white house and on in depth your calls and tweets for issue dale read. look for the complete schedule at booktv.org and get scheduled e-mails directly to you. sign up for booktv alerts. >> next, columnist for the nation and english journalism professor at brooklyn college and sunni graduate school. he argues president obama has been unable to deliver on many of his campaign pledges. he points to the political system as the main obstacle for a more progressive agenda. he discusses his book and busboys and poets in washington d.c.. is just over an hour. >> i did a book for a few days ago where everywhere i went somebody would call the bookstore and say i was sick and had to cancel and when i was

doing the bookstore in l.a. they called c-span to cancel and c-span called me and said we are sorry. please. >> thank you for coming. i wrote the book, it's called

"kabuki democracy: the system versus barack obama." i thought -- originally when i thought about giving the talk about the book in washington, i thought i might have to come explain, no, i don't think obama went too far to the right and has to be brought back to the left. sorry. it's so noisy. where was i? of course. here's the thing. barack obama invited me to dinner in 2005. and i didn't really have a strong opinion of the guy going in. i didn't watch his speech in 2004. i was at the convention. but i played poker that night. because i never watched the knee note speech of a convention because it's either great and you are depressed that this guy is not the nominee, like i would

have been had i watch that speech the year that kerry was the nominee. or boring the way that bill clinton gave it. or it's boring. why would you need to watch that? it doesn't matter the convention. you are at a convention. you might as well have fun. i didn't see him that night. i went in and dinner with him completely cold. i'd heard a few nice things about him. nothing specific. i sat next to him, i was blown away by his pose and self-confidence, by his good humor, and by his strong, progressive orientation. i remember leaving the restaurant that night walking around the neighborhood in d.c. thinking that maybe my daughter who at the time was seven would one day be able to vote for this man in the presidential election. but i never imagined that --

anything like his canada -- candidacy like in three years. it was anything beyond what i could dream. barack obama is president of the united states. not only is he the president, but he ran a very powerful campaign. he ran a campaign that was quite specific in terms of the direction that he wanted to take the country, and the kinds of policies that he wanted to implement, and the campaign was not one of empty rhetoric. it was not one of simply trying to be the last guy standing. it was a campaign about turning the country around. and it wasn't merely because george bush was incompetent or corrupt, not corrupt, but a corrupt administration. it was because the ideological obsessions of the bush administration and the administration -- the public administrations before it.

and to some degree, the clinton administration which had -- which had been forced to work within those parameters. those ideological parameters that had taken the country so far down the dangerous road that a fundamental correction was needed. it was understand -- this was understood by the people that voted for him. it wasn't the matter that i liked this guy better than the other guy. or i don't really like mccain or this sarah palin woman is funny and kind of cute, but actually quite terrifying. it was here is a program that we are voting for that will mean fundamental change for the country. what's more as we all remember, he was elected with a super majority in both houses of congress. and so for the first time in recent memory, we had the equivalent of a parliamentary

election in this country. the parliamentary election, the parliamentary majority gets to actually enact what they have selected to do. and then take responsibility for it. and it's not the system that we have. usually we have divided government here. but we didn't in 2008. and yet, again, as we all know, it didn't work out that way. we got -- well, we got some movement. it would be wrong to pretend that the obama administration has no significant accomplishments. it has many significant accomplishments in the two years of his presidency. but none of the accomplishments live up to the rhetoric of the campaign. and it's not easily apparent why. in other words, if you take, for example, the most failing

example would be the financial reform bill. the three examples that i use -- i spend the most time on in the book are the health care reform bill, cap and trade bill which died, and the financial reform bill. health care is a complicated issue. there's some awfully powerful interest fighting on every fight of it. and it's very easy to scare people. particularly old people, about their health care and whether or not they are going to lose their doctors or so forth. and that's one the reasons why no one has been able to pass it since harry truman first proposed it in the election of 1942. actually, it was proposed by -- originally teddy roosevelt when he ran as the bull moose candidate in 1912, i believe. yeah. but the first democratic, the first major party candidate was harry truman and no democrat has

made much progress with it until barack obama. and then cap and trade, that's a very complicated issue. it's complicated because people living today are being asked to make sacrifices for posterity. and that generally doesn't work. the famous -- there's famous political saying, what has prosperity ever done for me? and once more, it's very complicated and easy to mislead people on. and one the more depressing statistics, i think you'll hear all year is that fewer people believe in the reality of manmade global warming. in 2009 and 2010 than did in 2007 and 2008. when, in fact, the evidence for it was quite strong. of the 20 republican senate candidates who ran for office in 2010, 19 denied the reality of

manmade global warming. okay. so those are problematic issues. we can talk more about them in the question and answer if you like. if you take a look at financial reform issue, the president had the wind at his back in every imaginable respect. we had just gone through a terrible crisis that had cost thousands and thousands of jobs, cost thousands of thousands of people their homes, maybe millions, i don't know, a lot of time. cost people their homes, the stock market had lost roughly 1/3 of its value. the housing bubble alone accounted for 9% of gdp. so we faced the enormous crisis. and the cause of the crisis was pretty clear. it was the irresponsibility behavior of the banking sector, particularly with regard to the housing sector, but with regard to a lot of things. the fact that they were playing with having the rules and

understood themselves to be gambling with the house's money. when you gamble with the house's money, you gamble. it's fun. you don't have to worry about losing. well, not only were the culprits clear and the country understood who they were, but the memorydies were also rather clear. remedies like breaking up the big banks, capping executive pay, making sure that they didn't use their own money when they gambled, and mixed it up with the money that they were holding for people who deposited it. these were simple things relatively to understand. you didn't need to demagogue them. you only needed to focus on them. you would have reformed the system in such a way the obvious dangers would be eliminated. so we wouldn't keep experiencing these kinds of panics.

but they couldn't do it. they passed basically toothless financial reform bill. it doesn't -- it's not as if it's worse than what it was before. it's better than what it was before. but the opportunity to actually reign in the system and make it safe for individual investors so that we can be sure that we are not going to be bailing out the aigs and the citigroups and jpmorgan's next time. it was lost. now like i said -- it's not that i fell in love with barack obama or seduced by barack obama. maybe i wasn't, maybe i was. i think you'll agree it's hard to imagine a -- anyone who's more progressive and more intelligence and have a better handle on things than barack obama being president of the united states any time soon. he's given his background, he's multicultural background, the

experiences and the background he had in terms of not only being a harvard "law review" editor, and community organizer and so forth. it's kind of a miracle the guy got elected president, particularly when you consider his name. so i began to try to figure out why when you had all of these circumstances in your favor, why when the system was finally supposed to work on behalf of the -- to make good on all of the promises that not only his campaign made, but that progressives has been working towards for deck -- decades. why the system couldn't deliver. where it delivered what used to be called moderate republican governance, as opposed to liberal or progressive democratic governance. now, the answer is it's not simple. i don't know if you are -- if you are like me in this respect, i have a lot of trouble watching

american political news. like real news shows. they just make me want to punch someone. strangle by cat, you know? they make me crazy and angry at the same time. but i can watch jon stewart and steven colbert. they give me the right number of snippets before my blood starts to boil and shoot out of my ears. but the thing -- the problem that i have with stewart and colbert, the problem -- god bless them. it's not just the problem that everybody has with them these guys that they have marched for sanity and refuse to admit that most of the crazy people are in one side, not the other, a lot of them are in congress. the problem that i have is it's always one thing after the other. look how crazy this is. look how ridiculous this is. but they -- it's not their job. they are comedians.

but they don't lead us to think about all of these things together. in other words, you could fix any one of these things and still have all of the other problems that they are going to do a show about tomorrow. all of these things are significant roadblocks to sensitive politics in our country. i was trying to do two things with the book. the book had two separate genesises. i believe that's the plural of genesis. the guy, who happens to be president of the united states with a super majority of two houses could not make good on his promises. and number two, to explain all of the significant roadblocks in the system that answer that question. not just focus on the one of the moment. not just focus on, you know, there was a crisis in the gulf of mexico and so the problem is

that we don't do a good job of regulating oil drills. it's true. but there are a million of crises like that. they are waiting to happen. in part because we just experienced eight years of the incompetent and ideologically obsessed and corrupt administration in the country. that's one reason. but there are many reasons. so i looked as i said, at these three issues, these three legislative issues. i tried to figure out who were the roadblocks that prevented the obama presidency from making good on the obama candidacy? now it's not sure obama and his administration did a lot of things wrong. we can talk about that during the question and answer period, i have any view, you are your view. we probably share a lot of views. just off the top of my head, i'll tell you i don't understand

why he didn't try and affect a more rhetorically inspires presidency, the way that john kennedy and franklin roosevelt, and to be honest, ronald reagan did. i think he had that opportunity and that talent, and he chose not to do it. and there were other strategic mistakes undoubtedly that he made. but the problem with his inability to pass this legislation was not strategic errors by the president, or tactical errors by the president. and it didn't relate, necessarily, to the failure of his communications job. although there was a failure of his communications job. it related to fundamental roadblocks in the system that would face any president, any progressive president, trying to enact the kinds of promises that obama made during the campaign. what are they? well, broadly speaking, you know, many of them. but i don't think most people

understand how powerful they are within the system. how many -- and how strongly they narrow the options of the president trying to make this a more progressive country. i mean an obvious one if you think about the oil spill, for a second, what terrible shape the bush administration left the country in. i mean we had two wars, both of which were going quite badly, but are very expensive. we had eight years of complete environmental and financial mismanagement. we had an administration that didn't belief in science, and actually in many respecteds, didn't believe in competence. you remember james hansen, the head of nasa, was shot down by a guy that was 24 and hadn't finished college. and that was the way things were in the bush administration. so this was an enormous over hang of badly managed government

-- governance, that needed to be addressed simply to avoid catastrophe. and you couldn't do it all at once, as evidenced by the oil drilling catastrophe, and by catastrophes that we still haven't seen yet, but can expect in the future. second is we have an antiquated political system. particularly as regard to the senate, but not only with regard to the senate. so that a very small minority can very easily frustrate the will of the majority. and if you are contemporary republican party, you have every incentive to do so. because the republicans only exercise power as a united group. so they had 40 votes, and none of those matters unless they had all 40 votes. they were able to keep themselves united so they could exercise any power at all. they did so specifically in the

service of seeing the obama program fail. democrats don't do that. democrats like to see governance work. they believe in governance, and they are temperamentally unsuited to obstructionism. not all, but most. republicans are much more interested in power for power sake. and number two, to the degree that government succeeds, conservative ideology fails. so they had every incentive to throw every wrench in every monkey works that they could. and they did. and so given the fed up of the senate, it only takes one senator to put a hold on a bill that can go on forever and frustrate the will of all 99 of the senators, and, of course, the -- you don't need to actually have a filibuster anymore. you can threaten a filibuster and works just like a filibuster. you can do it on every single

bill. which the republicans did. they filibuster -- they threatened to filibuster every single bill until they got -- until a couple of them got what they wanted. frequently, they continued the filibuster. occasionally, the bill could past and reflect the enormous degree on concessions on the part of the president. it just so happens that, you know, our constitution is set up so that if you live in california, we have 1/12 of the influence in the united states senate than if you live in wyoming. and yet the most under populated states in america are also the most conservative states. so over and over and over those 40 republican senators who represent barely 32% of the population were able to frustrate the will of the majority. it wasn't anything obama could do about it. i work at the nation. i may be the most conservative

person at the nation. but people laugh when i say that. but it's true. and there were a lot of sort of people on my left who would criticize obama, saying he should just demand that the democrats pass health care with a public option. he should just demand they pass a carbon tax or cap and trade. yet, there's no way for a president to do that anymore. president's have no power over individual senators and congressman. because individual senators and congressman raise their own money. and unfortunately, there's this -- you know, tea party movement on the right which does actually threaten republican politicians who don't vote the way they want them to and will run primaries against them and will beat them and lose seats as a result. if there were no tea party, the

senate should be republican. but there's nothing like that on the left. and to the degree that anyone made any kind of noise in that direction, the obama administration shut them down right away. we don't want anything to do with it. there was no pressure at all coming from the other side. all of the pressure was coming from one side. now the most powerful form of pressure in our system and you could talk about this all night and you still wouldn't be able to do justice to it, it's the power of money. it's not just that corporations pay for the electoral campaigns of the senators and congressman. although that's powerful incentive to do what they want. they conserve and control the entire culture in which our politics takes place. they define the terms of the debate, they operate in such a way that the people who work in the so-called public interest,

people who work on the committees and so forth are -- see themselves as merely in training for the jobs working in the private sector that take three to four times what the people in the public sector make. and there's no saying at all in switching sides. you would think in a fixed battle over how we are going to regulate the banking sector, there would be some shame in the chairman of the house banking committee staff going to goldman sachs in the middle of the debate. the middle of it. you switched sides. while he was writing the legislation. and yet there is no shame. it's -- you know, she did it a few weeks earlier than we should have. but the fact is that the power of money is so persuasive in our politics and the ideology of finance is so powerful that there's almost nobody on the other side. one thing that i have to say

really shocked me about the way the 2008 to 2010 period turned out was, i was under the impression when obama became president that because of the financial crisis, and because of the obvious malfeasance that had caused it, the banking industry in particular, but business in general had discredited themselves to a degree that was comparable to what president roosevelt faced in 1932. in fact, that wasn't the case at all. the previous behavior played very little role at all in the way that the laws were written. i think i vote senator durbin in this book saying frankly they own the place. and they owned it before the crisis, and they owned it after the crisis. and so -- if you think about it -- you remember it was a long time ago that the media were paying attention to the writing of the rules of the financial regulation bill.

it was many, many months ago. those rules are very, very broadly written. they need to be defined as to what actual practices are allowed and what practices aren't allowed. because particularly in financial business, you can do what you want by changing a few of the accounting practices and doing what you were doing. you could change the name and move one guy into a different division and the whole problem is taken care of. there's about -- i think 1200 different rules. i kept pulling the number out of the air. the actual number is in the book. there's 1200 different rules that have to be written on the basis of the legislation. those rules are all being written by the lobbyist today. there's nobody else there. the press has moved on. and the staffs of these congressman are a) over worked, and b) looking forward to the next job with these very people for whom they are writing rules. even to the degree that victory -- we thought we won victories

in the financial regulation struggle, a lot of those victories are likely to be taken away in the fine print. now finally, and it's just about as important as the power of money is the transformation of our media. broadly speaking, and i write an awful lot about the media. it's hard for me to boil it down to just talking points for tonight's discussion. but broadly speaking, we're facing two simultaneous crises in the media. one is that the traditional media, which was always quite flawed and always drove progressives crazy, but contained a great deal of useful information which could then be prepurposed for an alternative vision of the world, and of the way the country operated, is collapsing for lack of a business model that can support it anymore. and so the information is disappearing. and the -- at the same time,

there's more and more air time. there's a blogosphere. there's more and more media out there coming boo our lives. but it contains less and less substance. therefor, people are able to get away with a lot more. there's a lot more people watching them. a lot more air and light being shown on the dark side of our politics. what used to be, what people were afraid to get away with in the past, things like respectable companies who would have been afraid to give money to the u.s. chamber of commerce to attack politics who they pretended to admire and support, or undermine environmental causes they said they support. they can to that now. there's not the man power in the media institutions to keep an effective watchdog eye on them. there's still people trying to

do it. i salute them. not only is it harder to do it, it's harder to be heard. that's crisis number one. crisis number two is that we have the new beef in our media universe, or media planet system. that's the same thing. i was listening to brian green today. he got me confused with all of the new concepts of universes. i don't know what is universe is anymore. but anyway, and that -- and the most obvious manifestation is fox news. fox news is not a news organization. it is a political organization. and it's a political organization that massacre -- massacre aids. if the lie is effective, and if it furthers the policy that you

supports the lie, then it's the truth. franklin roosevelt lied an awful lot. in a good cause in terms of getting the united states into the second world war. lyndon johnson lied a lot in a bad cause. in terms of getting the united states into the vietnam. we are critical of johnson because of vietnam, and admired roosevelt because of world worlr ii. but they both lied. we have a first amendment and a system of checks and balances that work through the media because we know this. because we know we can't trust the people in power to tell us the truth about what they are doing. well, fox news pulls off one the watchdogs, but they operate as a political organization. they lie.

they lie all the time. they make things up, they slander their opponents, they work hand in glove with politicians and political organizations, and they make no apology for it. all they do is call themselves a news organization and put up news shows. but the rest of it is quite obvious. they sponsor tea party rallies and raise money for candidates. every single potential candidate with the exception of mitt romney who is not in office is on the payroll of fox news. i think media matters added up what it would have cost them to guy the time on the air. and it was something like $68 million of free air time. it's not really free air time for them. they are working in the service of the cause of fox news. if roger ales doesn't like what they are doing, they would be fired. they have to sing his song.

so fox news, which makes no attempt to be fair, and i don't mind bias. but i believe in fairness. i actually believe in balance and fairness. i just wish the words hadn't been stolen from me by rupert murdoch and company. so fox news it does two damaging things two our political system. one is that it devalues -- two. it makes everything malleable and negotiable. so we spent lot of time arguing whether or not barack obama was proposing death panels for old people. and 24% -- 24% of republicans -- believe the president is a muslim. and even higher presidentage believe he might no be an muslim, but he's working to turn the united states into an islamic republic.

i'd love to know the 7% that don't think, but want to turn the united states into islamic republic. again, as i mention, we have a much -- a significantly smaller percentage of people who believe that global warming is manmade phenomenon even though during this very period, the evidence for that increased profoundly. so truth is devalued. but also there's been enormous affect of bias on the decision. because fox is so financially successful. i think fox news alone made $500 million in profit last year. whereas -- and msnbc makes a little bit of profit and cnn loses money on it's operations in the united states. certainly in primetime. so cnn and to some degree the larger networks hate fox news because that's where the audience is. so you get cnn sponsoring debate

be the tea party. you had them broadcasting -- look at this woman michele bachmann, think about it. she gave a speech two weeks ago where she applauded the u.s. constitution for ending slavery. i'm not making this up. i'm not making this up. [laughter] >> she's -- remember glenn beck rally on the mall. so cbs hired some helicopter guys to give a crowd estimate. the crowd estimate was 87,000 people. that was the honest estimate as best as they could do. some between 80 and 100. michele bachmann gets up on the stage. she says don't let anybody tell you there's under 1 million people here. the tea party that sends this, don't let anybody tell you. closing your ears and screaming while somebody tries to say

excuse me that's the reality over here. that's who the tea party picked to represent them. that's who cnn chose to broadcast without interference without any sense of obligation to connect the lies and deliberate misstatements of fact that is are made all the time. when you think about it from the perspective of the president of the united states who had a complicated agenda. it's hard to pass health care in this country because we have to write a bill that's hundreds and hundreds of panels. it's easy to manipulate and misportray. and it's really, really hard to pass a bill to deal with the problems of global warming because there's so many economic tradeoffs to be made, and because there's no many uncertainties built into the system. financial regulation, we agree it has to be done. how you do it is difficult. because the financial system is

so complicated. if you have to do it through the prism of deliberate opposition and distortion and manipulation, when the slightest little thing can be blown up into -- by this operation, operating in concert with this irresponsible movement and this political party that is dedicated only to undermining the president, well, it becomes damn near impossible to pull the thing off. and it's not just fox news and cnn, it's a collapse of standards throughout the entire media that comes from the desperation on the ground -- desperation deriving from the end of the financial underpinning of these stations. but also the success of fox news. you know, one the most depressing statistics, i'll stop in a minute. i feel like i have probably gone on plenty of time here.

one the most depressing statistics of the past -- of 2009, just in 2009, is this. now think about newt gingrich for a second okay? he was the leader of a failed rebellion of the republican party. he was disgraced, he was having a heart attack about clinton getting a blow job and having an affair. his first wife had to go on welfare and get money from the church because he was a dead-beat dad. then he went crazy after that. he said things like he endorsed the notion that barack obama is really leading the country on the basis of i don't know who is some umbu leader, colonial

ideology. whoever says this should be hanging out pages on the streets through the messages they get from aliens. they shouldn't be on television. well, newt gingrich was the single most frequently booked guest on "meet the press" in 2009. he had no official position of any kind. now he used to be the speaker of the house, okay? the speaker of the house, nancy pelosi was not on "meet the meet the -- "meet the press" in 2009, if you add up all of the speakers beside newt gingrich. doesn't increase. the only exspeaker is newt gingrich. he was the single most invited guest on "meet the press" in

2009. and he's nuts. he's crazy. he says things about our president that are -- that no fourth grader should believe. and yet it is in this atmosphere that this president has to pass this very complicated and difficult and many respects from the citizen perspective, very demanding legislation. so these are -- all four of these problems are very serious. they are structural, and they can't be solved by the president himself. even if he had a better communication jobs, even if he had done a few things more smartly than he did. he require the engaged citizenry and require the political movement that's better organized and smarter and more disciplined than the one we have. i think we deserve kind of a break for taking our eye off of the ball after we elected barack

obama president. it was very exciting electing that many president, particularly after the horror that we lived under for eight years under bush and cheney. it turns out not to have been enough. it turns out to be an beginning, not an end. it's a little hok

>> i ask that you keep your comments and questions brief. here we go. >> thank you for a great talk, but roosevelt, as you know, was hated by the dominant media of the day. most of them anyway. 2/3 of the nation's newspapers landed in 1936. there was father and the popular demagogue that was against him. yet, he still triumphed. i wonder in some ways, media is

not the problem. maybe this is -- at least on economic issues and issues of big government, this is just a conservative country, at least those who vote and are active. perhaps you are putting too much emphasis on the media. >> well, dr. kasin, i appreciate your question. but you came late. you came late to class. there was much discussion of the related points before i got to the media aspect. i will grant the point that progressives have an additional problem. which is that american ideology is -- it is antigovernment. there's a libertarian streak that runs through both the left and the right. and that some of the most inspiring statements for the libertarians, antigovernment statements are from people like thomas paine and emerson and so

forth. government that governs best i believe is payne. >> thurou. okay. >> it's correct in the book. we need to find the successful presidents have done, find an ideology. it leads to the significant criticism of this president. he has fore gone the belief system. this week those of you who watch a lot of c-span or in this case hbo have had the opportunity to see john kennedy's address, as well as the number of the press conferences that he gave. i wrote a book in significant measure by kennedy. i like john kennedy. but there are a lot of problems with the things he did there. a lot of very significant problems. one wonderful thing about john kennedy was the rhetoric, and

the inspiration track move them and put their lives in the direction of the arch of justice. barack obama did a wonderful job of that during the campaign and stopped on day one of the presidency, and got involved in the legislative debates over, you know, which rule was going to be included in which draft of which bill. i think that was a terrible mistake. i don't see why he could have done both. ronald reagan did both. there's no reason that obama wouldn't have done both as well. beginning in tucson, he started that man return, the one that brought tears to our eyes in denver and other places is back. i think it'll be a terrible mistake for him to return to the style of the first two years of the presidency. ma'am? >> three things. i'll take them short. can you talk about the thinking about about the title of the book? >> yeah. >> second one, are you saying that they should not have shown

michelle michele bachmann at all, or analysis and framed it in some way? because i might be curious to show it. one more. >> i don't have any problem with them reporting on michele bachmann's crazy speech. look at this crazy lady. about the slavery ending the constitution. anyone ever mention the civil war to you? but just to show it as if it were the equivalent of an act of state deserving respect without context or criticism, that was deeply inresponsible. the book is called "kabuki democracy" it might be wrong, a couple people have told me i'm unfair to kabuki theater with

the title. to me it implies the theatrical enactment without the substance. looked at from afar, people are going through the motions of having a democracy. and the actual democracy has been hallowed out by the things that i describe in the book. primarily money, yet it's a factor as well. >> okay. for the most important comments. >> okay. >> i'm interested in psychological manipulation of the public and demystification of the language. i went to the glenn beck rally and listened to newt gingrich. they probably hire consultants and anti-colonial -- he doesn't say he's anti. what is he? it's very, very so fest indicated in progressives are not so good at that.

one frame that i want to throw out. there's a problem with using the term global warming. you can bet after the snowstorm tomorrow, they are going to say al gore was wrong because it snowed. a better term, more accurate would be climate chaos. because you have chaotic patterns. we should all use the term climate chaos. >> okay. you heard it here first. thank you. sir? >> thank you. your talk reminds me of the books, "triumph for conservative ism" is one. it looks at crowley and louis herbertmeyer came out. i think crowley's book was revisionist, thinking of regulation as the reestablishment of the status quo.

do you think that's why we have so much problem with so much anti-intellectualism. it's easy to take advantage of the simple media with the complexity that we have here. i'm going to go back and read kirkland's book again, i think after listening to you. and the committee for industrial relations, some of the interacting relationship on the book on the documents of american history. >> i take your point. but one reason why i wrote the book, i'm proud of only doing it in a couple of hundred panels, it's not any one thing. we have a whole set of problems that create a system that is sporadic in many numbers of ways. anti-intellectualism is a problem. particularly when it's so easily manipulated by sarah palin on

twitter, michele bachmann, or just the dumbness of cable news. it's not the only problem. if we stop, we still have the money in the system and the democratic function of the senate. so i think we need to -- we need to take a more holistic view of our systemic problem; sir? >> good evening, sir. i'm sure you are aware as little sometime ago here in virginia, the individual mandate of the health care bill was ruled unconstitutional in part, and they ruled the entire thing unconstitutional. now the way the debate has been worked, when it gets to the supreme court, the way the issue is framed will determine how it is decided. i was wondering if you could talk about the legal institution have to do with the ways the laws are passed and enforced. >> i'm going to take the opportunity to answer in such a way that i'll know what i'm talking about, rather than answer your question where i

wouldn't know what i was talking about. but it's also very important -- you've given me the opportunity to say something important that i didn't get to say. which is if i had to say was at the root, the most important single problem we have, it's the power of money in our political system. and that is a legal problem. it's a legal problem because the supreme court insists on defining money as speech and corporations as people. they don't really have a good basis. particularly with regard to corporations and people. it's very murky as to why that should be the case. there's, i think, in a side somewhere 100 years ago where it was mentioned. then it was just built on it. it was never any actual decision by any court that ruled on that. and yet as long as corporations are people and money is speech, we can't really regulate our politics. they can get away with just about anything.

and so that's a long term battle that we have to fight. in the meantime, we need to do something to try to equalize people for the power of people versus the power of money. so i would strongly urge every progressive person and group to look at the power of money in their particular issue. because i do think it's possible to make the case that we should save taxpayers a fortune if we publicly financed our elections. we couldn't have to pay for all of the giveaways to the people that are paying. it's not that expensive. every other democracy does it. there's no other democracy that allows people to exercise the power that we do. we pay a fortune. because it's one step removed and doesn't get covered by the media, it's ignored. the media do cover in the power

of policy, the issue of money in politics. they don't uncover the power. it's not covered when the decisions is being made. it's treated like it's a battle between nancy pelosi and john boehner and as if the insurance industry and pharmaceutical industry aren't in the room at the time. they are writing the legislation. i think fundamentally, if there's one thing that can be taken away from what i'm saying, it's that you can't talk about any issue of progressive politics without understanding the media, but b, c, and d, understanding the role of money and how it needs to be addressed. >> hi, my question has a lot to do with what you've just mentioned. understanding the money of politics in understanding the difference or discrepancy between obama the campaigner who was outstanding and obama the

president who's a bit disappointing. i guess my question about that would be do you have any idea why he didn't use campaign finance reform as some kind of agenda that he would try to implement in his first term? my understanding of what happened in 2008 is that how thanks to his skills as an outstanding campaigner, he was able to circumvent the power and money in politics because he was able to reach out to people who would chip. >> that understanding on your part is mistaken. that's what they portrayed themselves as doing, when, in fact, they were reliant on big donaries. and the fact they knew they could out raid mccain. and the president can out raid the challenger in a case like that. so from the stand point of obama's personal interest, he

had no interest in supporting campaign finance reform from the presidential election because he is going to vastly out raise whoever the republicans put up. the rest of the system will continue to be a wash and money. we have had campaign finance reform in the past. we did have a reasonable system in place which has not fallen apart in part because obama opted out. it was getting weaker and weaker and less and less up to date. so i think what obama could say to the broader issue of why he didn't make good on the promise to drive the lobbyist up from the temple is the fact he got where the system was in crisis. we were losing 80,000 jobs, the dow was down 5,000 points from its high, and the system

confidence was collapsing. he didn't have the luxury of remaking the system. he needed to make that system work. we needed to get that boat going again before he could address it. once he did that, the opportunity to reform it was lost. he would probably at mitt that he didn't do -- i mean, usually -- the other thing that i hate about the obama administration is the way they make fun of liberals for saying we are disappointed in you. he should be saying i did my best. i'm going to keep fighting. instead he said you whiney little preps, you professional leftist, you make any sick. even if you think it's true, it's stupid. but in the case of transforming the system, he has a good argument. but he hasn't been -- he hasn't

owned up to what he's done and said now i'm going to go back and fight for the things i believe in. he won't admit it's impossible for the people in power to admit that there can be any better way to do things than the way they chose to do things. so i'm afraid in that respect, that opportunity has been lost. in part for good reasons, but in part for the fact that you just can't do everything at once. do we have time for one more? okay. >> well, i just want to follow up on what you just said. like the -- you said that you had a personal interaction with obama and you were impressed with his ideas and how they fit into a progressive agenda. >> yup. >> and then those of us that believe in the progressive agenda have spent the last two years being disappointed. then we also want to present the ideas that he was fighting in coming up against the whole

system that we know is in place that's going to very much discounselor this -- discourage this agenda and the way that we want to present it and the way that people feel needs to be acknowledged. me hope that he understands all of the things that you understand and that the progressives understand in terms of how the system works and how the system is going to be dealt with. and then on some level, he has a plan. in terms of dealing with the obstructions that he's going to come up with in terms of delivering what it is that we really hope from his campaign he was going to be able to deliver. and whether or not there should be some hope, i guess, is what i'm looking for that ultimately if he gets another term, he will be able to deliver on those. >> good question. well said. well, i think you can rest assured he does understand the

things that i understand and more. i think i feel confident about that. there's a quote in my book that i borrow from david remnick from one of obama's mentors in chicago who thought obama that when you can't get the whole hog, you got to be happy with the ham sandwich. and he's very much a ham sandwich man. he's grabbing all of the ham sandwiches that he can. these are the rather fatty and tasteless ham that's available in the system today. will there be a better sandwich with tastier portions of the big? in the future? i had this theory. i thought it was a great theory three or four times. he was going to unite us and work together and work with republicans and people wanted that. that was a good way for the

black man to become president of the united states, particularly with a black man with a last name hussein and rimes with obama. it was very comfortable. then he would try to do it. it was possible. they had no interest in cooperating. then he should have said, hey, i tried tuesday this nice. i tried to be a good guy. they can't play along. now i'm going to have to wash the floor with their face. we never got to that point. he's still saying he's going to try harder and harder to be nice. the media is demanding to reach out further and further, give them the entire shoulder, not just the elbow down cut off. he seems to not be taking up the second part of the strategy that i had planned for him that i thought was such a good idea. i am genuinely confused. what i thought he was doing made a lot of sense and i told my

progressive friends to be cool. it's part of a plan. that's great. maybe it's an eight-year plan, not a four-year plan. he's supposed to end it on hopeful notes. maybe it's eight. but it's going to require a lot of work on the kinds of people that push franklin roosevelt to the left as well. that's our job. starting with guying our book. okay. i guess it's not the end. we have one more question. has to be a hopeful question or we're not taking it. >> i got a suggestion for you. to help relieve some of your confusion. as a black person who has voted for long time now, i wasn't disappointed or in any way, you know, confused as who obama was because i didn't vote for him. i voted for mckinnie, who