conservative people wherever they lived regardless of party, to sort of dance together and take that the country. it didn't work. he leaves office. he can't get -- the democrats at this time are not democrats as you know like now. the parties are sort of split from where they were. they didn't trust him and the republicans surely weren't going to have him so he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he runs for office. he is unsuccessful at first but then in his return to the senate and he sees this as a vindication that he was right all along. he goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out and he is there only for a few months.

but not huge rings of material that i think as i is they said was one of the most difficult on american life of anybody even though he is a judge and the president. thurgood marshall one of his

dissents i believe it was and maybe it was in boston, he said that if america had done what it was supposed to have done in that time period, and he talks about this reconstruction period as a point of lost opportunity and i think that you cannot lame one person for all the good that happens or all the bad that happens. the president and the president is a leader of the country, the symbolic leader. in times of crisis, people don't look to the supreme court or the congress. the president is the energy of government and the president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership and the kind of leadership that he exhibited during this time period isn't enough to make -- everything all

by himself but he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done and that is the real tragedy of his presidency but again i think that is why more people didn't know about andrew johnson because i really do believe he helped to make us who we are today. think about land reform. think about the difference wealth, the production of wealth in the ballot immunity where the former slaves of headlamp. instead of being sharecroppers. the difference between owning your own property and printing it from someone else. we got the 14th amendment because all the laws of congress for passing, forced them into passing the 14th amendment and that is a good thing. think about the loss. if he had not opposed land reform and not opposed it, blacks have been -- in the

1860s. he set us back. he said the country back and set the black he pulled back tremendously with the failure of his leadership. the way he exercised his leadership. he said he wanted to preserve the treaty as white man's government and he would actually do that for the longest period of time time and if historical circles up until the civil rights movement he was seen by many as a good resident. the so-called dunning school, the school of historians out of colombia and other places to -- johnson is a hero who helped stave off rule. worthless rule in the south essentially. that historical school into the

20th century. deb e.b dubois wrote it took to set the record straight. very very clearly and for other people. once he did that other people began to take a look at books about reconstruction and the people who are congresspeople. these are some of the most educated people. these were really really educated men, talented who were in these offices and it is that whole "birth of a nation", dunning school business that really propped up bender johnson because it made it look like his adages were the correct ones. after dubois and others people began to take a different look at reconstruction and understood that it was more of a problem than any kind of solution. so, i am glad, i have to say even though it took me a long

time to do it and it was difficult about -- to write about someone who given all, was responsible for a lot of bad things that happen but you have to try to have enough -- men to present your points, and i hope i've managed to do that. but i do think i make very strongly the case that he is a figure that he cannot ignore. the kinds of things he did during reconstruction and the trajectory of his life is a very american story in good ways and in bad ways. so with that i would like to take your questions. [applause]

>> thank you very much. we have got hands already. fantastic. right here in the fifth row. >> do you see any player levels between the take back the country movement at the end of johnson's time and a tea party and sarah palin? [laughter] >> well, you know parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution and some people say too much. you know that it is almost like a sacred text and any time we are in trouble or anytime we any time we want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document, even people on the left. i mean, not as much as i think they should, but people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. i think it is different because

it is different in this sense. 500,000 people died, both regions especially the south estimated. this was really life during wartime. this was not life during wartime, that time and wartime. we had wars going on overseas but this is hyperbole i think at this point taking a country back. the country hasn't gone anywhere you know what i mean? these people are in a real -- they took up arms against one another and fought one another, and those were really serious life-and-death kinds of issues. i think that they are using that rhetoric but it is not to my mind as serious as the time period that those people were in. it is more -- it is rhetoric. it is sloganeering. i am not saying that people don't have legitimate concerns than they are not serious about them but johnson, we are talking

about life and death. certainly, and the south. if you read eric foner wrote the big book on reconstruction and i relied on that and pointing me to some materials about some of the things that were going on. i mean you know, this guy talked about going to a village in texas, a town in texas and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men women and little children, lacks and the rivers with bodies floating down them. i mean, this was after the war is over when people turned on blacks and try to reassert their control. they were playing for keeps back then. i don't know what this is. it doesn't compare to that i don't think, even though they might think it does. >> another question right here in the fourth row. >> thank you for coming to the

free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a bit about education? i have never quite understood why the radical republicans didn't press and push much more resources into providing education for the free slaves. >> oh well they did to the freedmen's bureau. they tried to do that. the friedman bureau, they're poignant stories about people, little kid sitting next to grown people. that is what they tried to do but those schools were attacked. knight riders, people who tried to be teachers and them. there was a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people, the folks -- i didn't want blacks in schools. they definitely try to do that. the schools, howard, higher education, howard university started by general howard and they tried to do that but in lots of these little places they were not in control of all of this and certainly once the military leaves education

becomes really really sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during during that time period so they tried, but there were lots of opposition and violent opposition in many many places. >> the lady on her left in the third row. >> when did johnson freed his slaves, or did he freedom? >> after the end of the war they become free, yeah. not before them. he may have freed a couple before then but not until after that. >> right here. >> what do you think about johnson's argument that secession was buoyed avenue shia? >> well, lincoln said that too, that it is illegal that secession was illegal and the reason he said it was because it secession is illegal, then the

president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellions and so forth. it secession is illegal and legal and they left, then you could say they are like territories and congress rules the territories so it as a matter of a political, the separation of powers, it was a political argument, but again, lincoln died so we don't know what he would have done or what he really thought. but for him he said that was an obstruction. it was a pernicious abstraction. johnson took it very very much to heart. he was very literal minded on that. what i think is that well, if they thought they could leave, they left. i mean jefferson davis did set up a government. it is hard for me to pretend that they were not real, that what they had was not a real thing and i think congress, they

should have been governed as territories and i think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct them. so i understand the legal argument about it, but practically and realistically they setup their own government and they stopped participating and they went their own separate way for a time period. >> right here in the third row. >> well, what was basically the base of support for johnson? after all he was regarded as a traitor of the southern diehards and as an unreliable president by the northern abolitionists. >> well, before -- do you made while he is president? while he is president he didn't

have that much support. he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed and at this point he begins -- he wants to try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about it being lenient with the former southern planters. they were still planters but he tried to butter them up by not punishing him the way he said it was originally going to do. he wanted to build this party and he wasn't really successful at doing it. public opinion varied about him. sometimes the northerners liked him and sometimes they hated him but once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction they uniformly hated him so that is why he couldn't get a nomination after, certainly after the impeachment nobody wanted to have him back that he didn't really have very much support. he spent most of his presidency trying to build that by currying favor with the southerners and then sometimes appearing lenient to northerners but it didn't work.

he please nobody. he tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until he manages at the end to get back to the senate for a brief period of time. but he was -- it is interesting because he must -- he was a good politician to a degree because he couldn't have come from nowhere to where he went but once he got into office, it was like he was out of i think out of his league. he was out of his depth. so he ended up with not very many friends at all. >> about four rows back in the middle. while we are getting that might bear do you think he was a tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? gosh. i think he was a tragedy for the country. a tragic figure? you know, he didn't -- i can't

find anything about him -- he didn't seem to have had a physical sense of humor and a way. there there is not a lot of -- yeah i would think he is a tragic year. [laughter] when i think of tragedy you think of like a hero, you think of somebody who has the grand you know persona and assorted brought down. i feel, but i do think in a sense he is tragic to kos he wanted desperately to rise and he did rise and it is an amazing story. you can't read until you are 19 years old and then you are president at some point. that is the great, the tenacity and which served him well. that is why he was able to stay committed to the union. a tremendous personal sacrifice. he could have been killed. there are many many people who wanted to kill him and he stood fast against all of that, but i

think, i don't know how much self-awareness he had. see that is the way i'm hesitating about this. if you think of a tragic figure, tragic figures you have, i think you have some evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. i think he died thinking he was vindicated and he had done the right thing. so he would not have seen -- he would certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to get the nomination again but i think you would have thought he was successful, because he was. i mean he really did save his region from being transformed. this transform to 1965 really, so he actually could count himself as a success in a way or a very long period of time. looking at him i think you know, if he had been a real statesman and -- that he didn't have to do everything the radical republicans wanted that he could

have been a great president. you know if he had made the right choices. i will give you an example. this i think is very telling about him. at one point, in his early career there was a proposal to bring the railroad to eastern tennessee. and even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad because if you brought the railroad, people would get to where they are going so quickly that you wouldn't need ends and taverns. so, so as not to put in sans taverns out of business you can't have the railroad. well, that make sense in a way, except, except towns sprang up a long railroad routes and i mean the people had to walk places. he had no force. when he leaves tennessee he

walks. he has to walk 70 miles to places and stuff like that. they are talking about dodging mines and so forth. you have the sense of a lack of vision in a way. [laughter] inner vision, and so but if you don't know where where you are deficient it is hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure, and as i said because he was successful. he actually did stave off the transformation of the south for many many decades so i don't think he would count himself as a tragic figure. >> he is also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a lecture. >> and the snow. >> okay the lady in the middle. >> you talked about -- right here. >> where are you? >> you talked about a little bit about his family when he was young. tell us more about his family

life as he became an adult. >> he had his wife who helped him as i said, taught him to read and write. he had -- we don't really know that much about her. she was an invalid for many years and did not accompany him to the white house, did not stay with him in the white house most of the time. his daughter served as the first lady most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seemed consumed by work. he was out giving speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. you don't get a sense that much of his family life other than that he was married, he had three sons and a daughter, one of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. he was an alcoholic, and that was a great tragedy in his life. i talk a little bit about it in

the book, a reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned. there was talk that he had children with her. there is no proof of that. the only thing is that he buys her, and she is about 16 years old. and she has two children. she is listed in the census as black and her children are looses as mullato, meaning mick's raise kids and people talk about that, that was possibly true. some people have criticized me about mentioning that although someone has written a book about andrew johnson talks about this and other articles have talked about it as well. i thought, here is a person who is in la it was important to mention that even as the a possibility out of deference to her and out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of enslaved girls at that time period because he could have been. we don't know that he was that i don't think when you are talking about a person who is a

slaveowner you have to talk about all of the aspects of that, not just buying and selling people. we don't get a sense of again and -- this is in comparison to jefferson where you had lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters and grandchildren and all those kinds of things and people commented on him. one thing that people did say is that he liked children quite a bit. he was good with children and they liked him. one of the people who was the son of a person who was enslaved, one of his slaves, said that he even would bounce black children on his knee. he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. he was able to be apparently childlike with children but you don't give a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. >> we have time for one more

question. we will go to this gentleman right here. >> no, jefferson. >> you may not want to answer this or even respond to this, but have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded in vastly rearranging events of the last half of the 19th century? >> oh, sure, yeah, yeah and i think he could have. he would not -- a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything the republicans wanted to do. one of the things that he did do that i try to convey and i talk about in the book is that his recalcitrance gave aid and comfort to southerners and

people said, their letters and comments, people said we would have accepted anything in the immediate aftermath of the war. we would have accepted any terma white man's government. and so, we knew to hold out. and so, i think the role that he played, i think it is the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. if he hadn't so strenuously oppose voting rights, if he had not sabotage efforts to bring about land reform. this is not to say that the south would have rolled over and and -- when you have the enemy down, you know prostrate, when you have them down, that is when you impose terms and you move forward. and numerous people said his

actions emboldens them to be recalcitrant, to pass the black codes, to sort of tamp down tamp down any move for transferred -- transformation. it would not up in the land for milk and honey. the south would not have rolled over and accepted blacks as equals citizens but it wouldn't have been as bad as it was and you know, a lessening of the problem, and a any lessening of the oppression i think would have made a big difference. so jow, i have thought about it and i do think that his particular brand of presidential leadership was toxic and it is important i think for us now to think about where we are, to go back. that is the importance of history, to go back and see how this got started and where we began to go wrong and what kinds of remedies we need to take. i think it could have been

different. history is all about contingencies and we ended up with a person who was strong enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union but a cousin of his own personal character, a character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of the south because to him that was against everything that he believed. >> please join me in thanking annette gordon-reed. >> our special booktv programming continues with eric alterman columnist for the nation on his luck, "kabuki democracy" the system vs. obama. this is about an hour. >> i am scarier to the right wing. i did a book to her a few years ago where everywhere i went, somebody would call up the bookstore and say that i was sick and had to cancel.

and when i was doing a book bookstore in l.a., they called c-span2 cancel and c-span called me and said you know we are sorry you are sick. i said i'm not sick. and so the event went on but somebody killed all of the electricity in the store while i was speaking and it was one of those stores. i don't want to disparage hippies or anything, but it was one of those stores where nobody knew where the fuse box was. [laughter] so i had to hold the audience for 45 units while they you know, while they found out how to get the electricity back on. i don't have 45 minutes worth of clean jokes. [laughter] so it was rough so i'm glad to see that i'm flying under the radar now and we are okay. so far. so thank you for coming. i wrote this book. is called "kabuki democracy" the

system vs. obama. i thought you know originally i thought if i gave a talk about this book in washington i might have to come and explain it. no, i don't think that obama lurch too far to the left and had to be brought back to the right and that is the narrative that -- sorry, it is a little noisy. where was i? so here is 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 watch the keynote speech of the convention because it is

either great and you are depressed that guy is not the nominee like i would have been had i watched that speech the year that kerry was the nominee or it is boring the way it was when bill clinton gave it and why would you need to watch that? so it doesn't matter that night at the convention. if you are at a convention you might as well have fun so i didn't see it that night. so i went in and had dinner with him completely cold. i had heard a few nice things about him but nothing specific. i sat next to him at dinner and i was blown away by his poise, by his self-confidence, by his good humor and by his strong progressive orientation. and 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 a presidential election

but i never imagined that anything like his candidacy would happen in the next three years. i was literally beyond anything that i could dream of that moment. now, as we all know, barack obama is president of the united states and he not only is the president that he ran a very powerful campaign. he ran a campaign that was quite specific in terms of the direction he wanted to take the country and the kinds of policies he wanted to implement, and the campaign was not one of anti-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 personally corrupt but he had a very corrupt administration. it was because the ideological

obsessions of the bush of administration and the republican administrations before it and to some degree the clinton administration which had been forced to work within those parameters had taken the country so far down the road, so far down this dangerous road that a fundamental correction was needed and this was understood by people who voted for him. so it wasn't just a matter of a kind of like this guy better than i like the other guy or i don't really like ducaine or this therapy linda bowman 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 supermajority 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. parliamentary elections, the parliamentary majority gets to actually enact what it is elected to do. and then take responsibility for it and it is not the system 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 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 is not easily apparent why. in other words, if you take for

example the most salient example with the financial reform bill. the three examples i use, i spend most time on in the book are the health care reform bill, the cap-and-trade bill which died and the financial reform bill. and health care is a very complicated issue and there is some awfully powerful interests fighting on every side of it and it is very easy to scare people particularly old people about their health care and whether or not they are going to lose their doctors and so forth. and that is one of the reasons why no one has been able to pass it since harry truman first proposed it in the election of 1948. actually it was proposed originally by teddy roosevelt when he ran as a bull moose candidate in 1912 i believe, yeah at the first major party candidates for who proposed it

was harry truman and no democrat has made much -- until barack obama. and then cap-and-trade, while that is a very complicated issue. it is complicated because people living today are being asked to make sacrifices or posterity. and, that generally doesn't work there is a famous old political saying what has posterity ever done for me? [laughter] and once more it is very complicated and easy to, easy to mislead people on and one of the more depressing statistics i think you will hear all year is that fewer people believe in the reality of man-made global warming in 2009 and 200010 than they did in 2007 in 2008 when in fact the evidence for it was far stronger. of the 20 republican senate candidates who ran for office in

2010, 19 denied the reality of man-made global warming. okay, so those are problematic issues and we can talk more about them in a the question and answer if you would like it if you take a look at the financial reform issue, the president had the wind at his back and every imaginable respect. we have just gone through a terrible crisis that had cost us thousands and thousands of jobs, cost hundreds of thousands of people their homes, maybe millions, i don't know, a lot of people. cost people their homes. the stock market had lost roughly a third of its value. the housing bubble alone accounted for 9% of gdp. and so we faced this enormous crisis and the cause of the crisis is pretty clear. it was the irresponsible behavior of the banking sector particularly with regard to the housing sector but with a lot of of -- with regard to a lot of

things but the fact that they were playing without any rules and understood themselves to be gambling with the houses money and when you gamble with the houses money, you gamble. it is 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 remedies were also rather clear and remedies like breaking up the big banks, capping executive pay didn't use their own money when they gamble and mix it up with the money that they were holding for people who deposited it. these were very simple things relatively -- relatively to understand and you didn't need to demagogue them. you only needed to focus on the many would have reformed the system in such a way that these very obvious dangers would be eliminated so that we wouldn't

keep experiencing these kinds of panics. but they couldn't do it. they passed basically a toothless financial reform. it is not as if it is worse than it was before. it is better than it was before but the opportunity to actually rein in the system and make it safe for individual investors so that they can be sure that we are not going to be bailing out the aig's and the citigroup's and jpmorgan's next time was lost. now, like i said, it is not that i fell in love with barack obama or that i was seduced by barack obama. maybe i was and maybe i that the fact is that i think you will agree i think it is hard to imagine anyone who is more progressive and more intelligent and got a better handle on things than barack obama being president of the united united s anytime soon.

he has given his background, his multicultural background and experiences he had in the background he had in terms of not only being a harvard law review editor but also being a community organizer and so forta miracle that the guy got elected president particularly when you consider his name. so, i began to try and 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, to make good on all the promises that not only his campaign made, but that progresses have been working towards for decades, why the system couldn't deliver? why it delivered a sickly what used to be called moderate republican governance as opposed to liberal or progressive democratic government. now, the answer is it is not simple. i don't know 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 my cat, you know. they make a crazy and angry at the same time that i can watch jon stewart and stephen cole there. i am fine with that. they give me just the right number of snippets that i can stand the former blood starts to boil and explode out of my ears. but the thing that, the problem i have the steward and cold there and god bless them, i love them but the problem i have is not just a problem that everybody has with them these days that they march for sanity and refuse to admit that most of the crazy people are on one side and a lot of them are in congress, the problem i have is that it is always one thing after another. it is always look how crazy this is an look how crazy this is and look how ridiculous this is but

day, and it is not their job, they are comedians but they don't lead us to think about all these things together. in other words you could fix any one of these things and he still have all these other problems that they will do a show about tamar and the next night in the next night. all of these things are really significant roadblocks to sensible politics in our country. so i was trying to do two things with this book. the book had two separate genesee is, i believe that is the plural of genesis. one was to try and explain why this totally excellent guy who happened to get to somehow be present at the united states with a supermajority and 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 focused on 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 drilling. it is true but there are a million crises like that. they are all waiting to happen in part because we have just experienced eight years of the most incompetent ideologically obsessed and considerably corrupt political administration in the history of the country. that is one reason, but there are many reasons. so i looked as i said at these three issues, these three legislative issues and i try to figure out what were the roadblocks that prevented the obama presidency from making good on the obama candidacy. now, it is not sure obama and his it is trish and did a lot of things wrong and we can talk about that during the question and answer period. i have my view and you have your view. we probably share a lot of views.

just off the top of my head i will tell you i don't understand why he didn't try and effect a more rhetorically inspiring presidency the way john kennedy and franklin roosevelt and to be honest ronald reagan did. i think he had that opportunity and he had that talent and he chose not to do it. and there were other strategic mistakes undoubtedly that he made her go 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 necessary 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 phase in a 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 with this system, how strongly they narrowed the options of the president trying to make this a more progressive country. an obvious one if you think about the oil spill for a second is what terrible shape the bush administration left the country and. 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 believe in science and actually in many respects didn't believe incompetence. you remember james hansen, the head of nasa, was shot down by a guy who was 24 years old who hadn't finished college and that was the way things were in the bush and administration. so there was an enormous

overhang 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 we still haven't seen yet but that we can expect in the future. second is we have an antiquated political system particularly with regards to the senate that not only in regards to the senate, so that a very small minority can very easily frustrate the will of the majority and if you are a member of the 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 mattered unless they had all 40 votes so they were able to keep themselves united so that they could exercise any

power and they did so specifically in the service of seeing the obama program failed. democrats don't do that. democrats like to see governance work. they believe in government and they are temperamentally unsuited to obstructionism. muss, not all that most. republicans are opposite. number one they are much more interested in power for power's sake and number two, to the degree that government succeeds conservative ideology fails. so they had every incentive to throw every branch in every monkey works that they could and they did. and so, given the this setup of the senate it only takes one senator to put a whole lot of -- can frustrate the will of all 99 senators and of course you don't need to actually have a filibuster any more. you can threaten a filibuster

and it works just like the filibuster and so you can do it on every single bill which the republicans did. they filibustered virtually and threatened filibuster of every single bill until they -- until a couple of them got what they wanted and infrequently they would then continue the filibuster and occasionally the bill would pass but it would reflect an enormous rehab concessions on the part of the president. it just so happens that our constitution is set up so that if you live in california, you have won 12 the influence of the united states senate than he would have if he lived in wyoming. and, and yet the most underpopulated states in america are also the most conservative states, so over and over and over those 40 republican senators who represented barely 32 per the population were able to frustrate the will of the majority. and, there wasn't anything obama

could do about it. i work of the nation. i may be the most conservative person at the nation but people laugh when i say that. but it is true. and, there were a lot of sort of people on my left who would criticize a lot of this saying he should just demand that the democrats pass health care with the public option. he should just demand that they pass a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade and yet, there is no way for president a president to do that any more. president has no power over individual senators or congressmen because individual senators and congressmen raise their own money. unfortunately, the 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 we'll beat them and

will lose seats as a result. if there were no tea party the senate would be in republican hands. but there is nothing like that on the left into 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 you. so there was no pressure at all coming from the other side. all the pressure was coming from one side. the most powerful form of pressure in our system, and you could talk about this almighty and you still wouldn't be a will to do justice to it is the power of money. it is not just that corporations pay for the electoral campaigns of our senators and congressmen although that is a pretty powerful incentive to do what they want. but they'd to a considerable degree in control the entire culture of 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, the people who work on the committees and so forth see themselves as merely in training for the jobs working in the private sector that pay three to four times what the people in the public sector make. and there is no shame at all and switching sides. you would think in a pitched battle over how we are going to regulate the banking sector, that there would ease some shame in the chairman of the house banking committee staff going to goldman sachs in the middle of the debate. he switched sides. while he was writing the legislation. and yet there is no shame. he did it a few weeks earlier than he should've but the fact is that the power of money is so pervasive in our politics and the ideology of finance is so powerful that there is almost

nobody on the other side. one thing that i have to say really shocked me about the way that 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 it caused it, that the banking industry in particular but business in general has discredited itself to a degree that was comparable to what franklin roosevelt faced in 1932. in fact, that wasn't the case at all. their previous behavior played very little role at all and the way that the laws were written. i think i quote senator durbin and this looks saying, frankly they own the place and they owned it before the crisis and they owned it after the crisis and so, and 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 but in fact those rules are very broadly written and they need to be defined as to what actual practices are allowed and what practices aren't allowed because particularly in the financial business you can just do what you want by changing a few of the accounting practices and keep doing what you are doing. you will change the name of what you are doing or move one guy into a different division and the whole problem is taking care of. well, there is about i think 1200 different rules. i am pulling that number out of the air. the actual numbers in the book but there are about 12 under different rules that have to be written on the basis of that legislation and those rules are all being written by the lobbyist today. there's nobody else there. the presses moved on and the congressmen are a overworked and b looking forward to the jobs for these people with whom they are writing the rules. so even to the degree that we

thought we will won some victories in that financial regulation struggle, a lot of those victories are likely to be taken away in the fine print. now, finally, and just about as important as the power of money is the transformation of our media. broadly speaking and i write an awful lot about it so it is hard for me to boil it down to just talking points for tonight's discussion but roughly speaking we are 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 repurposed for an alternative vision of the world in the and the way this country operated is collapsing for lack of a business model that can support it. and so the information is

disappearing. and, at the same time there is more and more airtime. there is a blog is here. there is more and more media out there coming into our lives but it contains less and less substance. and, therefore people are able to get away with a lot more because there are fewer people watching. a lot more hot air and a lot less light being shone on the dark side of our politics. so, 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 politicians who they pretended to admire and support or to undermine environmental causes, they can do that now because there is not the manpower in the media institutions to keep an effective watchdog -- watchdog

eye on them. their people trying to do it and i salute them but not only is it harder to do, is much harsher to be hurt. that is crisis number one. crisis number two is two copies that we have this new beast in our media universe or media planet system. i guess it is the same thing. i was listening to brian green on terry gross today and he got me confused with all these new concepts of universe. i don't know what he the universe is anymore but anyway, and the most obvious manifestation of it is "fox news." "fox news" is not a news organization. it is a political organization. and it is a political organization that masquerades as a news organization. politicians lie. it is no shame for a politician to lie. i wrote a history of presidential lying, and it is not like anything that anybody ever felt the need to apologize

for. if it furthers the policy that you support, then the lie is okay. that is the way the politicians the truth. it is entirely operational. 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 an awful lot in terms of getting the united states involved in vietnam. today we are critical of johnson because of what he did in vietnam and we had higher roosevelt for his leadership in world war ii but they have applied. we have a first amendment and we have a system of checks and balances that works for 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. "fox news" masquerades as one of these watchdog institutions as

the gatekeepers but they operate as a political organization. the lie all the time. they make things up. they slander their opponents. they work hand in glove with politicians and political organizations and they'd make no apology for it. they don't even pretend to do differently. all they do is call themselves a news organization and put up -- but the rest of it is quite obvious. they sponsor tea party rallies. the maze running -- raise money. every single potential republican candidate with the exception of mitt romney who was not in office right now is on the payroll of "fox news". i think media matters added up what it would have caused them to buy that time on the air and it was something like $68 million of free airtime but it is not really free airtime for them because they are working in the service of a cause of "fox news." ..

makes everything in measurable. as we spend a lot of time arguing whether or not barack obama was proposing that panels for old people and 24% -- 24% of republicans believe and in even higher percentage believe he might not be but he's working for the united states islamic republic. >> i'd love to know what that's like, 7% of people who think

that he's a modern muslim. >> we have a smaller percentage of people who believe that global warming is man-made. a phenomenon even though during this period the evidence for that increased because fox is so financially successful. i think fox news alone made $500 million whereas msnbc makes a little bit of profit and cnn loses money on its operations in the united states. and so, cnn, and to some degree of the larger networks hates fox news and so you get cnn was sponsoring the debate with the

tea party. you have the broadcasting look at this woman, michele bachman. she gave a speech to weeks ago where she applauded the u.s. constitution for ending slavery i'm not making this up. i'm not making this up. remember the glenn beck rally on the mall the hired helicopters to get the crowd estimate, the estimate was 87,000 people. the was the honest estimate to figure so somewhere between 80 to 100. michele bachman gets up on the stage and she says don't let anybody tell you that there's under a million people here. the tea party sentence don't let anybody tell you -- it's like clenching your years and screaming while somebody tries to say reality is over here and

that is who 50 party picks to represent them and respond to the president of the united states and that's who cnn shows the broadcast without interference, without any sense of obligation to correct the lives and the liver the misstatements that she made and that are made all the time so when you think about it from the perspective of the president of the united states, who has a very complicated agenda it's hard to pass health care in this country because you have to write a bill that is hundreds and hundreds of pages and it's easy to manipulate and miss portray and it's really hard to pass a bill that deals with the problems of global warming because there are so many economic trade-offs and so many uncertainties. and again, financial regulation is incredible. we all agree it has to be done but how you deal with it is difficult because the financial system is so complicated. and if you've got to do it

through this prism of deliberate obfuscation and extortion and manipulation, when the slightest little thing can be blown up by the operation, operating in concert the irresponsible movement and the political party that is dedicated only to undermining the president it becomes damn near impossible to pull this thing off and it's not just fox news or cnn.com it is a classic standard throughout the entire media that comes from both the declaration on the ground be arriving from the financial underpinning but also the success of fox news. i will stop because of, and plenty of time here the

specifics of 2009, nothing got new gingrich for a second. he was the leader of the failed republican party. he was having a heart attack about clinton getting a blow job and yet he was having an affair the same time. it was neither fair. his wife had to go on welfare and get money from her church because he was a deadbeat dad and then he went crazy after that. so, he said things like he endorsed the notion that barack obama is leading the country on the basis of i don't know, who is it, some leaders say and colonialist ideology. it's the craziest nonsense imaginable that anybody who says these things they should be

handing out nine pieces of paper on the streets from the messages they get. they should be on television. well, new 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 press in 2009. and if you add up all of the ex speakers of the house, besides newt gingrich invited on meet the press it doesn't increase the number of appearances at all. the only speaker of the house ever to be invited on meet the press is new gingrich, the single most invited guest on meet the press in 2009 and he's

crazy. he says things about our president that are -- that note leader should believe and yet it is in this atmosphere that what this president has to pass the complicated and difficult and in many respects very demanding legislation so all four of these problems are very serious and they can't be solved by the president himself even if he had a better communications job. even if he had done a few things more smartly than he did. they require your and engaged citizenry and the required when the political movement that's better organized and smarter and more disciplined than the one we had. we deserve kind of a break after we elected barack obama and

start electing that man president particularly after the horror that we've lived under bush and cheney but it turns out not to have been enough, it turns out to have been the beginning and not the end, and i take some comfort. it's a little bit hokey and overoptimistic i take some comfort in the fact that roosevelt was elected as a very conservative democrat in 1932 and then became probably the most progressive president perhaps ever by 1936 and was in part a response to the economic circumstances and response to the social movement that we are pushing roosevelt and a learning process. so i'd like to think that it's possible for the second obama administration to take on the direction of the second roosevelt at ministration but things aren't moving that way right now and they aren't going to unless everybody buys and read my book. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause]

>> if you have a question you can step up to this microphone and i would like to remind friday that his book the kabuki democracy is available at the bookstore the other end, purchase it there. bring it back to this room for the signing after the q&a period. we have about 15 minutes for q&a so i would ask you keep your comments and questions brief and to we go. >> thank you for a great talk. but roosevelt, as you know, was aided by the dominant media, most of them any way and two-thirds of the nation's newspapers landed in 1936 and the father and the popular demagogue who was against him at that point and yet he still triumphed. i wonder in some ways the media

is in the problem maybe this is at least an economic issues, issues of, quote, big government, the conservative country and perhaps you're putting too much emphasis on the media. >> i appreciate your question but you came late. [laughter] you came late to class and there was most discussion of the related points before i got to the media. but i will grant the point that the progressives have an additional problem i discuss in the book that didn't get a chance to mention which is that the american ideology is anti-government. it is -- there is a libertarian streak that runs through both of the left and the right and that some of the most inspiring statements for the libertarians are for people like thomas paine and emmerson and so forth, the

government that governs that i believe d'aspin. it's correct in the book. and so the president needs to find an alternate mythology as the successful progress of president has done, and it leaves me again to my most significant criticism of this president which is he had forgone the bully pulpit this week for those of you that what c-span or hbo have had the chance to see john kennedy inaugural address as well as a member of the press conferences i wrote a book about kennedy. there were a lot of significant problems but one of the wonderful things about john kennedy was the rhetoric he brought to the country. the inspiration he brought to

people to move them through to put their lives in the dark in the direction of the art of justice. barack obama did a wonderful job of that during the campaign and then just stomped on day one of the presidency and got involved in the legislative debates over which rule was the and to be included and which drafted which bill and that is a terrible mistake. ronald reagan did both and there is no reason obama couldn't have done both as well and beginning in tucson, in tucson he started batman returns, the one that brought tears to our eyes, and i think would be a terrible mistake for him to return to the style. >> can you talk about your thinking of the title of the book, and the second one, are you saying they shouldn't have shown michele bachman at all on

cnn or they should have had analysis or framed it in some way because i think i might be curious and i have one more. >> i don't have any problem with them reporting on michele bachman's crazy speech and say look what she said come here is the truth. that is with the irresponsible media would do or questioned her and say the constitution thing anyone ever mentioned the memorial but just to show it as if they were the equivalent of an act of state deserving of respect without context or criticism that would teach the response. the book is called kabuki democracy because -- and i might be wrong about this. a couple of people have told me i'm being unfair with this title. but to me, it implies that the

theatrical and that of the democracy, so look back from afar and people are going through the motion of having the democracy and the actual democracy has been hollowed out by the things i described in this book, primarily money, but the other factor as well. >> for my most important comment i'm interested in psychological manipulation and public mystification and the mystification and language and one of the things i will say is i went to the cleantech rally and listened to newt gingrich and if probably hired consultants in framing the way -- and the anticolonial and he hasn't said he's anti, he says what is he, like ask a question. i mean, very sophisticated in the progressives are not so good of that and the one efrain i want to throughout that i think

there is a problem with using the term global warming and you can bet after the snowstorm that tomorrow they're going to see al gore was wrong because it snowed and a better term and more accurate would be climate khios because the chaotic patterns we should use the term climate chaos. >> thank you. for talk reminds me of some of the books triumph of conservatism is one book which takes a look at the kind of iraq herbert crowley and lewis can out of struggling to create regulatory. i think that kirkland's book was a somewhat revisionist thinking of regulation as a reestablishment of the status quo. do you think that's why we have so much problem with so much

antiintellectualism it's so easy to take advantage of the symbol media -- sample media with the complexity we have here? i'm going to go back and read kirkland's book again i think after listening -- and the committee for the industrial relations. some of the interlocking directorships that is in the, enter's bouck of the documents of american history. >> that's a good point but i said one reason i wrote this book and i have to say that i'm kind of proud to only have a couple hundred pages is that it's not any one thing. we have a whole set of problems that create a system that is sporadic and any number of ways. the antiintellectualism of our discourse is a significant problem particularly when it is easily manipulated by sarah palin on twitter or mashaal bachmann or just the dumbness of

cable news but it's not a problem and if we solve the problem list of the problem of money in the system and we still have the problem of the democratic sponsored senate so we need to take a more holistic view of our systemic problems some time ago here in virginia the individual mandate of the health care bill was ruled unconstitutional in part and then in florida the rule the entire thing unconstitutional and now we that the debate has been framed and going to guess the supreme court the legal system will probably -- the week of the issue is framed will determine what is decided and i was wondering if he could speak about what to think of the legal institutions in this country have to deal with the way that laws are passed and enforced. >> i'm going to answer in such a way that i love what i'm talking about rather than answer your question where i wouldn't know when i was talking about but

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

long-term battle we have to fight. in the meantime, we need to do something to try to equalize the power versus the power of money and i would strongly urge every progressive person and every progressive group to take a look at the power of money in their particular issue and i do think it's possible to make the case that we could say taxpayers are fortunate in this country if we publicly finance our election and we wouldn't have to pay for all these giveaways for the people paying for the election. every other democracy does it. there's no other democracy that allows money to exercise the kind of power that it does in our country and we pay a fortune for it but because it is one step removed and it doesn't get covered much by the media it is ignored. the power of the issue of money

and politics that they don't cover its power. it's not covered when the decisions are being made. they are treated like it is a battle between nancy pelosi and john boehner and the insurance industry but the pharmaceutical the industry are not in the room at time and those are the ones writing the legislation so fundamentally if there's one thing that can be taken away from what i'm saying is you can't talk about any issue of progressive politics without understanding the media context but could become a c and d understanding the role of money and what needs to be addressed. >> my question has a lot to do with what you mentioned. understanding the power of money and politics goes a long way into understanding the difference or the discrepancy between obama, the campaigner who was outstanding and the

president who is a bit disappointing. and i guess my question about that would be do you have any idea why they didn't use campaign finance reform as some kind of an agenda that he would try to implement in the first term? bye understanding of what happened in 2008 is that somehow thinks to his skills as an outstanding campaigner he was able to circumvent the issue of power for the money and politics because he was able to reach out to people who would chip in ten, 20, 50 bucks. >> understandably that part is mistaken. that is what they portray themselves as doing when in fact they were relying on the big donors and the lion's share of the money came from big donors and the new edited out raise mccain two or three to one and they were unwilling to give away that advantage and the president cannot raise a challenger in a case like that so from the standpoint of obama's personal interest, he has no interest in

supporting a campaign finance reform for presidential elections because he's going to out raise with the republicans put up in the presidential race but the rest of the system continues to be a wash of money because in fact we have had campaign finance reform with the president in the past and we did have a reasonable system in place which hasn't fallen apart because obama wanted out but it was getting weaker and weaker and less and less up-to-date. sallai dewitt obama would say to the broad issue of why he didn't make good on his promise to clean up the system and drive the lobbyists from the temple is the fact that when he got they're the system was in crisis and we were losing 80,000 jobs a month and the guy was down 5,000 points and the confidence was

clashing and as we didn't have the luxury of remaking the system would be like rearranging the shares of the titanic he needs to make the system work and get it going again before he could address it, but once he did that the opportunity to reform it was lost because everyone became ensconced in their place. usually the other thing 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 okay i did my best i'm going to keep fighting. instead he said you whiny little twerps why don't you shut up and appreciate all was done for you, you make me sick. that is just plain stupid even if you think it's true. but in the case of the system he's got a pretty good argument he hasn't owned up and so can

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

know is in place that's going to very much discouraged this agenda and the way the we want to present it and the way that many people in this country feel and believe and needs to be acknowledged. and my hope is that he understands all of the things you understand and the progressives understand in terms of how the system works and how the system is going to be dealt with and somehow he has a plan in terms of dealing with the obstruction he's going to come up with in terms of delivering what it is from his campaign when he was going to be about 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. you can rest assured he

understands the things i anderson and and more. i feel confident about that. there is a quote in my book i borrowed from david remnant's book from one of obama's mentors in chicago who taught obama when you can't get the whole hog you have to be happy with a ham sandwich and he's very much a ham sandwich man to the and these are the rather systems today. will there be a tastier sandwich with better portions of the pig in the future? i had this theory i thought it was a great theory and i wrote it three or four times obama ran this great campaign seeing he was going to unite us and we have to work together and lower the tone of things and he was going to work with the politics and people wanted that and that was great and it was a good way for a black man to become

president of the united states particularly with the middle name hussain and a last name that rhymes with osama, it was very comforting. and then he would try to do it but of course it would be impossible because republicans had no interest in cooperating. so then he could have said hey i tried to be nice, i tried to be a good guy, they won't play along. now i have to wash the floor with their face. we never got to that point. he's still saying he's calling to try harder and harder to be nice to them and the media are demanding that he speaks out further and further, give them his untie your shoulder not just the double down cut off. and he seems to not be picking up the second part of the strategy that i had planned for him that i thought was such a good idea. so i was genuinely confused. i thought what i thought he was doing made a lot of sense, and i

told bicol it's all part of the plan. maybe it is an eight year plan and not a four year plan. supposed to end these things on hopeful notes so that's my hopeful note maybe it is an eight year plan but it's going to require a lot of work on both kind of people that push like president roosevelt as well and that there were job. o.k. i guess it's not the end. we have one more question. >> has to be hopeful question or we are not taking it. >> i have a suggestion to help you really relief your confusion. as a black person who has noticed a long time now, i was an >> -- i wasn't disappointed or in any way confused who obama was because i didn't vote for him, i voted for the real black candidate in the election, and it's kind of disappointing that

from a lot of black people's perspectives that they didn't expect a whole lot from obama because of who he put in office and the bus he rode on, that kind of thing, and reverend wright and everybody under the bus, so it was kind of clear for anybody there was black and understood american policy the way he was going and what he was about command to that end, i would suggest you read or kind of book marked black agenda report and black commentator into your bookmark because everything you said was like talked about way back when and it is no surprise who obama is and how he acts, because either he's smart or he isn't smart. either he's a constitutional law professor and understands the constitution or he isn't. so either torture is torture, indefinite detention is an indefinite detention, either of

these things are what they are or they are not what they are. >> okay. i would just point out that there were two groups in the 2010 election where barack obama did roughly as well in 2008, democrats did roughly as well in 2010 as they did in 2008 where obama received over 90% of the vote and where he received over 70% of the vote. so you may say that louis farrakhan and reverend wright are not but i would disagree. i think barack obama is a plaque that blacks can be proud of and that the fact that he doesn't happen to agree with you and mckinney and reverend wright and louis farrakhan is the reason that he is seen by all kind of

americans, white, black, brown, yellow, red, has a leader and wouldn't be seen as such if he held those views. so we have to fundamentally disagree that is the problem. thank you, everybodyyy

>> guest: thank you. ..

i did a spell check to make sure i didn't have jefferson in there when i should've had johnson because the temptation was actually quite great. if somebody had told me a number of years ago already put my life that i would've written a book about andrew johnson, i would've told them they were crazy. it's not that i don't inc. is an interesting person. he is interesting. it's not that i didn't know anything about him, but for most of my career as an historian, i try to put the period of reconstruction. and it sounds strange for someone who rates about slavery,

which is a difficult topic to write about, but i find it easier to deal with 17th century in 18th century and attitudes about race and slavery than i do dealing with reconstruction. there's something about it that is just maddening to me. i think what it is is that it was a moment of opportunity. when i think of the people in the 17th and 18th century with primitive ideas about many, many things in the world and you know there's lots of things they don't know, i cannot totally forgive them, but it's not as irritating to me, exasperating demands a period of time when you have trains, things that are part of the modern era and you feel closer to those people, the people of that time. see more like us than someone in the 18th century when i'm writing about development of slavery in virginia or jefferson's monticello event.

so when i read about reconstruction in this moment of hope, it makes me angry. i'm able to be detached. the further back you go, it makes me angry when i think about what could've happened and what did not have been and how close we were, how close the country west of a period of time and you really could have been sent to to begin the process of racial healing, the process of making america really one for everyone. so johnson would not have been my topic of choice. i read about that era because they have to, but he would be something i never thought i would actually study and very much about it. i got a phone call one morning from our thirst licensure junior telling me i was going to be getting a letter from him and talking just in general. i do get this letter in which he asked me to write the biography

of andrew johnson for the american presidents series, which is a very nice series, a short, concise book about american presidents and they get people -- sometimes people who actually said. someone like joyce appleby, she is a great jefferson scholar. george mcgovern did lincoln and so there's guardedly make vmax of historians and non-historians looking at these presidencies, telling the basic stories, but also giving your own sort of individual spin on it. and he asked me to do this to the johnson boat. i guess he figured i would put my individual spin on it. i agreed to do it because arthur asked me to do it and i have great respect for him. i knew him from the papers of thomas jefferson were both on the advisory committee for that and also because paul pollock was the editor, who is also the general series editor for the series was an editor for the

book i did for burning jordan. it's two friends. two friends asked me to do this and i said sure. i put aside my misgivings. i knew there was so much material, very, very rich, but i wondered if i would be able to curb my natural feelings of antipathy about looking at this particular. in american history and i agreed to do it. that was many, many years ago. this book is long overdue. in between sanity that i wrote "the hemingses of monticello," which took a lot of time and energy and then i came back and finished it and i'm very, very glad that they did. so the first thing i had to do was think about, how do i approach this? now, andrew johnson is not known by lots of people. not lots is known about him. pointing people do know it is in almost every survey, ranking for

the american presidents, he is at the bottom. he is in the bottom five. since 1997, i participated in the survey's and sometimes i look at the results. sometimes they don't. but he's usually in the bottom five. buchanan is usually the worst, but he is in the bottom five. this year come in the past year when i didn't participate in the survey for the first time, i typically fill them out, but it didn't this time because i was too busy. he made it to the last. just in time for the book i could say and some surveys the worst president. and to get down to that point, it's really splitting hairs to think about what the real story is at that. that's a difficult issue because that i'd used it to write a book about somebody who's judged the worst of anything? file, just because someone is the worst or near the worst,

doesn't mean they are not important. and that's the first realization i had. this man was president at one of the most pivotal. in american history and there was a moment when the country could have gone one way or the other way and he had a central role to play in that. and it came to me and started hit me that it's very important to focus on the life of andrew johnson because i really do believe some of the decisions he made during that time. affect us even today and the choices he made in the choices he did not make, his attitude, leadership style, all of those things help to make us who we are. for those reasons you have to pay attention. i say in the book that history is not just about the people you like, you know, all the people you thought i would love to have dinner with and spend time with and whatever. it's about people who did things that are importuned that'll put

us on the path to where you are now. and he is definitely a person who had that kind of -- that road. so once i made my mind to do this and understood how to approach it, it was relatively easy to set and get to work and try to tell his story in a way that would sort of the many flights american life is like and what it was like during the time andrew johnson lives. now, johnson is different from jefferson and many come in many ways. but the first thing, the first problem is john and didn't learn to write until he was in his late teens. his wife -- he married early. his wife taught him out to right. in those days, reading and writing were different -- separate. there were many many people who are tied to read said they could read the bible appeared but writing was not something people can't necessarily what together. and so his parents were

illiterate. neither of his parents could read or write. we know they couldn't write because we have marks, no record of them writing and people said they were illiterate. so he didn't become literate until he was a young man. and that poses a problem because even though he learned to write, he was never very comfortable doing it and at one point later on he mentioned that he had -- you sort of hurt his arm and he sort of explain it is the reason he didn't write. most people think it's because he was eerie, very self-conscious about it and most of his life he was self-conscious about it. so if you look at the papers of andrew johnson, their are many, many more letters to andrew johnson did enter chancing to other people. so that poses a problem for a biographer ratepayer. we don't have this inner voice. whichever city of 18,000 letters he wrote over the period of his

life and other kinds of documents and other things. even though he remains an innate lead to lots of people, there is still enough there to sort of some sense of what he's thinking, what he's feeling in who he was. john finn was at a disadvantage because we don't have that to the same extent and the letters we have the show when a show lots of missed telling, lots of phonetic spelling for things and it's difficult to wrap your mind -- it was for me, difficult to wrap my mind about who he really was because we just don't have the kind of record you would typically have, not someone i jefferson, but other people who are present, so that's a big problem. because we don't have lots of letters and there's not a huge repository of him explaining what he's doing, we don't have lots of stories about him. there's another biography. the principal biographer of

andrew johnson is a man named hans stritch who, who unfortunately died. i was hoping to finish the second show at him because he's the one who win out went out and read the 500 page book about johnson. to discover that the territory. my job is to cover some of the same territory or concisely, but also to put my view of johnson onto the picture. but what users have found, people tend to repeat when they are doing sort of smaller general biographies of major johnson and there is not that more. there has to be another approach to him and that's why my expertise for study of race relations comes in handy. it's interesting to think about the beginning of america and come to a point where you're focusing on on the time in american falls apart and has to be put back together again.

so let's start out with this material that is not as voluminous as i'm typically used to, but a person who i said is very, very interesting, considering where he came from. how does somebody like this go from being a litter it, a person whose parents were very, very poor to being someone who is at the highest office in the land. so it's born in north carolina to parents through as they said were illiterate. his father died when he was three. his mother was a seamstress and she also worked as a wash woman and other people's homes. this is the thing that caused a lot of talk. people suggested later on that baby andrew johnson was not the son of his father, you know, that he was illegitimate. i've gotten some criticism from mentioning this in the book, even though harvester foods

mentioned that as well, but instead of just mentioning it, i wanted to talk about the context that to say something about how class affected the way people viewed from the very very beginning. because his mother worked as a maid, people felt free to say things like that about the family. i really doubt if she had been a married woman quote unquote respect to the middle-class women, if those kinds of rumors would be openly spoken about it. so from the beery beginning it's not that he was just poor. it's that his family was seen as really, really marginal. there's a difference between what people call the deserving poor, the people who were seen as really marginal. she married again, his mother remarried a man who is as poor a

sheet, does improve circumstances very much and it gets so bad that she has to apprenticed her two children. so andrew johnson was was apprenticed with taylor when he was 10 years old. he was supposed to be in the apprenticeship until he was 21. why would take that long it didn't take enough on to become very, very good. so is 10 years old. he's an apprentice to a tailor and he actually runs away. the language that i reproduce in the book, basically a runaway servant that the thing you would expect to see people more familiar with was runaway slave. we were everything, capture him and will give you your reward. this is a future president of the united states. this is what happens to them. he runs away. he doesn't come back. he goes off and actually gets a

job as a tailor and becomes very, very good at his job. as an older man when he's a politician, he makes suits for people. again, it's kind of cool. he does the gender thing. it doesn't matter kavita taylor. that can be a max deal in thing to do, but that was his way of giving gifts to people, a very private gold will forward experience that he had. so we start out very, very low. one of the things i talk about is comparing him to lincoln who unfortunately. lincoln was a tough act to follow. i mean, on the same surveys that he talked about commies almost always mentioned as the best. go from number one in one,

terrible moment. you go from lincoln to enter john finn. so he suffers by comparison. so that part is not just he had failures, which we'll talk about, but he came after someone who was amazing to people in good ways and bad, but a very towering figure to andrew johnson. so we have these humble origins that seemed to make him in some ways -- well, it strengthened again. i need, hardship sometimes can strengthen people in a particular way, strengthen them and empathy, vision and so forth, but i think my take on junk than the fed is hard life could have been looked down upon by people, being thought of as trash, made him hard in lots of ways.

someone asked me, you would think that kind of upbringing would make him sympathetic to black people. now, the other side that i can do is make you look for somebody to look down on. there's got to be somebody below you. i think he took comfort perhaps in saying like many poor southern whites, you know, i may live in a shotgun shack. it may not have very much, but i'm white and not better than these people over there. if you want to maintain that come you have to make sure there's always somebody over there or under there who you can look down upon. i think that seems to be the tack he took in life into the dutch are meant in his own personal demon really ended up affect game the course of history of the united states of america. always in a tailor shop, he's a very smart kid, smart person.

he listened to men who had come to the tailor shop to read to the taylor's and think about civic engagement. you know there's people in the shop who can't read and a man would come and read a book of speeches. and johnson loved speeches. he kept the book. the guy gave him the book he thought it so much. over the years, anytime he needed inspiration, he would go back and read this book is speeches. at some point he realizes because he gets into a debate with the person in the shop they do the equivalent of taking it outside, but verbally. they decide to invite people to watch them argue and it becomes clear he has the talent. his talent is public speaking. then also marks into lincoln because lincoln was a good speaker as well. he could be very, very -- well, he was sarcastic and aggressive and people hadn't seen anything like it.

so his fame grew. people suggested he might stand for office, which he did and he was very ambitious. good businessman, even though he started up working at the right kind of investment in the actually bettered himself financially. any women to politics and climb the ladder for mayor, every single one of the latter he was on it up to the president. so it's an interesting comment on american life that someone could start out as blue as he did and go to where he went. so even though i'm somewhat hard on him and the book there's no question he was an extraordinary person. i think my editor and he's done all of these. he's edited all of the ones that have been done so far. all of these people are extraordinary to make it to the presidency. it's not like someone is sitting

around one day and says okay, going to the white house. there is something there. other people see something and other people see something and says i should go for that position. i should be at the top. and he was like that himself. so the book describes his sense and how he fashioned himself, try to fashion himself after his hero, andrew jackson county comes of age during the age of jackson, he is a unionist. he is for the common man. he campaigned for the homestead act. there's lots of things that seem very, very progressive, very popular in the way. as you know, populism has the double-edged sword there. lots of time populists are in favor of measures do you think

would be progressive. he was for the homestead act, giving poor people and. he wanted public education. he was always the champion of public education, thinking back on its own life and how deprived he was. he wanted a better shot for people. people who were privileged. the catch was the only one of that for whites. he was for the homestead act as i said. when reconstruction came and there was a time to give land reform, republicans in congress wanted land reform to give the former enslaved people to give them land, to give them independence that johnson and others understood was seated. that's what land men. you work for people, gravure and food come you can subsist on your ipod and you're not beholden to anyone. he wanted that for whites, but didn't want that for blacks.

populous part was the racist part inhibited his thoughts about how this might be expanded to include everybody in america. so he mixes political run at thinking himself as a champion of the common man. he is for the union. he has no trust whatsoever for secessionists any sort of alienated many of them even before the work on the alienated people at jefferson davis because of support for the homestead act. the southern planters did not like the idea of giving poor white people and. they wouldn't have used the term, but they thought, this is like welfare. i mean, why are you giving these people and below market rate? why don't they go out and work for it? why do they deserve this? he was all for it. from the beginning there

recalcitrance about this further, his antipathy towards southern planters. so he came out making enemies all along the way. link in hits on the ticket because lincoln decides that he wants to signal to the south but there's a future, the north and south had a future together, so as a symbolic gesture of unity to pick from the border state. but then he's from tennessee. he's moved to tennessee as a young man, to put them together and say look, even though the south of the participating in elections, they say look, i'm willing to have a southerner on the ticket and one of these days we can get back together again. so he ends up on the ticket. lincoln replaces hannibal hamlin from maine who didn't give them any political clout here to there he is as a vice president, this person who started out

alliterate up until man had is the vice president of the united states and people hated that. there were many, many people that said he is not the kind of man we should be in this office. you've read this kind of been a begin to feel sorry for him to figure people ragging on him. but then at the inauguration he's drunk. he comes to the inauguration. i had a lot of fun doing this. he had been so and in those days, i think they thought w-whiskey was a cure for everything. maybe people think that now. and he drank too much whiskey and so there was this tactical. it would've been amazing if something were to happen like that today. you can imagine on youtube, cable tv, everything. a lot of these things. people said see, we told you those kinds of people in those kinds of positions, this is what

they're going to do. lincoln nevertheless stood by him. people said you should dump it. i get that now comment and the soundtrack. he'll be fine. and of course lincoln was killed not long after that and he ascends to the presidency. and people are of course, mortified doesn't cover it. people in the south may have been happy about it, but they were not celebrating about it because they've just been defeated in war and they were in no position to really closed about something, even if someone were inclined to do it. it is a germanic muncher manic time. and there is johnson who has to rise to the occasion. in those days after lincoln's death he actually does rise to the occasion, other things that people said the performance as vice president has gone away. he knows what to do

symbolically. he really rises to the occasion. and there is a honeymoon for him for a time. until they get into reconstruction. and this is the part of the story when i said i tried to avoid all of this, when they begin to realize that he is not going to have any -- any support whatsoever for the notion of black right, any kind of right for the freed men after the civil war. he only grudgingly accepted abolition. he was a slaveholder himself. he was on a large-scale slaveowner. he didn't have a plantation, beatty did have slaves. as a supporter of slavery, adamant about like inferiority. he said everybody has to admit why people are superior to blacks. we should try to raise them up. if you raise them up, we should raise ourselves even further so

that the distance would always be the same. that was his plan. he said this is a white man's government and will remain a white man's government. when someone says that out loud and said adamantly over and over again and you have a policy from the republicans in congress saying black vote, land reforms, some sort of political life are but people come you realize they were loggerheads and that's what it was all about. his vision in the south -- bringing the south back into the union did not encompass anything about changing black people santos began taking them out of coleco slavery. that's where the battle was joined between him and republicans and that's what eventually led to his impeachment. a person -- one person who is a biographer of johnson started the book out lamenting the fact

that when people write about johnson, all they seem to care about her reconstruction and impeachment, but mainly reconstruction. in any sense, there's not much else. syria has this grand plans to talk about the other aspects of andrew johnson's presidency, but his reconstruction. we buy alaska during this time. there's a problem in mexico that we have to do. those things were handled by secretary of state. most of the time is spent on reconstruction and try to thwart the efforts of republicans of congress who wanted to transform. he believed that the south really had not succeeded. his view was that secession was illegal and because it was illegal, they never left. jefferson davis was not really a president. there was no confederate states of america. that did not exist. because it did not exist, as

like rewinding the tape except slavery part and take the slavery out of it, but the south goes back to exactly what it was before fort sumter, before there was any conflict at all. that's a tough position to think of, 4 million people who had been freed at this point. there were people who realized that called for something but he says no, the constitution does not allow what you're attempting to do. he was very much he's had a proponent of the constitution. he saw himself as the guardian of the constitution, but he had what i call it a cafeteria style approach to the constitution. if you liked were constitutional. things he didn't like were unconstitutional.

the constitution clearly says that congress has the right to set rules and everything having to do with the district of columbia. so when congress gives black people the right to vote he vetoes it and says it's unconstitutional. this is not even like some interpretation of it. so you get a sense of a constitutional as to him. i like it, it's constitutional. if they don't, it's not. so he thought he was in the write protect in the constitution. republicans thought wait a minute, with something has to change you. if you transfer the south you can't have people wandering around. sir, i don't know what he thought they wanted other than they were supposed to be on the nomination of ways. and he does something that really surprises people. remember he said he hated the southern grandes plantation owners and wanted to punish

them. he wanted to leave the south into war. he had a strange notion that southern planters, large-scale planters enslaved were in a conspiracy against poor white people. and so he blamed them for the war, that the blacks -- they've people and their masters was trying to keep poor whites down. at first he talked about punishing these people, but then he realized by greater enemy is not the southern people come in the southern planter aristocrats. my enemies are the people in the north, the republicans who want to change the south. what he opted to do instead of punishing was to put them back in power. and so not only does he thwart does trade deport radical republicans, so-called radical republicans, he puts on the people and how to put back into power all the people who had been in power before the word. the very people he called

traitors and wanted to punish them. he brought them back on terms that didn't require the oath that people had to swear to. he dispensed with those scum of the oath they had never -- the loyalty oath he dispensed with a lot of those. .. he would have been out anyway. the second thing was that the person who is taking over from

him was considered to be a wild-eyed radical. he believed in things like women voting. [laughter] which of course made him like a martian, and so what came after, what would have come after him and the fact that he didn't have very long to go on his term and some other things. he actually made terms with people about this. they voted -- he escaped conviction by one vote. he is nevertheless sort of a round president after that. he keeps vetoing bills that he is overwritten. he had hopes of making a comeback but his real plan was to unite conservatives in the north and the south and create another political party to try to bring, to take the country back. that was the sort of idea that it gotten away from him and he needed groups of the most conservative people wherever they lived regardless of party, to sort of dance together and

take that the country. it didn't work. he leaves office. he can't get -- the democrats at this time are not democrats as you know like now. the parties are sort of split from where they were. they didn't trust him and the republicans surely weren't going to have him so he goes back to tennessee and begins to plot his vindication. he runs for office. he is unsuccessful at first but then in his return to the senate and he sees this as a vindication that he was right all along. he goes back up into a body that had tried to kick him out and he is there only for a few months.

but not huge rings of material that i think as i is they said was one of the most difficult on american life of anybody even though he is a judge and the president. thurgood marshall one of his dissents i believe it was and maybe it was in boston, he said that if america had done what it

was supposed to have done in that time period, and he talks about this reconstruction period as a point of lost opportunity and i think that you cannot lame one person for all the good that happens or all the bad that happens. the president and the president is a leader of the country, the symbolic leader. in times of crisis, people don't look to the supreme court or the congress. the president is the energy of government and the president exercises actual leadership and symbolic leadership and the kind of leadership that he exhibited during this time period isn't enough to make -- everything all by himself but he made it much more difficult for the right thing to be done and that is the real tragedy of his presidency

but again i think that is why more people didn't know about andrew johnson because i really do believe he helped to make us who we are today. think about land reform. think about the difference wealth, the production of wealth in the ballot immunity where the former slaves of headlamp. instead of being sharecroppers. the difference between owning your own property and printing it from someone else. we got the 14th amendment because all the laws of congress for passing, forced them into passing the 14th amendment and that is a good thing. think about the loss. if he had not opposed land reform and not opposed it, blacks have been -- in the 1860s. he set us back.

he said the country back and set the black he pulled back tremendously with the failure of his leadership. the way he exercised his leadership. he said he wanted to preserve the treaty as white man's government and he would actually do that for the longest period of time time and if historical circles up until the civil rights movement he was seen by many as a good resident. the so-called dunning school, the school of historians out of colombia and other places to -- johnson is a hero who helped stave off rule. worthless rule in the south essentially. that historical school into the 20th century. deb e.b dubois wrote it took to set the record straight. very very clearly and for other

people. once he did that other people began to take a look at books about reconstruction and the people who are congresspeople. these are some of the most educated people. these were really really educated men, talented who were in these offices and it is that whole "birth of a nation", dunning school business that really propped up bender johnson because it made it look like his adages were the correct ones. after dubois and others people began to take a different look at reconstruction and understood that it was more of a problem than any kind of solution. so, i am glad, i have to say even though it took me a long time to do it and it was difficult about -- to write about someone who given all, was

responsible for a lot of bad things that happen but you have to try to have enough -- men to present your points, and i hope i've managed to do that. but i do think i make very strongly the case that he is a figure that he cannot ignore. the kinds of things he did during reconstruction and the trajectory of his life is a very american story in good ways and in bad ways. so with that i would like to take your questions. [applause] >> thank you very much. we have got hands already. fantastic.

right here in the fifth row. >> do you see any player levels between the take back the country movement at the end of johnson's time and a tea party and sarah palin? [laughter] >> well, you know parallels in the sense that americans revere the constitution and some people say too much. you know that it is almost like a sacred text and any time we are in trouble or anytime we any time we want to make a point, we use the constitution and say we want to get back to that document, even people on the left. i mean, not as much as i think they should, but people on the left look to the constitution as a protector. i think it is different because it is different in this sense.

500,000 people died, both regions especially the south estimated. this was really life during wartime. this was not life during wartime, that time and wartime. we had wars going on overseas but this is hyperbole i think at this point taking a country back. the country hasn't gone anywhere you know what i mean? these people are in a real -- they took up arms against one another and fought one another, and those were really serious life-and-death kinds of issues. i think that they are using that rhetoric but it is not to my mind as serious as the time period that those people were in. it is more -- it is rhetoric. it is sloganeering. i am not saying that people don't have legitimate concerns than they are not serious about them but johnson, we are talking about life and death. certainly, and the south. if you read eric foner wrote the

big book on reconstruction and i relied on that and pointing me to some materials about some of the things that were going on. i mean you know, this guy talked about going to a village in texas, a town in texas and seeing 28 bodies hanging from trees, men women and little children, lacks and the rivers with bodies floating down them. i mean, this was after the war is over when people turned on blacks and try to reassert their control. they were playing for keeps back then. i don't know what this is. it doesn't compare to that i don't think, even though they might think it does. >> another question right here in the fourth row. >> thank you for coming to the free library of philadelphia and for your excellent talk. could you talk a bit about education? i have never quite understood why the radical republicans

didn't press and push much more resources into providing education for the free slaves. >> oh well they did to the freedmen's bureau. they tried to do that. the friedman bureau, they're poignant stories about people, little kid sitting next to grown people. that is what they tried to do but those schools were attacked. knight riders, people who tried to be teachers and them. there was a lot of a backlash because they didn't want people, the folks -- i didn't want blacks in schools. they definitely try to do that. the schools, howard, higher education, howard university started by general howard and they tried to do that but in lots of these little places they were not in control of all of this and certainly once the military leaves education becomes really really sketchy, even more sketchy for blacks during during that time period

so they tried, but there were lots of opposition and violent opposition in many many places. >> the lady on her left in the third row. >> when did johnson freed his slaves, or did he freedom? >> after the end of the war they become free, yeah. not before them. he may have freed a couple before then but not until after that. >> right here. >> what do you think about johnson's argument that secession was buoyed avenue shia? >> well, lincoln said that too, that it is illegal that secession was illegal and the reason he said it was because it secession is illegal, then the president exercises his power under the powers to quell rebellions and so forth. it secession is illegal and

legal and they left, then you could say they are like territories and congress rules the territories so it as a matter of a political, the separation of powers, it was a political argument, but again, lincoln died so we don't know what he would have done or what he really thought. but for him he said that was an obstruction. it was a pernicious abstraction. johnson took it very very much to heart. he was very literal minded on that. what i think is that well, if they thought they could leave, they left. i mean jefferson davis did set up a government. it is hard for me to pretend that they were not real, that what they had was not a real thing and i think congress, they should have been governed as territories and i think they should have kept the military rule over them a lot longer than they did to actually reconstruct

them. so i understand the legal argument about it, but practically and realistically they setup their own government and they stopped participating and they went their own separate way for a time period. >> right here in the third row. >> well, what was basically the base of support for johnson? after all he was regarded as a traitor of the southern diehards and as an unreliable president by the northern abolitionists. >> well, before -- do you made while he is president? while he is president he didn't have that much support. he gets to be president because lincoln gets killed and at this point he begins -- he wants to

try to make a base of these conservatives that i talked about it being lenient with the former southern planters. they were still planters but he tried to butter them up by not punishing him the way he said it was originally going to do. he wanted to build this party and he wasn't really successful at doing it. public opinion varied about him. sometimes the northerners liked him and sometimes they hated him but once it became clear he was not going to go along with reconstruction they uniformly hated him so that is why he couldn't get a nomination after, certainly after the impeachment nobody wanted to have him back that he didn't really have very much support. he spent most of his presidency trying to build that by currying favor with the southerners and then sometimes appearing lenient to northerners but it didn't work. he please nobody. he tried to be everything to all people and ended up no place until he manages at the end to

get back to the senate for a brief period of time. but he was -- it is interesting because he must -- he was a good politician to a degree because he couldn't have come from nowhere to where he went but once he got into office, it was like he was out of i think out of his league. he was out of his depth. so he ended up with not very many friends at all. >> about four rows back in the middle. while we are getting that might bear do you think he was a tragic figure? >> do i think he was a tragic figure? gosh. i think he was a tragedy for the country. a tragic figure? you know, he didn't -- i can't find anything about him -- he didn't seem to have had a physical sense of humor and a

way. there there is not a lot of -- yeah i would think he is a tragic year. [laughter] when i think of tragedy you think of like a hero, you think of somebody who has the grand you know persona and assorted brought down. i feel, but i do think in a sense he is tragic to kos he wanted desperately to rise and he did rise and it is an amazing story. you can't read until you are 19 years old and then you are president at some point. that is the great, the tenacity and which served him well. that is why he was able to stay committed to the union. a tremendous personal sacrifice. he could have been killed. there are many many people who wanted to kill him and he stood fast against all of that, but i think, i don't know how much self-awareness he had. see that is the way i'm hesitating about this. if you think of a tragic figure,

tragic figures you have, i think you have some evidence that they have some awareness of the tragedy. i think he died thinking he was vindicated and he had done the right thing. so he would not have seen -- he would certainly upset about the impeachment and his failure to get the nomination again but i think you would have thought he was successful, because he was. i mean he really did save his region from being transformed. this transform to 1965 really, so he actually could count himself as a success in a way or a very long period of time. looking at him i think you know, if he had been a real statesman and -- that he didn't have to do everything the radical republicans wanted that he could have been a great president. you know if he had made the right choices. i will give you an example.

this i think is very telling about him. at one point, in his early career there was a proposal to bring the railroad to eastern tennessee. and even though his constituents wanted it, he opposed the railroad because if you brought the railroad, people would get to where they are going so quickly that you wouldn't need ends and taverns. so, so as not to put in sans taverns out of business you can't have the railroad. well, that make sense in a way, except, except towns sprang up a long railroad routes and i mean the people had to walk places. he had no force. when he leaves tennessee he walks. he has to walk 70 miles to places and stuff like that. they are talking about dodging mines and so forth.

you have the sense of a lack of vision in a way. [laughter] inner vision, and so but if you don't know where where you are deficient it is hard for me to think of you as a tragic figure, and as i said because he was successful. he actually did stave off the transformation of the south for many many decades so i don't think he would count himself as a tragic figure. >> he is also somebody that would walk 14 miles to go to a lecture. >> and the snow. >> okay the lady in the middle. >> you talked about -- right here. >> where are you? >> you talked about a little bit about his family when he was young. tell us more about his family life as he became an adult. >> he had his wife who helped him as i said, taught him to read and write.

he had -- we don't really know that much about her. she was an invalid for many years and did not accompany him to the white house, did not stay with him in the white house most of the time. his daughter served as the first lady most of the time because she was ill. he was someone who seemed consumed by work. he was out giving speeches all the time. he was running for office. he was plotting and planning. you don't get a sense that much of his family life other than that he was married, he had three sons and a daughter, one of his sons actually ended up committing suicide. he was an alcoholic, and that was a great tragedy in his life. i talk a little bit about it in the book, a reference to one of the enslaved women, one of the women that he owned. there was talk that he had

children with her. there is no proof of that. the only thing is that he buys her, and she is about 16 years old. and she has two children. she is listed in the census as black and her children are looses as mullato, meaning mick's raise kids and people talk about that, that was possibly true. some people have criticized me about mentioning that although someone has written a book about andrew johnson talks about this and other articles have talked about it as well. i thought, here is a person who is in his late person in his household. i thought it was important to mention that even as the a possibility out of deference to her and out of concern that you paint a picture of the lives of enslaved girls at that time period because he could have been. we don't know that he was that i don't think when you are talking about a person who is a slaveowner you have to talk about all of the aspects of

that, not just buying and selling people. we don't get a sense of again and -- this is in comparison to jefferson where you had lots of letters back and forth between fathers and daughters and grandchildren and all those kinds of things and people commented on him. one thing that people did say is that he liked children quite a bit. he was good with children and they liked him. one of the people who was the son of a person who was enslaved, one of his slaves, said that he even would bounce black children on his knee. he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. he was able to be apparently childlike with children but you don't give a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. >> we have time for one more question. we will go to this gentleman right here.

>> no, jefferson. >> you may not want to answer this or even respond to this, but have you ever speculated as to whether a different kind of johnson could have succeeded in vastly rearranging events of the last half of the 19th century? >> oh, sure, yeah, yeah and i think he could have. he would not -- a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything the republicans wanted to do. one of the things that he did do that i try to convey and i talk about in the book is that his recalcitrance gave aid and comfort to southerners and people said, their letters and

comments, people said we would have accepted anything in the immediate aftermath of the war. we would have accepted any terma white man's government. and so, we knew to hold out. and so, i think the role that he played, i think it is the symbolic role of the president as leader that i think was really important. if he hadn't so strenuously oppose voting rights, if he had not sabotage efforts to bring about land reform. this is not to say that the south would have rolled over and and -- when you have the enemy down, you know prostrate, when you have them down, that is when you impose terms and you move forward. and numerous people said his actions emboldens them to be

recalcitrant, to pass the black codes, to sort of tamp down tamp down any move for transferred -- transformation. it would not up in the land for milk and honey. the south would not have rolled over and accepted blacks as equals citizens but it wouldn't have been as bad as it was and you know, a lessening of the problem, and a any lessening of the oppression i think would have made a big difference. so jow, i have thought about it and i do think that his particular brand of presidential leadership was toxic and it is important i think for us now to think about where we are, to go back. that is the importance of history, to go back and see how this got started and where we began to go wrong and what kinds of remedies we need to take. i think it could have been different. history is all about contingencies and we ended up with a person who was strong

enough to stand for union and understood the importance of the union but a cousin of his own personal character, a character issue, was unable to see through the transformation of the south because to him that everything that he believed. >> please join me in thanking annette gordon-reed. >> our special booktv programming continues with eric alterman columnist for the nation on his luck, "kabuki democracy" the system vs. obama. this is about an hour. >> i am scarier to the right wing. i did a book to her a few years ago where everywhere i went, somebody would call up the bookstore and say that i was sick and had to cancel. and when i was doing a book bookstore in l.a., they called

c-span2 cancel and c-span called me and said you know we are sorry you are sick. i said i'm not sick. and so the event went on but somebody killed all of the electricity in the store while i was speaking and it was one of those stores. i don't want to disparage hippies or anything, but it was one of those stores where nobody knew where the fuse box was. [laughter] so i had to hold the audience for 45 units while they you know, while they found out how to get the electricity back on. i don't have 45 minutes worth of clean jokes. [laughter] so it was rough so i'm glad to see that i'm flying under the radar now and we are okay. so far. so thank you for coming. i wrote this book. is called "kabuki democracy" the system vs. obama.

i thought you know originally i thought if i gave a talk about this book in washington i might have to come and explain it. no, i don't think that obama lurch too far to the left and had to be brought back to the right and that is the narrative that -- sorry, it is a little noisy. where was i? so here is 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 watch the keynote speech of the convention because it is either great and you are depressed that guy is not the nominee like i would have been

had i watched that speech the year that kerry was the nominee or it is boring the way it was when bill clinton gave it and why would you need to watch that? so it doesn't matter that night at the convention. if you are at a convention you might as well have fun so i didn't see it that night. so i went in and had dinner with him completely cold. i had heard a few nice things about him but nothing specific. i sat next to him at dinner and i was blown away by his poise, by his self-confidence, by his good humor and by his strong progressive orientation. and 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 a presidential election but i never imagined that

anything like his candidacy would happen in the next three years. i was literally beyond anything that i could dream of that moment. now, as we all know, barack obama is president of the united states and he not only is the president that he ran a very powerful campaign. he ran a campaign that was quite specific in terms of the direction he wanted to take the country and the kinds of policies he wanted to implement, and the campaign was not one of anti-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 personally corrupt but he had a very corrupt administration. it was because the ideological obsessions of the bush of administration and the republican administrations

before it and to some degree the clinton administration which had been forced to work within those parameters had taken the country so far down the road, so far down this dangerous road that a fundamental correction was needed and this was understood by people who voted for him. so it wasn't just a matter of a kind of like this guy better than i like the other guy or i don't really like ducaine or this therapy linda bowman 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 supermajority 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.

parliamentary elections, the parliamentary majority gets to actually enact what it is elected to do. and then take responsibility for it and it is not the system 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 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 is not easily apparent why. in other words, if you take for example the most salient example with the financial reform bill.

the three examples i use, i spend most time on in the book are the health care reform bill, the cap-and-trade bill which died and the financial reform bill. and health care is a very complicated issue and there is some awfully powerful interests fighting on every side of it and it is very easy to scare people particularly old people about their health care and whether or not they are going to lose their doctors and so forth. and that is one of the reasons why no one has been able to pass it since harry truman first proposed it in the election of 1948. actually it was proposed originally by teddy roosevelt when he ran as a bull moose candidate in 1912 i believe, yeah at the first major party candidates for who proposed it was harry truman and no democrat has made much -- until barack

obama. and then cap-and-trade, while that is a very complicated issue. it is complicated because people living today are being asked to make sacrifices or posterity. and, that generally doesn't work there is a famous old political saying what has posterity ever done for me? [laughter] and once more it is very complicated and easy to, easy to mislead people on and one of the more depressing statistics i think you will hear all year is that fewer people believe in the reality of man-made global warming in 2009 and 200010 than they did in 2007 in 2008 when in fact the evidence for it was far stronger. of the 20 republican senate candidates who ran for office in 2010, 19 denied the reality of man-made global warming.

okay, so those are problematic issues and we can talk more about them in a the question and answer if you would like it if you take a look at the financial reform issue, the president had the wind at his back and every imaginable respect. we have just gone through a terrible crisis that had cost us thousands and thousands of jobs, cost hundreds of thousands of people their homes, maybe millions, i don't know, a lot of people. cost people their homes. the stock market had lost roughly a third of its value. the housing bubble alone accounted for 9% of gdp. and so we faced this enormous crisis and the cause of the crisis is pretty clear. it was the irresponsible behavior of the banking sector particularly with regard to the housing sector but with a lot of of -- with regard to a lot of things but the fact that they were playing without any rules and understood themselves to be gambling with the houses money

and when you gamble with the houses money, you gamble. it is 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 remedies were also rather clear and remedies like breaking up the big banks, capping executive pay didn't use their own money when they gamble and mix it up with the money that they were holding for people who deposited it. these were very simple things relatively -- relatively to understand and you didn't need to demagogue them. you only needed to focus on the many would have reformed the system in such a way that these very obvious dangers would be eliminated so that we wouldn't keep experiencing these kinds of panics. but they couldn't do it.

they passed basically a toothless financial reform. it is not as if it is worse than it was before. it is better than it was before but the opportunity to actually rein in the system and make it safe for individual investors so that they can be sure that we are not going to be bailing out the aig's and the citigroup's and jpmorgan's next time was lost. now, like i said, it is not that i fell in love with barack obama or that i was seduced by barack obama. maybe i was and maybe i that the fact is that i think you will agree i think it is hard to imagine anyone who is more progressive and more intelligent and got a better handle on things than barack obama being president of the united united s anytime soon. he has given his background, his

multicultural background and experiences he had in the background he had in terms of not only being a harvard law review editor but also being a community organizer and so forta miracle that the guy got elected president particularly when you consider his name. so, i began to try and 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, to make good on all the promises that not only his campaign made, but that progresses have been working towards for decades, why the system couldn't deliver? why it delivered a sickly what used to be called moderate republican governance as opposed to liberal or progressive democratic government. now, the answer is it is not simple. i don't know 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 my cat, you know. they make a crazy and angry at the same time that i can watch jon stewart and stephen cole there. i am fine with that. they give me just the right number of snippets that i can stand the former blood starts to boil and explode out of my ears. but the thing that, the problem i have the steward and cold there and god bless them, i love them but the problem i have is not just a problem that everybody has with them these days that they march for sanity and refuse to admit that most of the crazy people are on one side and a lot of them are in congress, the problem i have is that it is always one thing after another. it is always look how crazy this is an look how crazy this is and look how ridiculous this is but day, and it is not their job,

they are comedians but they don't lead us to think about all these things together. in other words you could fix any one of these things and he still have all these other problems that they will do a show about tamar and the next night in the next night. all of these things are really significant roadblocks to sensible politics in our country. so i was trying to do two things with this book. the book had two separate genesee is, i believe that is the plural of genesis. one was to try and explain why this totally excellent guy who happened to get to somehow be present at the united states with a supermajority and 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 focused on 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 drilling. it is true but there are a million crises like that. they are all waiting to happen in part because we have just experienced eight years of the most incompetent ideologically obsessed and considerably corrupt political administration in the history of the country. that is one reason, but there are many reasons. so i looked as i said at these three issues, these three legislative issues and i try to figure out what were the roadblocks that prevented the obama presidency from making good on the obama candidacy. now, it is not sure obama and his it is trish and did a lot of things wrong and we can talk about that during the question and answer period. i have my view and you have your view. we probably share a lot of views. just off the top of my head i will tell you i don't understand why he didn't try and effect a

more rhetorically inspiring presidency the way john kennedy and franklin roosevelt and to be honest ronald reagan did. i think he had that opportunity and he had that talent and he chose not to do it. and there were other strategic mistakes undoubtedly that he made her go 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 necessary 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 phase in a 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 with this system, how strongly they narrowed the options of the president trying to make this a more progressive country. an obvious one if you think about the oil spill for a second is what terrible shape the bush administration left the country and. 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 believe in science and actually in many respects didn't believe incompetence. you remember james hansen, the head of nasa, was shot down by a guy who was 24 years old who hadn't finished college and that was the way things were in the bush and administration. so there was an enormous overhang 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 we still haven't seen yet but that we can expect in the future. second is we have an antiquated political system particularly with regards to the senate that not only in regards to the senate, so that a very small minority can very easily frustrate the will of the majority and if you are a member of the 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 mattered unless they had all 40 votes so they were able to keep themselves united so that they could exercise any power and they did so specifically in the service of

seeing the obama program failed. democrats don't do that. democrats like to see governance work. they believe in government and they are temperamentally unsuited to obstructionism. muss, not all that most. republicans are opposite. number one they are much more interested in power for power's sake and number two, to the degree that government succeeds conservative ideology fails. so they had every incentive to throw every branch in every monkey works that they could and they did. and so, given the this setup of the senate it only takes one senator to put a whole lot of -- can frustrate the will of all 99 senators and of course you don't need to actually have a filibuster any more. you can threaten a filibuster and it works just like the filibuster and so you can do it on every single bill which the republicans did.

they filibustered virtually and threatened filibuster of every single bill until they -- until a couple of them got what they wanted and infrequently they would then continue the filibuster and occasionally the bill would pass but it would reflect an enormous rehab concessions on the part of the president. it just so happens that our constitution is set up so that if you live in california, you have won 12 the influence of the united states senate than he would have if he lived in wyoming. and, and yet the most underpopulated states in america are also the most conservative states, so over and over and over those 40 republican senators who represented barely 32 per the population were able to frustrate the will of the majority. and, there wasn't anything obama could do about it. i work of the nation. i may be the most conservative person at the nation but people

laugh when i say that. but it is true. and, there were a lot of sort of people on my left who would criticize a lot of this saying he should just demand that the democrats pass health care with the public option. he should just demand that they pass a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade and yet, there is no way for president a president to do that any more. president has no power over individual senators or congressmen because individual senators and congressmen raise their own money. unfortunately, the 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 we'll beat them and will lose seats as a result. if there were no tea party the senate would be in republican

hands. but there is nothing like that on the left into 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 you. so there was no pressure at all coming from the other side. all the pressure was coming from one side. the most powerful form of pressure in our system, and you could talk about this almighty and you still wouldn't be a will to do justice to it is the power of money. it is not just that corporations pay for the electoral campaigns of our senators and congressmen although that is a pretty powerful incentive to do what they want. but they'd to a considerable degree in control the entire culture of 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, the people who

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

that 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 it caused it, that the banking industry in particular but business in general has discredited itself to a degree that was comparable to what franklin roosevelt faced in 1932. in fact, that wasn't the case at all. their previous behavior played very little role at all and the way that the laws were written. i think i quote senator durbin and this looks saying, frankly they own the place and they owned it before the crisis and they owned it after the crisis and so, and 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 but in fact those rules are very

broadly written and they need to be defined as to what actual practices are allowed and what practices aren't allowed because particularly in the financial business you can just do what you want by changing a few of the accounting practices and keep doing what you are doing. you will change the name of what you are doing or move one guy into a different division and the whole problem is taking care of. well, there is about i think 1200 different rules. i am pulling that number out of the air. the actual numbers in the book but there are about 12 under different rules that have to be written on the basis of that legislation and those rules are all being written by the lobbyist today. there's nobody else there. the presses moved on and the congressmen are a overworked and b looking forward to the jobs for these people with whom they are writing the rules. so even to the degree that we thought we will won some victories in that financial

regulation struggle, a lot of those victories are likely to be taken away in the fine print. now, finally, and just about as important as the power of money is the transformation of our media. broadly speaking and i write an awful lot about it so it is hard for me to boil it down to just talking points for tonight's discussion but roughly speaking we are 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 repurposed for an alternative vision of the world in the and the way this country operated is collapsing for lack of a business model that can support it. and so the information is disappearing. and, at the same time there is more and more airtime.

there is a blog is here. there is more and more media out there coming into our lives but it contains less and less substance. and, therefore people are able to get away with a lot more because there are fewer people watching. a lot more hot air and a lot less light being shone on the dark side of our politics. so, 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 politicians who they pretended to admire and support or to undermine environmental causes, they can do that now because there is not the manpower in the media institutions to keep an effective watchdog -- watchdog eye on them. their people trying to do it and i salute them but not only is it

harder to do, is much harsher to be hurt. that is crisis number one. crisis number two is two copies that we have this new beast in our media universe or media planet system. i guess it is the same thing. i was listening to brian green on terry gross today and he got me confused with all these new concepts of universe. i don't know what he the universe is anymore but anyway, and the most obvious manifestation of it is "fox news." "fox news" is not a news organization. it is a political organization. and it is a political organization that masquerades as a news organization. politicians lie. it is no shame for a politician to lie. i wrote a history of presidential lying, and it is not like anything that anybody ever felt the need to apologize for. if it furthers the policy that you support, then the lie is

okay. that is the way the politicians the truth. it is entirely operational. 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 an awful lot in terms of getting the united states involved in vietnam. today we are critical of johnson because of what he did in vietnam and we had higher roosevelt for his leadership in world war ii but they have applied. we have a first amendment and we have a system of checks and balances that works for 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. "fox news" masquerades as one of these watchdog institutions as the gatekeepers but they operate as a political organization. the lie all the time.

they make things up. they slander their opponents. they work hand in glove with politicians and political organizations and they'd make no apology for it. they don't even pretend to do differently. all they do is call themselves a news organization and put up -- but the rest of it is quite obvious. they sponsor tea party rallies. the maze running -- raise money. every single potential republican candidate with the exception of mitt romney who was not in office right now is on the payroll of "fox news". i think media matters added up what it would have caused them to buy that time on the air and it was something like $68 million of free airtime but it is not really free airtime for them because they are working in the service of a cause of "fox news." ..