scrutinized in return.

think of frances walker and william ripley for him foral cod authority. half a century later the of people with the civil rights era turned the looking glass are bound bringing white people under scrutiny. think of malcolm x and james bald when. today the attractive qualities that saxons, anglo-saxons were whites were soon to monopolize oral soon to be found elsewhere. after a string of small white mrs. america, jennifer lopez and beyonce knowles are submitted as duties, tiger woods and the williams sisters, venus and serena, a sports, the founder of bet, bill cosby and flecha jr have made millions, oprah

winfrey is rich and famous, call one perlo and condoleezza rice have been secretaries and alberto gonzales attorney general. even more to the point of uniting power and beauty, barack obama is president at the united states. first leedy michelle obama whose skin color alone would have contended her ugliness in the 20th century figures as an icon of beauty and intelligence of global stage. none of these individuals is white but being white these days is not what it used to be. [laughter] thus it is sensible to conclude that the american is undergoing a fourth grade enlargement. although race may seem overweening without legal recognition it is less important than in the past. the darkest skin who also happen to be rich, say people from south asia or african-american

or have a hispanic background and the light of skin from anywhere or beautiful are now all the way to inclusion. in america? is this the end of race in america? >> no. >> i think we need democracy here. [laughter] let's take a vote. if you think yes put your hand up. two of you? three. if you think no, put your hand up. fisa noes have it. >> demand a voice vote. [laughter] >> recount, yes. okay. we have had our vote. and we will sign it tomorrow.

[laughter] at the turn of the 21st century it was starting to look that way, back in 2000. remember that, in the 90's? urged the american government to phase out the use of race as a beta category and substitutes' ethnic categories instead. geneticists studying dna, the constituent material of genes that issues instructions to the bodies and response to the surroundings were concluding that race as a biological category made no sense. that of relating human heredity to the environment may be traced back to antiquity but early 19th century racial thinkers turn the notion of around deeming of race a permanent marker for in eight superiority or inferiority not

until the 1850's did the influence of the environment on heredity get rescued with charles darwin on the origin of species. darden described a world older than the biblical 5,000 years reasoning that her read it he was not fixed the generation after generation living things changed and response to their surroundings. arguments over race and human genome subside of late leaving us with data about personal appearance. prevailing racial schemes now rest once again on a concept of skin color hands black and white people. but widely recognizes the fact that not only are black people actually very dee dee to various shades of brown and yellow but so too are white people merely somewhat lighter and often with a lot more pink or if they've been in the son of a lot more

red. [laughter] hence the red scare. as plowman box realize the 18th-century one groups skin color shades gradually into another there are no clearly demarcated lines. some people who identify as black and have lighter skinned than others to identify as white. siblings with the same mother and father can display a range of skin colors. race may be all about pigment but what makes people's skin light or dark? skin color is a by-product of two kinds of melanin, red to yellow, and dark brown to black it reaction to some light and several genes interact to make people write or -- lite order, red or yellow. ancient scholars were wiser than the new when they relate to the skin color to climate. today's biologists concur.

sunny climates do make people dark skinned in the dark cold climates make people light skinned. how much of the melon and people have in their skin and to what degree it is expressed depends entirely overtime on exposure to the sun's ultraviolet or uv radiation. melanin both protect against excessive the ultraviolet radiation and allows sufficient uv radiation to enter the body. too much radiation causes skin cancer and leads to death but uv radiation is crucial for developing fetuses and strong bones. so where are we now? mapping the human genome elicited initial proclamations of human tenderness across the globe. then restocked and spread racial differences on our genes. that talk has not disappeared. but ideally we would realize

human beings short history relates us all to one another. to speak in racial terms, incessant human migration has made us all of the racial. does this mean the human genome or civil rights are desegregation have ended the tyranny of race in america? almost certainly not. the fundamental black/white by an area in doors even though the category of lightness or we might say more precisely category of non-blackness' effectively expands. as before, the black poor remain outside of the concept of the american as a race of degenerate families and i should explain that i have discussions of the concept of alien races which was applied to immigrants and their children from eastern and southern europe and degenerate families were the poor white

families swedish for involuntary sterilization. a multi-cultural middle class may diversify the suburbs and college campuses but the face of poor segregated in their cities remains black. for some time now many observers have held monday and interracial sex would solve the race problem and indeed in some cases they have. nonetheless, poverty in the dark skin indoors the opposite of might miss driven by an age-old social yearning to characterize the poor as permanently other and inherently inferior. thank you. [applause] >> we have about 20 minutes for questions if you can get to the microphone.

me the race go to the swiftest. here we have a race. yes, sir. >> i have a sort of political question. >> no, please. please just ask a question. [laughter] >> sorry. i am trying to gather the intended goal or purpose of your book like what you would like to happen if also called white people ran in the premise because when i read works like the encyclopedia of western colonialism it talks about and i quote the colonial west position of nearly all of american, australian, 99% of polynesia, 99% of africa nearly 50% of asia or when you read the book we have here in the store who owns the world that one talks about the largest landowner in the world presently as queen

elizabeth. who just happens to be white. both of these books still state the people classified themselves as white still own the land that wasn't originally there's, still own the resources that were not originally theirs. so with your book are the just to apologize and give the land and resources back to the right for owners because now they understand they were tricked into white mess or is this work more of just a play on semantics of the overall world power dynamics will not change -- >> are these choices? >> yes. >> what is the intended goal or helpful goal of your book? >> i don't think i can win here. [laughter] if these are the only choice is i'm going to have to check other. my book is the work of a

historian, not someone who is making policy. >> [inaudible] >> not an advocate? well, i don't know. that is a hard one, too but let me say that my goal is not to change the world. so, what i would like people to know from reading my book is that whiteness is a concept, it is not something biological and permanent and inherent intrinsic and it has ideas that have changed over time that whiteness has a history. >> i would like to know in with your research and found any evidence that this crossing of the racial barriers that were experiencing is leading to

better families that if the people have -- >> another hard question. >> but if people have more choice they can choose better perhapading out tiger woods. [laughter] he is just one person. but i was wondering if, you know, having more leeway to choose as producing better parents and better families as a result. >> that is another hard question maybe even another trick question. and once again i going to appeal to this intelligent beautiful audience. we are going to take another vote. i think you all heard the question whether or not more choices produce better families. is that a fair paraphrasing of your question? everybody understand?

okay. does more choice -- you can reach out and marry or have sex with more people these days, right? >> does that make it better? wait, wait, i didn't ask you for an essay, i just want a yes or no. seóul deaths is more choice makes it better, no is more choice doesn't necessarily make it better. are you ready? this is still yes or no. yes more choice mix better families. okay. no it doesn't necessarily. well this time it's closer. i think the noes still have its and i did they are going to say as i heard other people say it makes a difference. it makes it different?

okay. >> my questions or it difficult, ey are simple. this week we are filling out the census forms and so looking on that it seems to me that the groups are identified generally by geographic locations except for one which implies there's only one the skin color that is really important and that is why, so why isn't there an effort to not use that on the census? >> you can be black african american negro, to have a lot of choices in that line but it does include black. >> the other thing that i think confuses the use ofaucasi which i don't know if people -- sprick i don't know if the connotation is in the census now. >> in society in general. how many people with those various shades of light were from the caucasus mountains

ever? >> zero. >> that was easy. the other part i cannot answer but i can say every ten years since the categories adjust to take account of what the federal government thinks it needs to count up. so it started in 1790 and there is a picture in my book of the first census categories and there was only one race listed which is quite and it was i think in five different permutations and then there were people who at that point were of various races. and then in the middle of the 19th century the census added malabo i think only for one sense this. and then in thearly 20t century for white people they

broke white people down into native and foreign born and you have even grandparents grew up over time and if you make a move made maybe you can get pink, gray, brown, you can get some more variety. >> a quick statement and then question. really quick which is just i had the good fortune of a long friendship with jordan and all through the talk i thought how excited he would have been to hear this talk so just to see that as a historian to historian. my question is i take my census form last week and wrote across it come on, guy is, you know race is a social construct but then i kicked white because they know they have to count these things and figure this out so the question is how did you do yours and why?

>> my name is pretty straightforward. i take to black. my husband and picked white because as far as we know he is. [laughter] but something interesting has been happening. my book came out on the 15th of this month and i've been talking to people and i hear permutations of this question over and over again and sometimes people are upset but i only hear that from people who are upset over the white box because they know that is the one the census or somebody, the black helicopters or something wants them to check and they are not comfortable with it and i fink, i guess what's happening is in the 21st century white people are more and more becoming aware of themselves as having a race in addition to being individuals and now seeing

how awkward of the fate, of a category meant to include millions and millions of people really can be so we are facing a kind of white dilemma that the is going to be interesting >> hello and thank you for coming. we had last year when they have the television show twice black and america will they ever make up the same white in america? and if they do i hope they are when they come salt. my next question was would you agree or maybe not the question would you agree but i felt as i watched the term will take place in this country over the past year it almost looked like an addict like racism was like an

addiction the need for the country to hold on to that separation is like an addict needing to hold onto something and then the denial of this addiction and the destruction of those on themselves how do you feel about that? >> i haven't thought of it that way but that is a really interesting and insightful way of talking about it. anthropologists have spoken of people addicted to race as people who believe in witchcraft and that you can never disapproving. if you point to somebody you disproved their analysis of something based on race than they have a way of getting around it and holding on to r belief. but i think this has been going on for longer than just the last year. and my last book creating black americans has a chapter on rap music and pop culture which is

35-years-old now, speaking of things that have history, and a good bit of the in society that comes out is trying to get black people back in the box. and a lot of black comedy is based on that. this is what black people are and what black people do and it is a kind fabricated unitary image which i think is the kind of showing the kind of a society that you picked up in the culture at large. so opposed segregation i think americans generally are trying to figure out who we are according to our traditional basis and the new basis is so much more about class because we are living in a country with the most profound inequalities of

income and wealth i think just about in our history. certainly in the post slavery history. in the slavery south the disparities were antonette. but since that time we have reached a very few people who are very rich and increasing numbers of people who are increasingly black and brown who are just scraping by. yes. >> we are going to take the last two ever is in line four or five. >> thank you for coming. my question is to give context i grew up in d.c. and went to a multiracial public school and then went to college and was very progressive and much wider and they're seemed to be almost a preoccupation among the student body about i guess the concept of white privilege to be

sensitive about white privilege but almost to the point it becomes full circle and we were taught as part of the sensitivity training when we were teaching the city schools that science can from white men and that was like one student trying to work through that and train the students but this kind of preoccupation and self consciousness i found really interesting because i wasn't used to it and i guess i'm wondering what historical what was -- is the appeal and the attraction of this category that kind of has no actual categorical basis? >> it has a teeny weeny basis and i assume that is your question, write? >> what the appeal is. >> of the appeal is your people, whoever they are assuming that you, let's just make you william

ripley for the moment, you are well-educated, knowing linder, a wealthy background, harvard and yale columbia, mit and so forth have a way of explaining why you are beautiful and nice and they are ugly and poor it sorts out the world. >> i heard you mention in the fact that was a white slavery back in europe a long time ago. >> not just a long time ago, slavery exists in our world. >> and this white slavery the words suave and sleep, they are surprisingly similar. >> they are not surprisingly similar, they are related. >> there were sharp differences between groups of people in

europe but now you go to the census for them and see one box for white. >> it depends every country does it differently and in france they do not collect by race but are thinking about it. >> i'm talking about america. the census block we have one box whit is ifou go back in the beginning of 20th century people coming to ellis island would say europe is bombing and you have all these other undesirable on the rule the folks coming my question is given now you said just one box for white may be in a hundred years we are not going to see a box for race in the census form. what do you think? >> i think that is possible because people are so mixed up and we are having our little revolt about checking the white box certainly so the largest immigrant group now is latinos and they are supposedly more latinos and african-americans

and latinos can be of any race. there are also large numbers of african descent into immigrants who don't necessarily associate themselves with african-americans native african americans who they see as lazy and inferior. so the whole thing is getting mixed up. something like only 46% of current immigrants i think this is like 2008 identify themselves as white whereas 78 -- 76 to 80% of americans identified themselves as white, so why to is getting to be less popular. we will see. thank you. >> the last three questions here. >> a couple of things. you began by talking about

greeks, they were slave owners, romans were slave owners. -- >> not all of them, just that to talk -- tippy top. >> they were made into slaves. >> yes, yes. >> then we c to this country and to have capitalism at work in terms of southern plantations meeting later to sell cotton to england -- >> i'm going to correct you a little bit because the whole plantation system started with sugar. that is a big difference, and it started before capitalism got going. >> okay call it commerce. >> you can call it commerce which is different. >> but they brought blacks over to be bought and sold and work in these places. the majority were black. >> finally, yes.

>> and was a big circle of trade. >> trying to work. >> of the ships came from the north -- >> what is your question, sir? >> my question is if you look at the basis of race and set aside the american experiment -- >> set aside the american experiment? [laughter] >> -- set aside the american experiment by the be needed, as it is not endemic. >> i can't go with you on your "if" because -- the question is -- what is the question? [laughter] i disagree. what is the question? >> my question is when you deal with race you have to look at where it proliferates and the reasons why and in every part of the world it's different say you can't just generalize it by using the american experience.

>> i certainly can. i'm talking about the united states. >> well i'm not. you've got to look elsewhere. >> okay. we will leave that book to you. [laughter] >> hello. it is very interesting that this gentleman more or less mentioned what i wanted to say, but however, i'm going to start with the history of white people. i was expecting more universal type of situation, and i do realize with here the people and you are the author that we are back to the same subject black and white in the united states. it just happens i do come from another country and you mentioned france. few actually six or seven months ago i was asked what is your

race because i was feeling a question by the phone from the washington hospital, and the man was the questionnaire and he said collocation of course and i said yes, caucasian. then i said so, no, black. [laughter] and he said black? and i said yes because i am a descendant of lucey most likely so i am black. [laughter] >> definitely. so what i want to say to you is please, give us a book next time which gives us a pursuit of the universal black and white world. thank you. >> [speaking in french

] >> i used to live in the u.k. and if you want to talk about how categorization gets taken to the extreme for a number of people and that is people of color, so if you are black, you have a basically whole laundry list are you black africans, black caribbean, black mix? if you're black mix who are you mixed with? [laughter] than black other which i fit in because i was american, a black american living there. but when he looked at the english white is basically just one category and the question is what will it take and when will it become desirable for white people to actually describe themselves to the same degree other races, quote races, are

asked to describe themselves or is there this year there would be loss of power because once i heard and i would like your comment is that if there were of any white people and all they came to america and that is when all of the italians, english etc united, and is there a fear, loss of power -- >> okay. i understand now i think. i think that the fear of loss of power is already under foot or in the air or whatever without tampering any further with the categories. hind the powerful, the power arrangements. so for instance, as nations become richer, they will also become more beautiful. and as we get all mixed up, the taxonomy will have to somehow catch up to us.

one thing that american historians have found a frustrating over the years is that we have a lot of trouble classifying people according to wealth and income. which i think would be a much more useful way of dealing with the equities of t

>> coming up next, the tv presents "after words," an hour-long program will reinvent guest hosts to interview authors. this week, former assistant education secretary diane ravitch discusses her new book "the death and life of the great american school system". initially examines the current practices in american school system and what she believes is

too great a reliance on standardized testing. new york university education professor says the schools need to adhere to a curriculum and rely less on test scores at or with knowledge. ms. ravitch shares her observations of education reporter valerie strauss at the "washington post." >> host: hi, diane. really great to be here with you today. i'm excited to have a good conversation about a book that i hankins really unusual and in the library of education books that i could mention every day. this book is kind of a combination of memoir policy data that i inc. conclusively shows how we failed in education reform. and what i'd like to do is really haven't talked about it.

for people who don't know you, when we talk a little bit about your background. you are the leading education historian i think in the country. you have been for many years. you've been in education for 40 years i understand. you're a professor at new york university and you were the first administration -- the first bush administration. >> guest: george wh bush. >> host: tell us what you did. >> guest: is the assistant secretary for education research and improvement. and what made it attractive to me as i was coached by lamar alexander and he said we want to do something about academic standards. and i was here. passionately things like english and literature and history and geography so the whole range of liberal arts and sciences. i felt we could really get the conversation going in this country about improving what kids learn.

this would be very important. so i was in d.c. on the government for all the years. >> host: now, we don't have a lot of time and there's lots to talk about in the book. so what i'd like you to tell us a little bit is what part did you do start writing the book. when did you set out to do this? >> guest: well, i guess it was about three years ago i realized it was really changing a lot of the views that i have had over the past after the bush administration. i have been advocating for the standards and testing and accountability and for choice and charter schools. and occasionally for vouchers, though i'm not a huge cheerleader for vouchers. but i did sir think it will maybe this a way to improve our schools and show all children have access to high-quality education. my question is always how do we get the education rockets were getting what i would want for

children which was access to foreign language, history, literature, finance and soap were. and it seems to me these might be the means to that end. when president george w. bush announced no child left behind, he got overwhelming support from democratic and republicans alike. and i went to the announcement said that she'd maybe this is a great thing because now kids look at the basic skills and they'll be neither able to study these other things. as more and more evidence accumulated the past two years, i began seeing this as a working. so i began particularly i guess it was actually dated 2006 when i went to a conference in washington, where a group of conservative scholars got together to say in effect no child left behind is not working. now its remedies and sanctions were we not see an improvement. the test scores are really going up at a miniscule rate in some cases they're not going up at all.

and then the national scores came on in 2007. i realized they're right. were not seen any improvement. so i began writing in 2007 say no child left behind is a failure and i began at the development of the charter movement and realizing that the charter movement i was taken off like gangbusters. there are now 5000 charter schools across the state and something like 1.5 million children in charter schools. in the village across the border began looking to research and seeing that the charter schools, some of them are wonderful, excellent, excellent charter schools out there no question about it. some of them are terrible and i think anyone who denies that art going to have to look around. any evaluation may seem that the says there's broad range. and then i discovered on the whole that charter schools don't do any better than the regular public schools on average. you know, given his very wide variation in quality. and so, i guess it struck me

other things i've been advocating and later brought in that it was important for me because otherwise i'm afraid we'll lose something that has been very pressured in this country, which is our commitment to a democratic public education system and method of working harder to do the things that might make it better for on courses that might even make it worse. >> host: it's unusual for anybody in public life to admit that they were saffron. and so that's one of them as they think makes the book particularly interesting and revelatory. i'm curious, what is then the reaction to your former allies in the education movement. you are aligned with conservatives are many years in their approach, looking at the business outlook for schools versus specific model. so i'm interested in and what happened. >> guest: well, i've been very involved with conservative organizations and pretty much resigned from all of them because i felt like i didn't

belong there anymore. i was the founding mother of the correct passports at the hoover detention and a great respect for all those people associated with it. i would never criticize any of them because they think they're doing what they think is right and i disagree with them and they know i disagree with them because the last year i was involved at the hoover institution's activity i disagreed very openly and ended up in a debate with john chubb, one of the leading advocate of an emi have a published debate about no child left behind for he basically said monday, don't end it and i said and did, don't mend it. and i will always be -- i hope very close friends with checker fan, was the head of the ford foundation and checker and the ford foundation began -- we began our friendship around the advocacy or improvement and kids access to high-quality education. check are increasingly became attracted to choices, as a solution about these issues.

and so, we in effect parted ways in terms of our views about that, but were still very close friends. >> host: let's talk about the book. let's go -- it's very well organized. it takes you from accountability, to charters, to testing. in the first chapter basically is about and clb. what happened? how did it go wrong? and before we start, but he gave you a chance to stock down something that i hear is you were an architect along with george miller and ted kennedy and diane ravitch camera iiib put this this together. such is not right. >> guest: well that's just ridiculous. it was put together by george w. bush, margaret spelling, george miller who's the leading democrat in the house representative, senator kennedy and their staff. i was never part of this discussion. but you know, so what.

i supported it. but it continues to strive to daily summit congress because although senator kennedy is gone, the democrats, george miller and the house and others both in house and then it, continue to believe in the accountability. unfortunately, accountability has become a center for punishment and the attitude towards our schools is that kids aren't learning, somebody has to be punished. and right now it the teachers who have to be punished. and i take great exception to this because i feel it is so contrary to the very nature of education that you cannot resolve a problem by cutting someone's head off. i mean, if teachers are terrible teachers they shouldn't be there. but to say you're going to close down the scale or fire up the teachers just flies in the face of any kind of common sense of how you evaluate individuals and individuals should be on the for sure, but not in that regard anyway that is an issue of accountability. >> host: one of the things

they think are booked as well as use data, which is i think one of the big things that no child left behind as it likes to do. let's use the data. you actually use data well to make your case. the idea of closing schools doesn't actually work, even though our new secretary of education, arne duncan keeps promoting it. it hasn't been shown to work, is that right? >> guest: it hasn't been. the truth is there a system going up that somebody has a formula somewhere to transform schools were some unhealthy or millet to open new schools. and there is no such formulae. there is a new project i were several states have gotten together and they have given the millions of dollars and they're going to first of all threatened schools with low scores if they don't get their schools that they'll be punished, they will be closed and this is supposed to make everybody said you have to and begin teaching the kids and getting the scores at. they actually don't how to

change the school culture. they don't have to turn the school around and there are no models out there. i mean, you will find many anecdotes about schools that were improved traumatically, but it does not get to a model. the model does make this. >> host: exactly. i want to actually read a quote from your book which i think it's really important for people to know. you write, reformers imagined that it is easy to create a successful school, but it is not. they imagine the lessons of the suspects all school are obvious and can be easily transferred to other schools just as one might take an industrial process or any piece of machinery and install it in a new plant without error. but a school is successful for many reasons, including the personalities of its leader in teachers, the social interactions among them, the culture of the school, the students and their families, the way the school implements policies and programs dictated by the district, the state in the federal government on the quality of the schools curriculum and instruction, the

resources of the school and the community and many other factors. when a school is successful, it is hard to know which vector was most important or if it was a combination of factors. that's exactly right. the problem is that too many people in school reform think that there is some quick fix, some model. >> guest: well, this is one of the big points in my book is that there is and for many, many years, for generations really that someone somewhere has a magic formula, that the typical expression is there no silver bullet. there is no magic feather, there is no way you're going to transform a school or education is an arduous process that takes time and there's not going to be anything that can be done overnight. whatever time it is successful is going to take years to bear fruit, even when the current competition is as far as the teachers. what we have 4 million teachers ever take a few hundred thousand. and if the intent is to fire

some every year, it will still be many, many years before you'll see the change and you may or may not be getting better people into the teaching corps. that doesn't mean he shouldn't fire bad teachers. of course he should fire bad teachers, but this is not a way to improve our schools. >> host: what are the chapters in this bk tells an extraordinary story would have been in san diego. i'd like you to tell us about that because as you say it was unprecedented in school reef worm. but i think that it shows all the elements of what can go wrong in school reform and what has gone wrong everywhere. tell us about that. >> guest: well you know, in the good of the book i explain about how many people fastened on the story in the district of new york city is saying here's the district with a really solve the problem, close the achievement gap, always great things happen. and so i showed their affection wonderful leaders there, happens to be the most affluent district in all of new york city and it's got a population that's not reflective of the city.

it's overwhelmingly white nation district in the city in a school system that is overwhelmingly blocked as hispanics. nonetheless, when san diego collected a very brilliant lawyer named alan berson. alan berson here but district to an imported the leader of district to to come to san diego and to say make everybody to this, coerce them. there is no time. we have to get to immediately. we just want to make it happen. and it was easy to document this because he said this again and again and my interview about the teachers and principals, some of whom i'd been hired and promoted during the administration other than the one that inspired a to melt all the who lost all economy, all ability to participate in the decision-making because the district model was there is only right and as far away and do it and it was tremendous

demoralization and many teachers left the school district here and after several years the results were no better than in other districts that are not coerce teachers. in fact, since the teachers have better results. but in a nutshell, i would say my lesson that i draw from this is you cannot impose on teachers things that teachers either can't do or want to because they're the ones left to do the work. and if the people left to do the work won't do it, it's not going to get done. and if it's sunday will be be done poorly. >> host: that's one of the lessons i wish new superintendents would learn that they think they can come in and dictate what they want from the top down. they forget that it just doesn't work day. bureaucracy starts to game. you get nowhere. you leave, someone else comes and you try to do the same thing and get this continuing cycle of failure in all these districts. one of the things you mention that i found a really telling in this chapter was when you call kaiser permanente and spoke to a

representative about teachers coming in. just a little bit about that. >> guest: well, as i was interviewing teachers i kept hearing this complaint that there was a lot of illnesses come a lot of stress, people felt that, you know, they had to be this way and not that way and when the supervisors came in and the facilitators and group leaders came and they were watching the teachers and writing them up all the time, constantly demanding conformity, conformity, come for many. there were many complaints about minimal stress. and i checked with a major health provider for the community i would have it verified and i didn't backtrack down the person with the data he said yes and he, there were hundreds of teachers calling with mental stress issues during that period. and when the new superintendent came and all the complaints that because the new superintendent was a respected educator who had a long record of understanding how teachers work, the necessity of trust on the collaboration.

this is the nature of education. people don't go into education should be tough on kids. they go into education to help kids. people who become teachers because they want to see children learn and grow and develop and become healthy and thinking human beings. and then when someone comes into the contest, you're not doing anything right, do it my way or you're out of here, it creates a very stressful situation. and so i think that leadership ought to consist of respecting the work of people who have to do the work. that's kind of a starting point. >> host: how did we get here? you know the history of american education better than anybody. when did it turn to become the province of economies and statisticians and people who believe in taking business models and putting them into schools. when does this happen? >> guest: jeanneau, with a long history be not happy with our schools good and it didn't really start with a nation at

risk. but the famous report from 1980 through was issued during the reagan administration. if i were to look back over it could be heard to find a decade where americans were not complaining about this. so this is like a long, you know, repetitive story that we want our schools to battle. they're not good enough. the schools i'm as good as they used to be. but a think as we have widening inequality, as we have more effort -- more immigration, more diversity, the pressure within the schools to make everybody proficient or advanced with no child left behind in particular, the goal was 100% proficiency. nclb, no child left behind was passed by congress in 2001, signed into law by president bush in january 2002. and it was a response to this perception that american education was falling behind. i've been a critic of american education for many, many years and i think we should do better. i've tried to put forth lots of

reasons and arguments about how good it could be better. i think the main thing we really need just another bill curriculum, which most schools don't have good been the essence of of any real curriculum in the absence of any division about what a good education is and how it should have said, you know, the arts in history and geography and all those good things, all week i was testing. and so no child left behind became a substitute for actually looking at what kids were learning and replacing, you know, the definition of good education without that more tests. if we test, test and test, then we'll expose the achievement gap. we'll post low performance and things will get better. what we've done is we've clearly expose the achievement gap that was clearly exposed low performance, but things are not better. and what we've created is this monstrous testing regime under no child left behind, where schools were told if you don't 100% of your children proficient

by the year 2014, you're going to be closed down. so the last figures i saw from the government, which were 2008, shows that 35,000 public pools or the 30, 35,000, somewhere in the range of about a third of our schools have been notified that under the federal rules they were feeling schools. now as we get closer to 2014, as long as the lot is on the book, the numbers got to go out because the schools are not going to reach 100%. their very first 100% of them as more and more, as the bar goes up, more and more schools fall into that feeling category of the prescriptions, the remedies written into no child left behind or the rules will be turned into the charter schools that such rules can be privatized, the schools can be closed. the whole staff of the school can be fired. and these are very trichotomy and penalties because schools are unable to reach a utopian goal. no school but i know of, maybe there's an individual school summer where every child is proficient. but it's a rare school were 100%

of the children are proficient. and if it is 100% proficient is because probably they have a dumbed down standard of proficiency. there's certainly no safeword 100% are proficient. >> host: that's what a lot of the states to do when they realize they can reach the goals they had initially let they started to dumb down -- and they still can't even meet the requirement. from what i understand, they knew back then that 2014 was illusory, there was no way they're ever going to reach it. >> guest: you know, in which republican rented 2002 after legislation was signed in as a panel of senators talking about the 100 passes landmark legislation. and i stood up and said he really believed that 100% of children with every kind of backroom and disability will be proficient by the year 2014? and a senator who answered me, what about experience in the

sirius said, no we don't believe that we think it's good to cycles. well, that means that you are punishing schools or goals you know aren't even possible. and you could almost say that the timetable for demolishing public education in the united states. >> host: what is your standing unshared understanding of abolishing no child left behind. it was thought they would've to have that share common out there was some thought of them doing it this year. i don't think they're in the political situation that hoped they'd be. wherever you that? >> guest: i would say during the campaign that educators overwhelmingly support to president obama, believing he really would change no child left behind. and he did say something that i were going to get away from the sound down multiple choice test. and so, i think people are very hopeful. unfortunately, it seems to me that president obama and secretary duncan are actually doubling down on no child left behind in making its requirements even more onerous.

this completely bought into the myth of accountability and also to the importance of privatizing as many schools as possible. they put out $5 billion in competition, which they call the race to the top, offering this to the states if they would compete to see who could get this money. and the way to get the money was to do one of several things. one was to remove all limitations on privately managed schools, charter schools, which is a form of privatization no matter what anyone calls it, it's privatization because public schools and public fans are handed over to private organizations, many which have little turns. the about where the money is going. in some of the leaders of the charter organizations pay themselves 400,000, $500,000 a year, which would never be tolerated in the public service. the second requirement the obama administration has allowed as a teacher should be evaluated based on their students test scores, which is a really i think a very bad idea because it just means the pressure to teach

to the test and admittedly secretary duncan has said these are bad tats, dump down tests and teachers will be evaluated based on the scores. this approach also ignores the fact that student scores are affected by many things. it's not just whether the teacher is not affected. that's one factor certainly. but student scores are affected by did the student tried, student motivation, soon after. that matters. to the family support the student, were they engaged? to the doctor met during times, encourage them to do their homework, you put your telephone, video games? family support is very important. community support is important. they could even be in terms of testing distraction on testing day. maybe students were sick, maybe there is a dog park in the parking lot. they're all kinds of reasons why it student scores offer down. probably related to teacher

effectiveness, but the many other factors that it's very unfair to say that the teacher will be judged by that is anything other than a small part of the whole of valuation portfolio. >> host: one of the things i think makes your book so affect did to people who are outside the education policy walking bubble in which many people in washington lived is that you explain all of these policies -- both initiatives and policy terms very well. there's something now going on that they talk about in policy circles called value added but i think it's important to understand who are outside the policy circles. explain what that means and why it is so dangerous. >> guest: well, there's a popular notion that's been promulgated by various economies that says you can measure teacher effectiveness based on whether student scores went up. and if they didn't go up, the teacher was ineffective. and so, what's happening in some districts is that they're

measuring the scores of third graders and then measuring the scores of next year's third-graders and comparing them. and these are two totally different codes or students so that not a good way to do value added. you could conceivably give kids a test in september and get the same children a test in june, but that's not what schools do. schools give a test once a year to totally different groups of kids and then compare different groups to each other. but they're not randomly selected, so it turns out not to be a very good method your so what i did in my chapter about teachers was to go through all this research on explain it and to show that this whole concept had been debunked by economists who say it doesn't work. it doesn't work because you're comparing non-brindley selected groups of kids and there's one economist who shows that you can say something about the effectiveness -- the effect of a fifth-grade teacher on fourth-grade scores. both a fifth-grade teacher to

another fourth-graders, but he knows all of this stuff is you're getting into kind of high-level economist talking to each other. it's not cut nothing to do with children, schools, teaching and learning. it turns out to be one of these areas were the economists and statisticians are in the lead and it's gotten a pass from the reality of school. just go one of your chat roos refers to one of your teachers when your in school and he describes another great attribute, things that made her so effective in teaching and they're all things would make her a failure today. tell us a little bit about her. >> guest: well, you know what i tried to do in this book was to humanize it. and when i was humanizing it was to try to tell stories that would make a point and explain things at least my own life and what i've learned. and so when i wrote it but teacher research i didn't say this chapter but teacher research. by the teacher called what would mrs. ratliff do. i keep hoping. she is deceased now.

but i keep hoping her daughter will contact me. so maybe she'll see this. mrs. ratliff was my homeroom teacher in high school in houston, texas pitcher thoughts my english teacher and i was really hard to get into a class because she was so popular and very tough, very gross. she didn't tolerate any nonsense purchased a red and her red pencil that she would always encourage you to do better pusher tell you in your grammar is drunk on the on juice and wonderful literature and she had very high standards. but she never use standardized test your i suspect that she probably wouldn't have wanted to be a teacher under the circumstances that exist today because her style of teaching was to demand a lot of essays and not to just say kids with doubles and three pick one.

>> host: curious about the response you had to does the very most education but they be print a few thousand, and they get sent to reporters, they get sent to a peer wants and then they die. and often for very good reason. i see a lot of them and a lot of them are boring. yours isn't. what's happened with it? >> guest: well, i guess the first thing i should say as the west indies to find a publisher because it's a book about education. education but some have a good

reputation. so i was turned on again and again and again by publishers. >> host: butcher a best-selling author. >> guest: be that estimates a tough time in publishing and no one wants to read a book about education. the book came out within three days amazon had announced and i began getting e-mails saying we can't find your book, some available anywhere. two days a week since the publication and it's not going to the third remain. the response i would say from educators has been overwhelming. i am getting in the area of 150 to 200, 300 e-mails every day, most of them saying thank you for standing up for us. thank you for telling the public what they don't seem to hear anywhere else. and just a week ago i was at an event in new york city, the channel 13 s. teaching and learning and they bring together a few dozen educators from across the country and i

expected to speak to two or 300 people, which is what i've done in the past when i've gone to the celebration. and i came into this ballroom with my back to the empty room and by the time he turned around, they were about a thousand people in the room. and when i was introduced, i got a standing ovation. and i was all about the book. they hadn't read the book, but they'd heard about the book. and so the word has come out across the country. someone is standing up for teachers. someone is saving up for public education. and he is reputation that she's conservative, this is bad, but i've never been a critic of teachers. i've always been. i know many, many teachers in the great respect for what they do. he spent time in the classroom and see the problems teachers have dealing with kids with all kind of issues there that do about the issues, not just for testing issues. i've always had respect for teachers so i was overwhelmed. i got this amazing recession and

everyplace about them, the book is flown off the shelf. they're not right now, but hopefully in the next few days the second or third printing will begin to get the shelf. >> host: that's old because i would also assume -- you're taken on some powerful forces during the. a chapter that will talk about in a minute. some of the most powerful forces in education today you are taking head-on and that's kind of a briefing to do. let's go to that chapter, the billionaires club, where you talk about the big foundations and their role in education. i think it's the best critique that i've seen on the influence of this kind of money and whether it works, whether it doesn't work, particularly the gates foundation because it is so wealthy. tell us why you put this chapter in here and what this money is doing to education. >> guest: well, the reason i

put the chapter in theirs because i think for the first time in american history, education policy is shaped eye foundation for the natives by government, which is just unbelievable in terms of a democratic sense of public education. the gates foundation and i give them credit for good motives. i don't question that legates want the best. it has so much money and they shape what happens in many, many school districts. when the gates foundation decided some years ago, i think around 2000 or so that all high schools were the answer to everything, they put out $2 billion. their districts lining up to break up the big high schools and replace them with small high schools. and then in the fall of 2008, the gates foundation said it didn't work. where: the plug. they stopped doing it. in some schools it had become small high schools recommended large high schools. on that same small high schools are back at us like to be said, but it's not the silver bullet and they would pick if.

they were doing no better than the equivalent children in the large high schools. nonetheless, there still districts that continue to break up every lurch high school, some of which serve grilled meats in terms of having a diversity of programs. we're not going to get them it's all high schools. so that his apartment small of small high schools, but they also don't have conservatives. they have a range of kids who are english-language learners. so the small high schools, problems and we need to have an intelligent high schools to which works for rich kids, but not just heavy machine than most other large high schools and turns them into little bitty boutique schools. some of the gates foundation decided that if big issue with the charter schools and teacher evaluations. and so they have not out hundreds of millions of dollars to promote charter schools and teacher evaluation.

and the viewer to look at the highest levels of the u.s. partner of education, the gates foundation has really had an enormous impact on defining education policy for the nation. i wish the gates foundation would spend more money on reducing poverty in america, reducing poverty around the world and back off a little bit from education policy because there's so much money that they're distorting the whole policy scene. and if they decide over 10 years from now they made another mistake, we will have messed up our school system yet again chasing rainbows. >> host: the issue of poverty and education is something that i think is ignored way too much by the current group of reformers, the notion that whatever goes on in a classroom is all that you need to turn around a school system i think is a huge fallacy, but you don't hear people talking about that. you don't people talk about a kid who comes to school hungry, who comes to school without glasses, whose two through.

i mean, how big a problem related back? >> guest: well, see the issue here is we have swung from one extreme to the other. previously, sociologists and others with say what you can't educate those children because they're poor, which is ridiculous. i was racist and anti-any effort to help kids went a lot of disadvantages growing up. but we've now gone to the other extreme of saint poverty doesn't matter and that anyone who says that poverty matters is somehow a racist and somehow, you know, they're making it uses in their sane demography is destiny. we'll demography is not destiny, and if you look at in the 80 years of social finance research, the one thing that stands out is that poverty has a big impact that people have on

their future is one of the most important ways we can improve schools would be to reduce poverty. if kids came to school ready to learn, if they had good nights sleep, if their parents had a steady income, they were healthy, they would be better prepared to learn. and that's not the end of the equation because lots of other things they need in terms of the quality and the teacher of their schools. but if you don't address the child poverty, then you're really, really begin i would say blind to their importune issues. >> host: before we talk about what you would do if you were education secretary, a place to go to one more of the chapters in your boat. tell us a little of the history of the choice movement. i think people will be surprised to know where it started and for what reason. >> guest: well, i go back to the brown versus board of education of 1954. and it was in 1954 the decision was made that segregation was

unconstitutional in separate but equal would never be acceptable. and at the same time, 1955, a very eminent economist at the university of chicago, milton friedman, wrote an essay about vouchers. he was trying to address the question of catholic schools any posed by catholic families were backed twice. you know wants to pay their taxes are meant to pay tuition. so he said the government should give everyone a voucher to wherever they want to go. on the one hand you a choice movement getting a little bit of intellectual list i'm economist milton friedman and on the other you had supreme court decision. and the response of many states in the southwest is able we don't want to desegregate. what would they'll do is give people the choice. and so choice became the way in which he could give choice to whites and blacks to go wherever they wanted to go another way to get up in white schools and other blacks and about the black schools. choice became a painted word for managers or do was considered a way of pretending to open the

schools when a fight to keep them exactly as they were for the status quo of segregation. they're a freedom of choice plan. again, segregation and this was defending the status quo. so then, as time goes by, as the milton friedman idea began to gather sand roman town and it's not until really -- there was ever to promote choice between president reagan's time because he liked the idea of vouchers. and then in 1990, the whole idea that choice for the poor was a very important by john chapman cherry know about schools where they said by now we've completely lost all the connection of choice to segregation. they said the choice -- we must consider the possibility of the choices, that the reason the test scores are above and perform poor is because we have bureaucracy and democratic participation. and if everybody would go to a

voucher school of their choice, then achievement would take up yet so that's really the kind of background of the choice movement and then we now have voucher plants operating in three cities in milwaukee, cleveland and washington d.c. and the country right now they're about 30,000 children in public schools using -- none of public schools public and private schools using publicly funded vouchers and going to private schools. >> host: i remember when the charter movement touted big-time in the district in the 1990's. and one of the big arguments was that it will wind up being good for the traditional public schools because it would provide competition so they would have to up their game. and that really hasn't happened, how the? >> guest: the igf competition was one of the driving forces of the charter movement, but would not endorse endorsing the benefits of competition. as of the charter people say will the public was refuse to

learn from her great example and they're not copying us. well, what is happening now is because charter schools in many places are training up the most motivated families come in the most motivated students, public schools now have to spend money or getting their wares. and so they're not really changing fundamentally what they're doing but they're developing marketing strategies to attract students. >> host: they wind up with a bigger population of the most difficult kids. >> guest: well this is i think the underlying danger. it's important to think about the history of the charter movement. charter movement that started in 1988 and their two men who knew each other who proposed charter school spirit with all shanker, the head of the american federation of teachers, the number two teacher. and he thought it would be a wonderful idea teachers could create the self manage, these little schools, which would act as are indeed laboratories for education and they could take difficult students that come up

good ideas and bring them back to the regular public schools good the other guy was a professor of educational administration massachusetts named ray booed when a similar idea to visit the places that you could figure out the problem, help the public schools get better. within five years however, the charter movement attracted a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of money makers and all shanker turned against it. in 1993 he began writing a column saying they're no different from vouchers, their form of privatization and they said in public education. but we have right now is 5000 charter schools exist is again a wide range of quality, but many schools are cherry picking students taken the most motivated students because they operate on lottery, not taking their fair share of immigrant children, kids with english-language skills, not taking their share of special at june the 11th special at student with the mildest disabilities lead in the public schools with a larger portion of

children who are just to educate. so what's happened is the charter schools have gone from this degree that they would support public education to today's reality with a fake were going to be chewed, or pitch out of business, we'll take your space and were better than you were. was the czarist charter schools will treat the 3% in that they consume so much and they know it's really thinking about what about the system more than 97% are. if we want to be as good as the best public schools or the best schools in the world, we should be worried about a 97% of the charter schools were to double. we have to worry about the 94%, but to continue focusing so much time, attention, resources, intellectual energy on the school for 3%, 5% or 7% and to ignore the overwhelming majority of kids in the quality of education is a big mistake. >> host: you said before,

2014% to proficiency that bind with dusty thing that was intended with some of the creators of that too. that's been a conspiracy theory that i've heard over and over for years by some people. do you think that that's actually true? >> guest: you know, i never have believed in conspiracy theories. as the senator responded to me, it's good to have goals. so we can have a goal by the year 2014 there will be a molecule of pollution in our air. by the year 2014 there'll be no crime in the streets. but no one is saying we're going to fire police chief and fire all the cops because they're so crime in the streets. in this case their actual penalties that are destroying the lives of adults who are trying to do a good job. >> host: okay, we've talked a lot about what's wrong, how about ron. how do we get out of this mess? let's say you were secretary of education, which wouldn't be a

bad idea. what to do? with the first thing you do? with the second thing you do? what we need? >> guest: i think what we need in this country is not just one target plan for no silver bullet. we have to recognize that educational achievement of several parts. first of the health and well-being of children good and so is there ever want to be secretary but if i were over 20 years younger and still want to be, i would say lets it down with evil who are having health and welfare issues, focus on the communities for children are most distressed and in need and let's do something about making sure that their parents have jobs and health care and all the things that are necessary for decent life. looking at schools, what i would do and it doesn't have to be a federal mandate would be to say we need to have in this country a real curriculum were recognized the kids with math and reading, but where there's

that dean engaged in the yard and history and geography in literature and other things that we would want for children. and i think what the secretariat to be doing is maintaining the addition. can i were involved in the reauthorization, every penalty, every sanction of every remedy from the federal law because none of it is based on research. none of it has worked, none of that will ever work in all it does is distort education. hope you starting point. and i would've won federal mandate and that is every child in america should have the opportunity to play a musical instrument. >> host: love that. i love that idea. the arts education, music education has disappeared from awful lot of schools. >> guest: sacrificed to the monster goals of no child left behind. >> host: one of the things you mention in your book is very often can be quantified or we act as if all we can do is quantify.

have you had any talks with arne duncan, secretary of education? >> guest: i did very pleasant discussion with him last fall and he listened very respect lee and it's clear that i think i have much impact on him. i mean, he just seems to believe that everything needs to be incentivized. i think that's not the way education works aired i don't think that if we have good teachers will work harder. i think when incentives will do well to focus everyone more are what admit we are not enough test. will continue to drive out everything for testing and basic skills for more refocus on those. >> host: let's talk about the notion of the natural -- national standards today, the new core common core standards are being released. what do you think of this effort, what do you think of this idea quite >> guest: well, i think some of the standards -- it troubles me they're going to be mandated

because they don't how good they are. and i've read them on paper. some of them and the part i'm familiar with which is the english language are, there's been some very strong points, points where the change if i were them. but i don't think anything like this should be required or mandated until it's been delegated good delegated means you tried it out on the gethsemane to small states or large state and say you do this for three or somewhat see whether kids are actually doing better. i guess i'm a little bit troubled winners in the department of education many years ago we try to encourage voluntary national standards, we had voluntary national standards in the yard and geography and all the subjects i mentioned because we felt that was the full respect to. but i don't want to say anything bad about them except that i think they should be required or mandated until it's been proven and it's not yet been proven. >> host: one of the big questions is who writes them?

whose sensibility do you put? and then the really good think larger question is you have standards, without tenders before. every state has a set of standards, some of them are ridiculous and the way they're written. they tell us nothing. if you don't have the resources behind it to get teachers to be able to teach to them, if you can't keep kids grade by grade on track, then it seems to me, tommy weren't wrong. it seems to me that it's a waste of time and energy putting these things together. >> guest: i think there's something to be said for a syllabus. people confuse the word standards increase. standard is usually how well did you do and no standard arduous process. they're about you will be coming to understand coming will interpret coming to understand that are increasingly complex. that doesn't mean anything. but if you have a curriculum, you would say this is what you need to know enough. you should be able to do fractions at this point. you should be able to do

multiplication of double digits at this point. and just lay out for you hope and expect kids would be and then become the guideline to instructors to help them understand where kids out to be. and then of course he got to back it up with good instruction and with well-trained teachers of the teachers know what they're expected to. and i talked about the teachers prevent no problem with the peer the best programs for advanced claimant or international baccalaureate work with children. they don't work with the standards were they just refer to nothing. there's a lot to be said for a syllabus. but i know how hard it would eat to satisfy that at the national level. if you could just develop that state by state that wouldn't be so bad. we should then rely on something that the federal test, the national progress. not to test individual students but to test it and report back on how we are doing and then not use that information to punish the schools, close schools,

punish teachers, but rather say here's where you are, this is information. use it and everybody wants to be better. no one says i'm content to have low performance. >> host: very briefly, tell them but may face. used to be on the court that govern this and it's a test that some have called the nation's report card. understand what it is. >> guest: at the federal testing program called the national testing of progress it's called an ape also referred to as the gold standard of testing because it does not have steaks. it's given to scientific samples of kids throughout the united states and also state-by-state. nape test is given in reading and math every year and also giving on it last week and a system but also offered in u.s. history and will be offered in world history and their science is tested, writing is tested, physics is tested. they're all these different subjects that are part of nape,

but it's only reading and math test it every other year. it gives us a very good snapshot of how were doing, what progress are making. and congress has an slow. they met the biggest progress has been made in reading and math was made before the adoption of no child left behind and not sense. >> host: that's interesting. and what was it that was sent to get those results? >> guest: well, i think there was an emphasis on improving without penalty. and i think that information itself is a valuable virtue of improvement. but i think we may have reached a kind of automated out point with of this beating up on people nuts white think we've seen so little progress because we don't play out -- i mean, to make progress for instance in reading you need a lot of general knowledge. their shifts emphasis on reading skills. and so we have many children were trained to take the state test and are trained like peretz and seals. they can take the state test

that they actually get fairly good scores in the state test. then when i test the same children they had taken test preparation for nape as it doesn't make sense and they do poorly, we see no improvement in reading up to this point. and for eighth-graders, from 1998 until 2007 that's why. >> host: our biggest real problem is this achievement gap in the united states has some of the best schools in the world. some of our public schools rival none really. and some of them are among the worst. has the achievement gap, you know, essentially stayed flat, hasn't it? >> guest: it is narrowed somewhat but in arab mourn the passing recently. and i think that until we've been really to address the sources at the achievement gap, which isn't bad teachers, it's really poverty, and were not going to make a lot of progress. anything to the extent we can begin to reduce income inequality, reduce have fewer

people with low income. i thought this in my studies and new york city even many years ago that this is a good predictor of educational achievement with economic growth, economic improvement. >> host: i always found it amusing that when the economy is bad, everybody brings the public schools. in the 90's when the economy is great, nobody said thank you, public schools. if the harlin school a kind of school that makes sense? the prenatal services for parents, adult education, is that something to look at? guest go i think that jeffrey kennedy is doing a great job. harland unfortunately has become ground zero for the charter movement and this is not his fault although he does when two of the charter schools. there will be neighborhoods in holland that have no public schools, where kids will not be able to go to school across the

street because they have to apply to enter the charter schools. charter schools are really replacing public education and the lowest performing kids are not in those schools. and so it's really a problem. but i do think whichever he came canin is doing is the right approach parities bringing together social services, health services, prenatal care, helping kids and adults at different points in their life span. >> host: the last chapter of your book titled lessons learned, what are the major lessons come the major things you want a reader to take away from the boat? >> guest: i think the major thing is there's no way to turn around educational system easily or quickly and if anybody says they found a miracle school, it doesn't exist. you may find charismatic leaders somewhere for whatever they're doing and you can't reproduce what they're doing. if you look more closely to find out that they're skimming the kids and maybe they're getting wonderful results, but then one year and the next or they're

not. there are no miracles in education. education is an arduous process that requires willing students, supportive families, well-educated teachers, strong coherent curriculum and a community that values education. i mean, our kids are growing up in a society filled with distractions, where they're being entertained endlessly by blinking screens as the recent report said the average child eight to 18 spend 7.5 hours a day in front of a blinking screen. whether not spending 7.5 hours a day with their teachers. they're what the blinking screens. there's a lot of competition for children's competition. and aside from the poverty there is this immense problem of we have a very anti-intellectual disrespect for popular culture that teaches kids that they should want, want, want and buy, buy, byte and the never say to them the importance of sitting by themselves and studying cover reading the book, removing

themselves from the distraction and focusing on their studies. that would be a good thing. but if all these things if we don't recognize the educational achievement is composed of all of those, then we'll just continue along the same path that we've been on. >> host: well, thank you very much. i could talk to you for another hour and another after that bartenders that said thank you. just go thank you, it's been great talking to you. >> host: youtube. ..

next, authors mark halperin and john speed on their book, "game change," a look at the 2008 presidential election. this hourlong event also examines the effect of the book on politics and policy in washington. >> host: we are joined by the authors of "game change," john halperin and mark heilemann. mark heilemann, let me begin with you. i heard i think it was you or one of you say that you had a list of things he thought would make news in this book and it's been out there for a little bit now. we have heard many of the pieces in this book. what on that list hasn't made news or what are you surprised that? >> guest: a lot of things.

john and i set out to write a book we hoped people would find an interesting book to read and as we see in campaign of a lifetime but we also were going for breaking news because we felt there were things that were uncovered during the campaign. i will give you one. john will have others. sarah palin was picked by john mccain. people were shocked when it happened in that time the mccain campaign said she had been on the list of consideration and then received as much background check as the so-called vetting as other people john mccain considered. there was skepticism at the time but like so much we write about in game change the kind of parade, political journalism moved on. there were other things to cover sarah palin's speech and everything that happened after the convention so this is one case where we went back to say what is the truth and the truth is that she was brought into the game of consideration as mccain's running mate very late after their main focus, joe lieberman, fell apart else an

option. they needed a game changing. lieberman was a game changing pick of one sort, palin was a mother. in the book week quote for the first time anywhere the affecting report done by a young washington lawyer asked on a friday afternoon to get ready and then in the space of less than today's looked into sarah palin's background not by making phone calls or interviewing anybody but simply giving online searches because they needed to keep a secret. quoting from that report looking at the process by which became a victim virtual stranger as a running mate is something they thought would get a lot of attention and hasn't gotten very much. >> john heilemann. >> guest: i agree with mark there's a lot of stuff that hasn't gotten attention we would have expected and i will give you three quick examples. one of them is it is kind of a macrostory which is in the wake of the campaign, one of the pieces of conventional wisdom propounded by the obama operation is from the very beginning from the time obama

got in the race until the end the question of his race was something they didn't think about. it was and factored into his decision to run. they didn't talk about internally. it was a kind of non-issue. that is one of the things they said over and over through the election and throw the book, "game change," we talk about how much they were in fact obsessed with race as a political factor. we talk about how in the campaign against mccain they produced an ad after ad in expectation, the internally produced fake ads they fought with the kind vance the mccain campaign was going to run against them that would be treated and how they would respond to that but it was kind of topic eight. it is terrifically interesting and i will do to more quickly -- >> before you do, let me show the view worst part of the book. you say while the cash poor mccain campaign was coming up with ads on the fly scribbling scripts in effect on the backs of napkins airing spots without ever testing them the obama's

were running a stealthy high-tech lab to discover which attacks were most dangerous and to develop responses. >> guest: right and i will stay with that because you stayed with it. it's fascinating. they produced dozens upon dozens of spots and then also to look at the ads to prepare to respond to them and also produce other spots that would deal with the problem that the question of wind would obama's alleged connections to muslim, when would the mccain campaign start pushing them out? the didn't. the obama campaign was trying to respond. we have an anecdote in the book they tried it one point the obama campaign to produce and added that would take care of all the questions about his race, his legend muslimism and lack of patriotism in one ad and we tell the story humorously that obama when he's reads the script of this ad that was supposed to knock down all of these he reads the script and says you guys, this is too much. i can't say this.

this is a silly hat. i would say to other things quickly. one is we have what i think is a strong chapter in the book on the economic and financial crisis which has an incredible reporting. i believe about what happened in the white house meeting between -- that george bush held with john mccain and barack obama. i think it is hardly been mentioned in the coverage and exciting and very interesting and shows how unprepared mccain was and well-prepared obama was. a republican aide in the meetings is as he listened to obama takeover the media that it seemed to him that if you close your eyes you would believe this was the president of the united states, george bush or john mccain. then we have an interesting story about david and maureen dowd and have a devastating column that maureen wrote in the early part of the nomination fight how that came to be and how this kind of mischievous between the hollywood mogul and "the new york times" columnist healthy adult one of the first severe blows to the notion of clinton's defense inevitability.

>> host: let's dig into that more. mark halperin on what john was just talking about about the column. there is a back story there. she was trying to write the column before she got him to agree to do it. >> guest: she was. as john said it's an interesting case to not only prominent people but laconic people. the most prominent "new york times" columnist of our time. i would say in many ways and then david geffen this if went to hollywood figure. david geffen, part of dreamworks with steven spielberg and jeffrey katzenberg were big supporters. they raised a lot of money for them. david stayed in the lincoln bedroom but he, like so many prominent liberals including in hollywood turned against the clintons. he was unhappy with president clinton's toys of pardons at the second term, not in granting the part in the david geffen hoped for, parting the inebriating the fugitive financiers so geffen

turned on the clintons and felt that they were if not actually corrupt they were morally bankrupt. he loved obama and saw him speak at the democratic convention in 2004 and reached out and started a relationship with him and when maureen dowd heard david speak at the 92nd street y in new york and get a question about clinton is and hillary's chances david was very tough on hillary clinton and maureen dowd in the audience was struck not just by held david geffen was in his talking about the clintons morality but the audience reaction here they were in new york the state hillary clinton represents in the audience seems enthusiastic about the notion of craddock criticism of hillary clinton so over the course of a long period of time as you suggest maureen is looking david geffen to take what he said at that even, it will fly in an interview and by coincidence she's in california of the night before david geffen is going to

host a major fund-raiser for barack obama. she convinces him to do the interview. >> host: what year is this? >> guest: 2007. this is a critical period because barack obama has gotten in the race. he's clearly created excitement and in communities of finally important if you're trying to become the democratic nominee for president, hollywood, new york, liberal circles where hillary was trying to sort of not let obama rise up as a major competitor to her. so for david geffen to agree to host this fund-raiser weak report in the book was a blow to the clintons. they were desperate to try to overshadow that because it showed a hollywood support key in the democratic party would not be monolithic and again maureen dowd convinces david geffen to do the interview. the next night her column goes on the web by coincidence. both barack obama and maureen dowd are at this fund-raiser and david geffen's house and he

knows the article is going to run. he printed and takes it to obama insurance it to him and says this might cause us some trouble and obama says trouble for him because it wasn't going to cause trouble for obama and it plays out as we report in the bucket was worse for the clintons than they thought. this is the first time a lot of the issues of bill clinton's personal life with the clintons were old politics, what they were to lose with the truth was laid out and the one to punch lead held by david geffen this pillar of the establishment of the get the maureen dowd column was devastating in public for the clintons and personally behind the scenes even more devastating because all it presented. >> host: am going to turn over to the viewers because i'm sure many people are interested to ask questions. blundell tennessee sylvia democratic line commodore first. ahead. >> caller: i saw you all on another show and you were talking about bill and hillary were upset during the iowa caucuses that the obama campaign

had cheated. from what i read and i heard was the reason they were so upset is because the obama campaign busted lots of young people from illinois with the help of a.c.o.r.n.. they should earlier and locked up the hillary voters. >> host: john heilemann? >> guest: the caller is right about what the clintons believe to the letter what we've report in the book is that hillary had been worried about this possibility for a while. she had been concerned that the caucuses were too loose and there was a chance that because obama was the home state senator from illinois that this could happen. we report in the book how on the night of the iowa caucuses when hillary is coming in third she and the former president clinton are in the hotel suite and extremely as angry as the eighth scene. there are told by their closest allies they would either finish

first or close second and she finesses are offered and they are upset and the former president clinton starts going on about the fact of these people come to madrid 39,000 people had shown up and no one expected the was double the amount that iowa caucus in 2004. he was incomprehensible that many people could show up the caucasus and he seized on the notion this cheating had occurred and the buses had been brought from illinois as the caller says and he clung on to that notion long after in fact we report in the book five days later are not the time of the new hampshire primary he's suggesting she actually raised this question in a debate that the caucasus, the outcome of the caucasus should be invalidated because obama has done this and president clinton was suggesting they should hire lawyers and churlish the results of the iowa caucuses. i think we cannot know with any certainty whether that is true but i would say that we spoke to many of the clintons' lawyer

with staff people who had long experience in iowa public spirited people very loyal to the clintons. none of them believe that charges true. they all say as upset as the clintons were they were looking for some excuse for her performance there and these were people who had every reason to believe it was true and all of them think the people, the iowa caucus the best of them believe it is a false charge. >> host: georgia, amy on the independent line. amy, good morning. i'm going to remind you to turn that television down. all right? i am going to move on and put you on hold. moving to mount clemens michigan. ellen on the republican line. good morning. >> caller: hello, how are you? >> host: doing well. >> caller: i will let the dingley say i have not read the book, these fellows being so closely connected to the campaign and everybody who was involved and all the candidates, i want to know why it is that the most important pieces of all

of these people, clinton, obama, mccain, everything was fielded and the most important aspect never came up and the democrats were protected down to every minuscule little better -- the most important things didn't cannot but when it came to mccain and sarah palin, how the attacked her and went after her for her clothes and eating habits but yet when it comes to not even reporting on any of the policies were the leaves or agenda stuff that obama was going to go for which he is doing now not having his thesis come out, ending at his background and they were saying he's so smart and intelligent and sarah palin is not qualified when she had been elected starting in the school system would ever municipal mayor to governor and she's so stupid and

irresponsible but she held all these offices -- >> host: i think we got the point. did mark halperin? >> guest: we knew one of the challenges of writing a book on politics in this day and age was a lot of the political discourse through the media and politics directly has become partisan and we were trying to write a book and hope we did that wasn't a partisan because there is stuff in here that wasn't reported not just as the call suggested that the democrats but there's a lot that was never a report about the republicans. we are heartened by the fact the book has received praise from people on the left and right. shom hannity said nice things about the book as did it schultz, and i think the strength of the book, the extent it has one in this realm as we reported everything we could find that we thought was germane to telling the story about both parties, candidates in both parties without fear of war favor and with an eye towards history and eliminating what happened not covering things up. there has been a concern i will say quickly why wasn't as reported in real time?

people are all going to be forthcoming the way they were with us in the heat of the campaign. the offer to veazey and there's too much at stake. we went to people after the nomination fights and the general election win memories were fresh and they were willing to cooperate and they understood the project and it's important for history. second, it is hard to piece this together if you don't have the time as we did over a long period, 300 interviews with more than two injured people long interviews able to sit down and sift through and piece it together the realities of daily journalism particularly these days with the internet and cable there's no way to do that in daily journalism you have did was a. was to have you heard from your sources and got in reaction from your sources without of tediously specifics of who they are? >> guest: we have and as mark says we talked to a lot of people from the book as mark cited the figures. most of these people with people we had, or the other had long relationships. we had been covering politics

for close to 20 years each and the relationships we have with the resources was the basis on which the book was built. if we didn't have such relationships i don't think we could have done what we did and we have been heartened also by their response which has been uniformly positive. people have sent notes of congratulation about the book. i think that again as far as we can tell from what we've heard and we haven't heard from everybody that we heard from an awful lot of people people feel as though we got the story right and we have done it in a way that they think is both fair, accurate and good for history in this sense we capture things about the campaign and how people lived through the campaign and it changed them and their strengths and weaknesses affected the way they waged a campaign that are important for people who are going to be looking for years to come to understand what happened to it was co amy on the independent line, good morning. >> caller: sorry about that.

you know, i am an independent. i used to be a democrat and win this election with barack obama kinard i ended up dropping the party completely. what i was looking for at the time was a candidate the would represent the country well and i know for a fact the fact the media was there boosting obama like the way they did bush which he actually did do seems to be the game plan for me is whoever the media choose is could be the next president is going to be the next president and it's very unfortunate because why did listen to open beat colburn ogle on a few times and by some of the speeches he set about changing things in washington yet he was a supporter of mayor

richard daley which as far as i'm concerned being from illinois was one of the biggest crooks and politics. if he couldn't even be the chicago politics what makes them think he's right to change anything in washington and he hasn't? >> host: john heilemann. >> guest: the rule of the media and presidential elections is huge and one of the things that is most interesting and reporting on the campaign is the fact that all of the campaigns feel as though the media was biased against them. they feel as though as the caller says they look at the power of the media and feel as the media plays this role and in some ways it is unfair to them. >> host: evin president obama's campaign felt that way. >> guest: whenever it was confronted with and i think mark and i would agree president obama got very favorable coverage in the course of the campaign it's just not disputable but they felt as though all the questions on things like reverend write as

though they were subjected to ask of media scrutiny as any in history and in many cases they thought the things for which they were hit like the rezko incident those were not germane like any campaign they were constantly the media was focused on trivialities and on things that were not stories rather than what the candidate wanted to say about health care policy or economic policy, so i think it is a perennial complaint and as far as i can see the media is an equal opportunity in the kind of riggers it puts the candidates through and it doesn't surprise me as mark said in a partisan environment people feel as though the media choose sides but it is a topic i think it's not going to go away for that reason because as the media and political culture get partisan they're going to escalate. >> host: democratic wind durell in new jersey go ahead. >> caller: good morning, marc,

john, greta politico of things, one is i seen you guys on other shows and one of the things that's fascinating to me is the country seems to be a state of dissidents, barack obama is the on prepared and unqualified to be president. john mccain is the longtime politician with experience and based on what you guys have said this morning to me the exact opposite, the reverse is true. barack obama seems to be hoping and change and all that but he seems to be a very savvy politician, brilliant strategic thinker and a very well-prepared and understands the issues and yet all of the buzz right now about sarah palin who mostly speaks and her vocabulary is mostly models love it and i haven't heard her say anything of substance in terms of public

policy from the time she started running up until now and i'm just amazed are you amazed the country is so enamored with sarah palin who lacks intellectual curiosity, blacks debt and is mostly black -- >> host: mark halperin? >> guest: i have to disagree that is a problem. you know, with all the respect to that caller and other people who call c-span he sees the world in a very particular way and there's millions of americans who see it this way but there's millions of who think that barack obama was a fraud and salvation and part of a preacher right to do in writing "game change" is to rise above what has become a feature of the political discourse which is again a lot of political books and cable television and the web is to say i have a point of view about the world i hate

the democrats or the republicans and everything i say or write is going to be geared towards reinforcing that point and trying to spread. we said we wanted to write a story what happened in this exciting campaign with bigger than life characters and not make it a partisan book and again as i said before, we have had positive feedback we were heartened by from people on the left and right who said to us i may disagree with barack obama's policies but i was glad to be able to read how he experienced the campaign and get inside what he's like an sarah palin. we didn't write it for the reason i'm about to see as a potential benefit but i hope it has the benefit which is we do both think that our country's discourse has become too partisan and it's not good for government or politics or for the future of the country and we hope that people will think about politics and a different way more about the drama and try

to trade it from the partisanship that dominates a lot of the calls and discourse. >> host: on the mccain strategy approach to the campaign you both right wherever mccain was and what ever he was sitting, whoever was listening donner was the campaign. the rest was noisy and as mccain was concern he could wind with defense if you meet the press appearances and airplane tickets. >> guest: it is in the early part of the book we right back in terms of the republican race and it's talking about how mccain in the early planning phases you half an operation that was all the people looked back at the 2000 campaign when he ran this renegade outside the campaign and they said we lost, we got crushed by the machine in 2000. we don't want to run that again. our candidate is perfectly positioned to be the front-runner for the race and we should build a campaign that's like that. we should build on the bush model and have a big campaign and raise a ton of money and

have a huge operation across the country and the formidable and scare for the the way. the problem was mccain was totally psychologically ill suited to that campaign and and as his organization billed itself his attitude was white you i need this? he didn't want to make fund-raising calls were get into the race as early as he wanted him to. we've seen in the book with top strategists saying to him we are the front runner. we have to act like the front runner, we can't act like a person you are naturally which is to be this sort of maverick to use his terms, and the mismatch between the kind of operation they aspire to build for him and the kind of thing mccain was comfortable with doing created what turned out to be in emulation for the campaign. his campaign over the course of 2007 in the first six months the campaign is broke and lagging in the polls. he's miserable. he's finding his top staff. the meltdown that killed him

politically not personally as jury much about that as much and where mccain is strongest in the book is when he gets rid of these people like to see him emerge in some ways when everyone in politics looked at mccain and what he's dead now. mccain was actually happier in that situation, he was more comfortable writing or driving around the country basically in a metaphor replete speaking old car carrying his own bags and going out and flying by the seat of his pants. i would say when you come back around to the general election you don't have that risk, you can't run that kind of campaign it comes back to bite him because mccain thinks of himself as a guerrilla candidate and through the fall campaign the mismatch between him and about in terms of organization and finance and muscular strength across the country ends up being a huge disadvantage among other disadvantages that was the problem and it goes to the core of one of the things the book is about is this is why

in some sense the personal stuff about the human drama of the campaign is actively matters enormously because it tells you a lot about mccain's political fortunes you can't understand without understanding his psychology and how he looked at the art and combat of politics and it's in all of that that you can see on its board over the course of the campaign pitted >> guest: can i see one thing? you know, we have been honored and pleased by the amount of tension because got him and we have done some other interviews before this one. this is literally the first time we had a chance to discuss the topic and extraordinarily in important part of the 2008 campaign. so for people who've seen stuff about the book and think well i know everything in the book already we love the quote but you just read about mccain and the sheaf of airplane tickets because it does define a huge part of the mentality of the republican nominee. so there is a lot more stories we want to talk about today but some people have the impression they learned everything that's in the book. we think there's more in the

people would be interested in like you just talked about. >> host: kansas city missouri, republican line. >> caller: when president obama ran the was more to the center than the democratic party and that's what i voted for. i voted for obama because i thought he was more to the center of the democratic party, not to the left. he has since become more left and center and that has made me very disheartened. i've turned from democrat to republican. i'm going to start voting republican. i'm going to vote more for the people who have might tell you and my type of ideas about this country and how we should be run because i think our country is out of whack. we are spending too much. the deficit is too high.

there's too many people unemployed. and i think obama is not concentrating on what the problems are in this country. he's concentrating on his ideas. >> host: mark halperin? >> guest: what was the name of the caller? i would call her nancy also known as david axelrod's forced a nightmare. this is the kind of voter that voted for barack obama, white house political what lies like david axelrod have to be worried about to say not just for the midterm elections and the president's potential reelection bid for having political support in the country to pass his agenda in the short term he has done the thing that is the most dangerous for any politician. he lost control for a large segment of the population of the image how he's been perceived. the reality is as we show in the back in the campaign he was skillful at being what george bush successfully did which is in a sense of things to all people liberals could see in his rhetoric and parts of his agenda someone who would come to the

white house and enact a liberal agenda. health care is a great example. what has moved through congress is similar. there is policy differences that are not insignificant but the thrust and expense of it is similar to what he ran on some people shouldn't be surprised on the range of issues he is more liberal. at the same time one of the gifts barack obama has had is the ability to speak as a unifying figure, to give the people this sense that he wants to work across the aisle and solve problems in a bipartisan way. but as it has turned out partly by choice and partly by circumstances with the economic crisis in particular has led to governing in a partisan way than i felt he would do and i think than he intended. the result has been in part to alienate the calls like that, voters and citizens like that and part of the challenge he faces now is to finish this health care bill that's been defined as a liberal from rightly or not and move on to an agenda that addresses jobs in the deficit reduction in

particular, the state of the union, the budget are going to be opportunities the white house hopes to win back the colors like that. >> host: we found it yesterday the state of the union will be wednesday january 27th next week. tampa on the independent line, good evening. >> caller: thank you for taking my call. i want to say to the host and i don't know 20 my apologies. due to call earlier for someone challenging your body is and suggested that you should be fired and ibm just wondering it might make a great thing for c-span2 do that sort of to an empirical studies of the length of calls, which lie and they come in just for informational purposes would be great. but to go more to the point i have not read the book but i think the campaign that we have become so divisive in this country with the two parties. i am a big fan that we should have multiple parties but i think that hillary clinton has shown herself to be a gracious loser obviously in the campaign but also with a hard-working

woman. you look at her and she is just no laws to the grindstone. i'm the secretary of state and i am going to do the best job i can do for the country regardless of the party. i think during the campaign obama was such a wonderful speaker, is such a wonderful speaker that he was able to carry the election without a lot of substance. i'm a supporter of his but at the same time you have to govern and not just be elected. >> host: mark halperin, the background of hillary clinton during the campaign. >> guest: is somewhat fancifully in the beginning of the book talked about how the hillary and obama relationship is a love story which i think it's counter intuitive for people and again one of the things mark and i were surprised to learn is how much of a fan hillary clinton was of barack obama before they got in the race. we report in this book about her posting when he ran for the senate in 2004 hosting fundraisers in chicago and at her home bill clinton appearing in a fund-raiser in 2004 and her

talking admiringly about him saying there's a superstar in chicago. he was the kind of candidate she and her husband wanted to support in the democratic party, very intelligent african-american candidate she thought of as the future of the party and when obama comes to washington he seeks her counsel because he's already a kind of superstar in an unusual way because his speech that the democratic convention and they have a bond where she sees him as a potential minty and he sees her as a mentor. there is a lovely detail in the book how he gave her a picture of his daughters and his wife and she get that on the office displayed until the day she left the samet. obviously huge amount of conflict and bitterness that unfolded when they ended up head-to-head in the democratic nomination fight but in the end after all of her bitterness over how the race turned out and her anger documented in the book and a lot of it in detail, the

extraordinary series of defense that lead her to accept the job of secretary of state we have at the end of the book and she has this -- they have a rather incredible and coming together in this fleet might phone call after he offered her the job, she turned it down. she decided she doesn't want the job. everyone in her life is trying to get her to take the job. her husband thinks it would be great, rahm emanuel, joe biden lobbying her to take the job. she decides i'm not been to take the job and she calls obama to tell him i'm not going to take the job and they have this incredible late night phone call where the two of them -- she tells him why she doesn't want the job. he accepts that those are all good reasons to a lot on the job. she's burdened with debt, tighter, wants to go home, she thinks her husband will be a difficult distraction if she takes the job and he says understand that but i need you to do this job. the economic crisis is going to be huge and is going to consume a huge part of my first term. i need someone in the state to part with who is fully competent and understands foreign policy whose hand i don't have to hold.

your country needs you and i need you to be success as a president. and after all that's happened between this epic arc of their relationship is an extraordinary moment because when the moment she kind that makes her husband can be a problem, something she's never done before through the campaign to read any time bill clinton has done anything considered politically detrimental she defends him, even her closest allies she never kind of says -- she never takes any side other than she's loyal to her husband. now she's singing something not disloyal but admitting this, nobody she sees in her husband. obama, the most self-contained self possessed person who doesn't express need or express he needs anyone, he is a kind of guy that is maximally self-sufficient politician turns to her and at nights that he needs her to be a success and it's in that moment they have a bond, the beginning of the first seeds of a relationship they feel like they can work together. he tells her he wants her to sleep on it and not to say no and she wakes up the next morning and decides she's going

to take the job and i think that the caller is right. her performance the first year of his term as the secretary of state has demonstrated all of the things that are the best about hillary clinton. she has been i think an incredibly valuable at pfizer. she has worked incredibly hard representing america around the world and by all indications from mark's reporting and by reporting and other people their relationship is as solid as any relationship of any cabinet secretaries. they are on good terms and it speaks well of her and her patriotism and devotion to the country and ability to put past pain and bitterness aside for a higher calling. >> host: were in pennsylvania for the line on democrats. >> caller: good morning. i had a very simple question i would like to ask the gentleman. what kind of impact do you think this will have on people running again and people who want to work for them? when it seems like if you write a book like this i don't -- i don't understand why these

people talk and say some of the things they say about the candidates and i think it would be hard to get anybody to work for you again and harder for the candidates to have to be so careful what they should say and do in private and just the question is i guess what kind of impact do you think the book will have. >> host: before you answer, howard kurtz wrote in the column yesterday in "the washington post" that perhaps president obama's character is unusually consistent. but the portrait maylso reflect that the aids on the winning campaign had little dirt tradition and even less incentive since many of them are now running the country. just want to add that to her comments. >> guest: there's a lot, let me try to address part of it. as john said earlier and almost every case as we were doing the many and long interviews for the book we were dealing with what strangers but people who have a positive strong working relationships over decades and

so in that process we explain in great detail what we were doing and explain the kind of book it was and explain the terms which we were speaking and history is important. one of the things we learned in much times to our panic was as time passes people's memory gets worse. campaigns don't write about down. so there is an oral history that if we hadn't stepped in and on the interviews when the we did i think a lot of it would have been lost. people have said and this piece and others have sort of talked about the notion we've relied on people with axes to grind. i have to tell you john me feel differently. i can't remember more than five interviews at most which the people we were interviewing clearly were trying to spin the story to reflect a point of view. they were in almost every instance jerry purely cooperating with us and telling the story because they knew we were writing what we would consider to be the history of an important moment in history that

process yielded a lot of stories that we were able to overtime taking our time merged together. there isn't a single quote on quote controversial story line in the book on which we based on people exclusively with people who could be said to have an ax to grind. we always went to supporters, people more sympathetic to a candidate or spells and said this is what we've been told by others. what you think? there were almost no instances where the merging of the accounts from the two sides required judgment on our part. the store is lined up. >> guest: i would add one thing to the comment that you've read. he says i believe the quote is perhaps the reason unusual consistency between barack obama's public image and private really. that is actually true and one of the things the book demonstrates is in some cases there is a wide divergence between public image and private reality. the st. john edwards and elizabeth edwards is a most dramatic example in the book

where the gap between what the public saw and what they wanted the public to see and how they were in private is yawning, it is a cosmic gap. obama's, the gap between his image and reality is all the major candidates was the narrowest and i think that it's part of the reason why he turned out to be such a strong candidate and the reason why he won because they spent very little time in the obama campaign having to manage the problem of years we are telling the public but what is really going on. for all the other campaigns it was enormous amount of time and effort devoted by the staff to try to bridge the gap and massage the differences. the obama campaign was able to focus to a larger extent on getting done what it needed to get done because there wasn't that large gap. now that said, as i talked before about the race example which aplenty example where the obama public image was and what was going on behind the scenes and we laid that there but it's

important reason he was successful in the campaign again compared to his rivals because the gap was narrow. >> guest: if i can see another of thing that's been said about the book is we don't have a very much about barack obama or we don't show anything about barack obama that is less flattering. i would urge people to read the book interested in that. there's a number of moments in the campaign where the campaign behind the scenes was in crisis and there were questions whether the strategy was working. in one instance you see barack obama in the game change say we are staying the chores. we chose this strategy, the tactics to back up this is the right thing. there's another instance leader in the book where he decides he's not getting enough advice from the broad circle of people. one of the things we report in the book is a group of three men, david joxel rot and david plus, the campaign strategist and spokesman who foremost a stranglehold on the advice the gets to barack obama, very influential and this was a

constant tension in the campaign where other people including michelle obama would occasionally say when things were going badly there needs to be a broad circle of advisers and later there is a process around the time it's clear that barack obama will probably beat hillary clinton but is worried his went to england and to the general election where he makes a decision to change course and expands the circle. he starts a nightly conference call with advisers run not by the so-called suits by -- but by anita dunn. so there is a deeper portion in its lot of lettering. it's the true story what happened and people have said there isn't much about barack obama were this stuff about barack obama is written by the sources that are the winners therefore it is and as full of a portrait as others. >> host: on the strategy, john heilemann, can you talk of early on when he decides to bring anita dunn into the fold while he's considering a run and the strategy she takes up by running his fund and the speeches he's getting around the country

helping raise money for other candidates, that exchange, the strategy she comes up with for e-mail addresses. >> guest: this is in the early 2006, late 2005 period barack obama like all politicians have a pack that was called hope fund and obama invited, interviewed and hired anita dunn to run the pack. he was an extraordinarily unusual candidate in this respect even before he was elected to national office when he was still a candidate for the senate in 2004 he was able to raise money for the other senators. it was clear once he got the nomination he was going to win by a landslide was during fund-raising events for people like tom daschle who were sitting senators, immediately upon arriving in washington obama was this unprecedented fund-raising draw apart from hillary clinton and in some ways an excess of her by a certain point he could go around the country to visit and purple states to obviously blue states and turnout huge crowds and i

mean mark and i of the time we were following this we knew obama was traveling and we knew he was raising money but i don't think until we reported in the book we have a clear set we started talking to people, claire mccaskill who would tell the stories about obama coming to campaign in 2006 and help when he would come to st. louis they would have to get an overflow room because not only did they have to have the fund-raiser for the people who were going to pay a lot of money they would also needed to get a separate room for 10,000 or 15,000 people because everybody wanted to see this guy. his fund-raising ability was at the core of why as we talk of the democratic establishment was secretly behind him that was part of the could see the political appeal, part of the way they demonstrated he was someone who could be a serious candidate and anita dunn in some sense along with the fit plough initiating a similar strategy for deval patrick of massachusetts, they started to think about how this could be capitalized to build what became the grassroots armies of people would come to the obama events

and ask for e-mail address and that was the beginning of building the database for the health fund that eventually became the database that eventually built into this mess of all my army that obama exploited in the 2008 campaign and it became the core of what became the fund-raising machine as we all know the use the internet in a totally novel way in 2008 to build this machine that is unprecedented in the history of politics. anita dunn and the decisions made a route that were the seeds of the development which a disalle made obama credible and indeed gave huge advantage when forward against hillary clinton and john mccain. >> host: marie on the republican line. colcord yes you know, i get a kick out of the left out the attack their opponents. they try to call them saddam. if they see a threat and they are all for women's rights until sarah palin came along and was attracting even the left like bill more. they go after her all the time and she has had more managerial

experience the and obama by four. she's been a governor, mayor, she had an 80% approval rating in alaska and you know einstein came back and ran they call him at dawn. that's how they try to be little their opponents and it's really quite funny when you come right down to it. they also say europe has done this or that. europe is made of different countries with their own culture and switzerland and europe are not part of the e.u.. >> host: we will leave it there. let me take one thing she said about sarah palin and the coverage of sarah palin in the book. she talked about alaska. sarah palin from your reporting was consumed with how she was perceived in alaska during this election. >> guest: she was. one of the challenges and writing about sarah palin was she had never been much involved in the national politics as the governor of alaska. very few people in the national

or political media life had dealings with sarah palin so it was unusual because normally the top or bottom of the ticket, people in washington and journalism circles no sarah palin was new support of the job was to talk to the national operatives on the campaign and other people around sarah palin who are literally to this day among the only people we know who had exposure behind-the-scenes to see what she's like when she's not on tv or giving a speech. they met with sarah palin, two of john mccain's said pfizer's. they had never met her. she was a stranger to them and they were asked to talk to john mccain in arizona and to talk about what this job is going to be like if they offered the position. one of the things they discuss in that meeting late at night on the eve of john mccain's selection was importance of understanding that even though she would remain as the sitting governor of alaska she needed to understand her focus now needed to be on fun national campaign. she was basically not an appendage of the campaign and she would probably not get back

to alaska on the other was a natural disaster and she needed to be focused not on her home state but on the national ticket and the sprint to the election. from the point of view of the staff she did not live up to that. she and her husband were consumed with what was an 80% approval rating slipping to something less than that. they were consumed when todd palin would go back, ciro campaigned in the lower 48 he would see absence of joaquin palin your signs in alaska. no television ad for citing -- advertising because it was secure for mccain. they spend an inordinate amount of time complaining to the campaign staff not enough was being done in alaska. sarah palin had a good relationship with the local media in alaska. from sarah palin's point of view the local media kind of turn on her. she wasn't allowed to talk to the reporters like a lot of governors she would get out her phone number, mobile number to

the reporters, talk to them on a regular basis. all of that are most of that ended when she was on the national ticket so the palin salles the dynamic in alaska the was bad for them. on the mccain's point of view there was no time and she said she understood that before she was put on the ticket. that was one of the many causes tension between palin and the staff. >> host: david on the independent line. >> caller: good morning. my political of addition and florida on my car i am identified as no party affiliation because independent is classified as a party. here's the way i vote over the years. i always -- when a politician reaches their 12th year that is a maximum for me and i will vote for them. i will not vote for politicians to move to new districts just to run. two examples clinton from new york. if i was the president of new yorker wouldn't have voted because she moved in and being in florida, connie mack iii even

though he graduated fort myers high school he moved back into the district to run for his father's office and many in south first florida voted. they felt they were voting for his father and they were upset when they realized after the tabulation that they had voted for this his son. being a disabled veteran when george bush didn't produce his -- post to david, let me jump in because we are running out of time with the authors. what is your question or comment? >> caller: i was leading into the question. this is a question i've recently started asking my friends about voter fraud. here is my question. which are the three largest cities in the u.s. have a reputation whether it is deserved or not for having corrupt elections. >> i'm not sure the authors can answer. either of you to take a stab? not sure? >> guest: never belonged to king cities and maybe louisiana and new jersey. >> host: that we get to some

criticism of the book if i can from howard's column yesterday. deep background means you can describe someone's thinking or reconstruct freedom by of when you write about events involving that person. as an author that used the technique i don't believe it entitles you to quote what someone said to you. which puts on the record and several other journalists have said the agree. he is referring to the quote but came out on what he reed said in private about john heilemann, why don't you take that? >> guest: first in the authors node we refer to the notion we conducted our interview on deep background and then we say in a shorthand way what that meant which was basically as a word rights in the peace. the authors's note isn't complete in the sense it does not have a thorough description of all of the conversations we have with our sources which we had with every source we talk to. they would talk in great detail

about how the interview we were about to conduct would be used and would go through a speech. there was no actual scrap there might have been where we would lead them through is a this is of the interview was going to go. this is how we can work and what isn't going to work. i can say that there is no case in which the way that we explain what we are going to do in the and we didn't live up to that agreement with any source in the book and it is a think it's important people understand it's not a concept etched in stone. every journalist in some sense house rules of the road and the rules of the road with the rules we stuck to in every instance. >> host: you don't think there is concrete on the record or of the eckert deep background? >> guest: there isn't. you can read with new ones describe different things to read what me emphasize a couple of points made. we didn't violate the agreement with anybody we interviewed for

the book and on like a lot of exchanges in washington and journalism generally between the reporters and sources for the terms are not defined but they are assumed there's commonality or they are determined on the flight we meticulous the and carefully in every exchange and every interview we did went through the project the terms we were discussing and we didn't violate them with anyone we talk to for the buck. >> guest: >> host: fort lauderdale, melvin on the democratic line. >> caller: yes i have a comment i want to -- a couple people indicated barack obama wasn't living up to his campaign promises but this is in a lot of the campaign is taking place a lot of people talking about deficit spending. people don't realize when reagan took office the deficit was 980 billion. with a senior left office it was

405 trillion. clinton got the surplus and when george bush deficit was 10.9 trillion when obama took over a think it is now 12 trillium. why do the democrats get blamed for the spending when it is republicans who treated the deficit and democrats never seem to address that issue and continue to get demonized for the spending and republicans use this. >> host: some of this is playing out in the special election in massachusetts about democrats being spenders and raising taxes and state senator scott brown running the campaign widening heading into today's election. john heilemann, i was wondering if you could compare notes from hillary clinton's compendium staffers she had into the

reports i saw in the newspapers this morning that hillary clinton's staff from new england is helping run martha coakley's ken . >> guest: mark might know more. we've been so busy i don't know the details going on. i know the broad dynamic scoring on and certainly it is the case the historical, traditionally in many cases wanted to paint the democrats as the tax and spend party. they've been relentless in doing that in the course of the last year. they've been successful in having done that in massachusetts it was to be playing out in the point where you have a situation where martha coakley is not and the same time much more importantly she's lost, she has had a hard time getting the number of independent voters she would need to are obsessed with the questions of tax and spending and deficit. on questions of the staffing i just can't answer that i don't know. was cuddy want to we in?

>> guest: one of the most dramatic and human moments in the book or series of moments is clinton's attempt to get teddy kennedy to endorse hillary for president over barack obama and the both frustration and anger that both clintons felt the had a bond with the kennedy family, they'd gone sailing, clinton regularly and privately but tell people how angry and frustrated he was the he had done so much for the family as president and they seem to be drifting towards obama. hillary clinton and bill clinton have incredibleolital support in massachusetts and one of it and the satisfying moments on super tuesday was despite the fact senator kennedy had endorsed barack obama hillary was able to win massachusetts, some of her field operatives who work not just in massachusetts but also new hampshire are now as i understand working for the democratic nominee. they probably should have been there sooner and i think most people watching this closely the believe their involvement is being done at the last minute very quickly and may be too

little too late if i may use the cliche on c-span. >> host: steve, go ahead. >> caller: i was wondering if you could talk about for mitt romney in his public image with his relationship with john mccain and mike huckabee. >> guest: in the book we spend for a variety of reasons we did not spend as much time on the republican race because it lacked the drama of the race. however there is interesting material on mitt romney and to the specific questions i think there is one very striking example of the disparity between the public image and private reali which is the public image if anything was defined a competent ceo character. he was an arch capitalist. in addition to the governor of massachusetts but this notion he was a pragmatic businessman like he could from the government as it were a board room.

>> guest: decisis captain of industry. >> guest: and what you see through the coverage in the book of mitt romney is that his staff was constantly frustrated with the fact he was totally and decisive, he could never tell things all metal a speaking a campaign slogan this discussion went on for months and months and they never came up with a campaign slogan because romney was seeking more advice that the consultant side of town dominated in some ways he would ask for more and more input constantly taking more sound he wanted more data and the deluge of data paralyzed him from making decisions and for a lot of the people around him they were sort of stunned by that disparity between the decisive and indecisiveness they saw in mitt romney. his relationship with the other candidates was horrible and we have some quite vivid details in the book about just how much john mccain and mike huckabee and all of the republican candidates disliked mitt romney. they saw him as a kind of preening prima donna. at the debates he wouldn't have to sneak up on in the same room as the rest of the candidates and there