less government means more freedom and opportunity for arizona. [applause] .. >> there's just one problem. most of our capitol complex, including the building we gather in today, is not ours. [laughter] so to fortify that symbol, to make all our capitol truly ours,

once again, i'm asking that you send me a bill by statehood day that allows me to buy back the capitol complex. [applause] and together we can celebrate the burning of the mortgage. [applause] and just east of phoenix international raceway here to turn number four -- near turn number four, there's a hill often used for seating called monument hill. towards the top of the hill is another symbol. it's a little known historical marker with a concrete x called the initial point. it's where surveys for the state first began and still remains the site for all surveys conducted in arizona. as the official midpoint of the state, monument hill is, essentially, the heart of

arizona. the arizona centennial, like the monuments that mark arizona's 100-year-old past such as the initial point, gives us a chance to set our bearings for the next century. an opportunity for all arizonans to share our great pride in the past and prepare for the future with a compass heading that is true, worthy and resolute. ladies and gentlemen of the centennial legislature, we are the architects of our second century. [applause] so will you, please, join me as we continue to rebuild this great state, a state with restrained regulations, limited

government, a steadfast commitment to the tenth amendment, an unwavering commitment to advancing freedom, and i ask you once again to join me in securing those freedoms. freedoms to build a business without suffocating regulation, freedom to build a life and to raise a family without the nanny state interfering. freedom to speak the truth about government and those who would lead it without fear of retribution. and freedom to increase your income without someone telling you that you're making too much money. [applause]

however, freedom should never be separated from responsibility, so i'm asking every one of you in this room, every arizonan beyond these walls to make a personal statement in support of our centennial year. i'm calling on everyone to make a contribution to the future. volunteer. volunteer at your local school, volunteer in service at your place of worship, volunteer at shelters, at a food bank. people are still hurting, so volunteer for the least and the lost. volunteer to provide food or clothing to the less fortunate. lend a hand at a charity, a retirement home, a hospital. anywhere your talents, time and heart can be invested in the lives of others.

let the spirit of service be at the heart of our centennial year. barry goldwater wrote an article for the february 14,1962, edition of the tucson daily citizen titled "arizona's next 50 years." he concluded his look 50 year into the future where we stand today. with the following words: my children, my grandchildren and my great grandchildren will be as happy living here as i have been during the first 50 years of statehood. because the people will remain warm and kind and thoughtful. and even though much of what we know is desert -- what we know as desert will have disappeared, there will remain a sufficient amount of natural beauty to

satisfy all of the desires of the ten million people who will live here. and barry goldwater closed with: even though i hope to be on cloud nine or ten or whatever they allot me, i am sure that 50 years from now i will look down on this delightful spot on the earth and be envious of the people who call arizona their home in the year 2012. well, we know barry goldwater and the rest of our pillars of the past are still watching, watching what we do with the next 100 years. our future depends on the choices we make. and if there's one thing i learned from my mother in my years of public service is it's that life is about choices.

it's choosing tough over what's tempting, and it's choosing the truthful over the false. and it's choosing a government that's necessary over a government that's merely desired. america is an exceptional nation, and i believe arizona is an exceptional state. i believe our destiny arrives in this time and in this place and binds us together in some wonderful and mysterious way with the great giants of our past. i believe that we in this chamber and the people we represent are connected in common purpose with the keepers of the arizona range.

to each we say, you have shown us the way, you and your families, plowed the fields, harvested the crops, minded the -- mined the ore, raised the cattle and endured the dust and the heat, the rains and the wind to allow this territorial land to rise up as a symbol of what freedom and individual courage can create. i hope years from now that my career, my record, my life -- guided by god's grace -- all stand as proof of my love for this beautiful state and my caring for all who call this place home.

in his february 14, 1912 inaugural address, governor w.p. hunt concluded his remarks by saying: i have the hope, the ambition and determination to so discharge my public trust that it will be said of me that he started the state off right. well, i have a similar hope and determination to so serve the people of arizona that it will be said of you and me together 100 years from now they started the state off right into its second century. [applause]

may god bless you and our glorious, 100-year-old state, and may god always bless and protect the united states of america. thank you. [applause]  [applause]

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> joint session, joint organization committee is escorting the governor out. members of, the joint session is dissolved. the house is in recess at the sound of the gavel. [applause] >> the new hampshire primary is tomorrow, our coverage of the first in the nation primary continues today with former utah governor jon huntsman for a campaign rally in competitor, new hampshire -- exer the, new hampshire. that's live at 7 p.m. on c-span. >> c-span's road to the white house coverage of politics takes

you to the candidate events. >> good luck, governor. >> all the best to you. thanks for coming out. >> thanks again, governor. good luck. you'll do great. >> thank you. >> sorry about the house. [laughter] thank you very much. i appreciate it. >> [inaudible] >> i'm not thinking about that. all i want is the endorsement of the people of new hampshire right now. >> as we follow the candidates on the campaign trail meeting voters. >> i am for very strict rules to protect -- >> [inaudible] >> that's right. to control the border is a big first step. [inaudible conversations]

>> tomorrow night watch our coverage of the results of the new hampshire primary with candidate speeches on c-span television starting at 8 eastern. and join the conversation by phone along with your comments from facebook and twitter. and watch events online at c-span.org/campaign 2012. >> tonight a look at the major telecommunications issues of 2012. >> one thing that we'll be tracking closely as we always do is cybersecurity. this has become increasingly something that's come to the forefront like some of these other issues that took a while. we've been talking about cybersecurity for 10 or 20 years, but knost as a result of some of these data breaches and some of these high-profile events and just the increasing reliance of our society on the internet to run critical sectors of our economy and infrastructure, there's an awareness that this threat is very real. >> the hill's gautham nagesh and telecommunications reports paul

kirby. "the communicators," tonight at 8 eastern on c-span2. >> the first in the nation primary in new hampshire is tomorrow. next, a look at congressman ron paul's strategy in new hampshire following his third place finish in the iowa caucuses. senator rand paul, the congressman's son, was a guest on this morning's "washington journal." this is 20 minutes. >> host: senator rand paul, who is on the stump for his father, ron paul. in "the politico" today, senator, you say that independence could be the key to your father win anything new hampshire. can you expand on that? >> guest: well, you know, in iowa we doubled the independent vote from 2008 to 2012, and ron paul won it three to one. when you poll young people and you poll independents, ron paul does the best in that category. new hampshire's unique in the sense that independents are allowed to come and become republicans that day and vote in the republican primary. so our best chance for victory here would be a large independent turnout.

>> host: and as it stands right now, the suffolk university southern news poll rates mr. paul at 20% right now, that following mitt romney at 33%. >> guest: yeah. that's more narrow than it's been. it's been as high as a 20-point lead for romney. i think a couple of days ago it was 15 and now 13, so i think that is narrowing, and i think a lot of times in new hampshire if you're solidly in second and the candidates below you don't seem to have much chance, people will gravitate to the second place finisher to try to send a message or maybe topple the front runner. so we could get a surprise here. we're also hoping for a big snowstorm, and so there's a lot of things we need in order to win. but we do have a pretty solid second place right now in the polls. >> host: our guest with us until about 9:45 or so to take your calls on ron paul's campaign. if you want to ask him questions, 202-737-0001 for democrats, 0002 for republicans,

and for those of you who live in new hampshire, 202-628-0184. senator paul, what do you make of statements made by the candidates and others about your father's sense of foreign policy? >> guest: well, you know, his foreign policy views are different, but we're electing a commander in chief who will be in charge of the world's large nuclear arsenal, and i think what you want is someone who is reluctant to use them, who is a believer in the checks and balances and separation of power. what i mean by that is that some people think now the president has the unlimited power to commit troops to war or send a nation to war, and that's not what our founding fathers wanted. our founding fathers gave the power to declare war to congress, and ron paul's one of the few candidates, republican or democrat, who talks about these checks and balances and that we should not be in a rush

to go to war, that sometimes even when a country does something we don't like and we think is something that destabilizes a situation, that sometimes containment could be a strategy in replacement of war or instead of war. >> host: first call for you, sir, is from staten island, katherine is on our independent line. go ahead. >> caller: yes, good morning. good morning, mr. paul. >> guest: morning. >> caller: you are the best congressman we have, and i'm an independent, and i follow your father from last time running, and he's the best we can get. that's what america needs right now. and people listening, don't be in obama's army, just go ahead and vote for ron paul. [laughter] ron paul. >> host: do you have a specific question for our guest, ma'am? >> caller: yeah, he's going to win. >> host: next call is wisconsin, wayne on our republican line.

and wayne's left us. senator paul, i want to read you a little bit from the new hampshire union leader, and this is the publisher there, joe mcquaid, on your father. and he says this, ron paul is a dangerous man. his domestic libertarian views are quite attractive to some voters fed up with politics as usual, it is paul's positions on issues of national security that are truly dangerous. >> guest: i think that misunderstands my father. his position on national defense is that under the constitution one of the primary responsibilities of the federal government, if not the most important responsibility, is national defense. the government at the federal level is doing a lot of things that we're not supposed to be doing, and as a consequence we're borrowing $40,000 a second. ron paul would balance the budget, and he would have a strong military. but in doing so, we would have to say that we don't have an unlimited checkbook, that every dollar spent on the military is

not wise or sacred and that you can have a strong national defense but not have unlimited expenditures. we have doubled the military budget from 2001 to today. ultimately, the compromise if we're ever going to get our fiscal nightmare and, again, our fiscal house in order is really going to be that conservatives will have to acknowledge that some military spending will have to be reduced, and liberals will have to acknowledge that some domestic spend willing. when liberals and conservatives come together, then we will finally tackle the debt crisis that we're currently in the midst of. >> host: and to that point, we have bay white off of twitter who asks specifically how will your dad get his party and democrats to work together like the president currently wants? >> guest: well, i think that is, ultimately, how you get them to work together. you have to say that what i think is my pet project that i'm willing to discuss with the other side. i think republicans typically say i'm not looking at military spending, and i won't cut any.

that unwillingness to talk to the democrats leads to an impasse. the democrats say to the republicans i'm not willing to compromise on any welfare or domestic spending, or i'm not willing to compromise and fix entitlements. we could fix entitlements tomorrow. social security is $6 trillion short, and i have a bill that i've introduced. you gradually raise the age of eligibility on the younger people, and you means test the benefits, and you can make social security sound for 75 years. but people have to get together and talk. i talk every day to democrats in the senate, and i've yet to find one who's willing to do entitlement reform. they all say, well, if you increase taxes, we'll do entitlement reform. well, why does there have to be some sort of horse trading? why can't we just fix the entitlements because they're broken? >> host: lancaster, california, glenn on our independent line for senator rand paul. >> caller: hi, rand, this is glenn. thank you for your time.

i'd like to ask you to check how many ious have been put in social security since 2006 since the democrats ran the house and the senate. and one other thing, i'd like to ask about how the dream act could be constitutional for when these people don't even belong in the united states? they're getting welfare as soon as their baby is born here, and how much money is that costing the american citizen? thank you for your time, sir. >> guest: well, let's start with immigration. i don't think we should encourage can illegal immigration -- encourage illegal immigration, so i think providing taxpayer benefits or anything for free if you come across the border or encouraging you to join our military, i mean, if we say that you can get a free college education and you can get citizenship if you come in here illegally if you join the military, half of mexico's going to come to the united

states and join our military. i don't think that's going to work, and i think we're already bankrupt. we can't really afford to have ten million mexicans come across the border illegally. with regard to -- what was the first question again, pedro? >> host: you know, and i missed it, and i apologize. and if i could, tell us a little bit about your father's plans as far as the rest of today. what's he specifically looking forward to south carolina to after today? >> guest: i think what we want to do is do the best we can here, make sure that we separate ourself from the second tier of the field. in iowa there were clearly three front runners. in new hampshire i think there are clearly two front runner, and i think it becomes more of a two-way race. and one of the reasons it becomes a two-way race in south carolina and beyond is there's only two candidates that are on the ballot in a lot of states. virginia's a big state, illinois' a big state. i think ron paul and romney are the only people on the ballot. ron paul's the only one with an

extensive national network and a national campaign structure. many of the others are on such a shoe string budget that they live from day-to-day, and so really i think after new hampshire becomes a two-man race, and then we'll see how we do. some of it depends on how narrow the gap is, whether we get very close to mitt romney here or if we pull an upset, then the whole world changes if we can pull an upset. >> host: and your finances to keep that going? >> guest: pretty good. i think the last quarter we raised $13 million. i think we have 150,000 donors. a lot of our donors are small dollar donors. we have people that send $13 every two weeks from their paycheck. so having a large number of small donors is easier than if you have, you know, 500 people who can give you the maximum. once the 500 people give you the maximum, then they're done. but one to have advantages president obama had -- one of the advantages president obama had was large numbers of people

giving him money in small amounts. ron paul has some of that similarity. ron paul also excites the youth and excites the independents, so it's a new pool of money. sometimes independents haven't given money in years because they haven't been happy with either side, and they see something that appeals to them in ron paul. so he's able to tap into a brand new group of people to support his campaign. >> host: ashfork, arizona, ladonna, go ahead. >> caller: hello, mr. paul. i want today just ask you about how your father feels about social security, medicare and minimum wage. and unemployment benefits being unconstitutional. and how you think that health care is a privilege for only people who have money and how you want to get rid of the epa and then deregulate the polluters in this country and just trust them not to pollute anything. thank you. >> guest: well, the social security and the entitlement question we got started on and,

actually, that was the previous caller's question that we didn't get to was on surpluses. social security did run a surplus for maybe 40 years. last year was the first year social security began paying out more to recipients than it brings in. and what i try to tell people, and i think people need to understand and listen to this, the problems we have in social security are no one in particular's fault. thai not republicans' fault, they're not democrats' fault. the problem with social security and medicare are because there are not very many young people, and there are many old people. when social security started, there were 50 workers for one retiree. now there's three workers for one retiree. we're headed towards a time when there's going to be one worker for one retiree. this is because we're all living longer lives, which is good, but it's also because we had a lot of babies born after world war ii, and then the next generation had a much smaller population.

and that trend continues. and so you don't have as many workers paying for the retirement benefits. now, some would say, oh, well, social security had all that surplus, it has two trillion surplus. it's kind of true and kind of not true. social security has $2 trillion in assets, but these assets are called nonnegotiable treasury bills. so they're something that can't be redeemed by selling it in the marketplace. it's only redeemed by taxing the next generation. so we do have problems with social security and with medicare. now, some people want to simplify this and say, oh, republicans don't like old people, republicans don't like poor people. no, we don't like borrowing money, and we don't like the fact that the debt when you run up a massive debt, end up hurting elderly people, people on fixed incomes and the working class. because when you run a massive debt, the way government pays for debt is by printing money. when government prints money, the value of your dollar

shrinks, so if you're getting a $of 600 social security check a month and that's what you live on, if food prices are rising by 20% and gas prices have doubled, you have trouble making it. so people on fixed income in the working class should be gravitating to the side of us who are concerned about the debt. it's not that we don't care about these entitlement programs. i'm looking for democrats who will work with me to fix the entitlement programs. but what we're having in washington right now is the president has decided he doesn't want to work with us. his campaign message is republicans won't work with me, and so i'm just going to have to campaign for re-election. that's not true. i've ridden on air force one with the president, i've asked him repeatedly will you help us fix social security and fix medicare. they won't do it. they won't talk to us, they won't come to capitol hill, and there are two or three simple things we could do that would fix social security and fix medicare, and i'm announcing today, mr. president, come talk

to us. to you'll come -- if you'll come talk to us, we could fix these problems in a bipartisan way. >> host: greenville, tennessee. republican line for rand paul. >> caller: hello, mr -- dr. paul and good morning. >> guest: morning. >> caller: my question for you is pertaining to what has happened on the grassroots level in the state primary of new hampshire presently, any commentary on that. but more specifically, i'm curious towards what will happen for the liberty movement in the postelection period? is there a plan for kicking it up another notch to grow the numbers of supporters for the more libertarian wing of the republican party? i know about the campaign for liberty, i've heard of the young americans for liberty. i've seen some comments from you on these organizations. now, support for the liberty movement if you were to gauge it at least by polling the support for your father has no more than doubled since 2008 to say the

least. i would definitely like to see this trend continue, and perhaps by 2016 see another doubling of the amount of support. if this ideology continues to grow, this could change the entirety of american politics. so far in a way it already has. >> host: thank you, caller. senator paul. >> guest: well, i would say that, um, the libertarian conservative movement within the republican party is still a minority. we don't win battles in washington even within our own caucus yet. but we're a growing minority in the sense that many people realize that we're out of money, that with a $1.5 trillion annual deficit that just cutting domestic spending's not going to do it, that we do need to reassess our military obligations around the world. now, they're not quite there yet either as far as being, coming libertarian conservatives, but people are coming around. there are at least 10 or 15 u.s. senators who think that you

shouldn't go to war without congress declaring it. that's the good news. unfortunately, there may still be 30 in the republican side who think that the president can go to war without congressional authority. but we're gaining ground. >> host: nashville, tennessee, kevin, independent line. you are next, go ahead. >> caller: yes, sir, thanks for having me. one question on the military. and how your dad would respond to this, sir. we have a man over in iran threatening the u.s. we all know it. he's going to have nuclear power, he's going to use it. may not be directed towards the u.s. how would your dad respond to this if elected president? and my only comment is about to the american people all around the whole world, watch as much

c-span as you can and read commentaries in newspapers. stay away from the other news agencies. that's all i have. thank you. >> guest: yeah, i apologize for the cough. i've been kind of under the weather a little bit. on the issue of iran, ron paul doesn't want them to have a nuclear weapon. he thinks that if they got a nuclear weapon, it could destabilize the middle east. but if they -- >> next, the american enterprise institute looks at u.s. politics. the discussion will focus on the power shifts in washington following the 2008 and 2010 elections and whether congress will see another shift in 2012. >> and i think it's fitting that it has a political theme. but this is the 23rd season of aei's bradley lectures, and they have been supported generously by the bradley foundation of milwaukee. before introducing zone, i'd like to tell you about next

month's bradley lecture. it will be given on february 6th by aei's own charles murray. it will be one of the first public lectures on his new book titled "coming apart: the state of white america 1960-2010." it's a special pleasure for me to welcome sean trendy to aei. many of you know sean as a senior elections analyst for real clear politics. he earned a master's degree in political science and also a juris doctorate from duke, he holds a bachelor's in history from yale university. but we at aei have a very special connection to sean. before he went to duke in 1997 and 1998, he was an aei research assistant working for allan meltzer on his monumental history of the federal reserve. while sean was at aei, we considered him an honorary member of aei's political corner as his passion for politics and for political history was clearly evident at that early point.

we are especially pleased to be able to help him launch his new book, "the lost majority: 2008 and 2010 in america's political future," out this very week from palgrave macmillan. copies are available for sale in the lobby and also from amazon. in december gallup asked people which of two statements describe their attitudes about the 2012 campaign. the first statement was i can't wait for the campaign to begin, and the other was i can't wait for the campaign to end. [laughter] 70% nationally said that they couldn't wait for it to end. it's an amusing finding, but i think it point toss a larger truth. although we're interested in who's ahead and we want to read -- we want more than the latest polls and the prognostications from the pundits. sean's book provides that by inviting us to think about the larger sweep of american politics and how the 2012 election fit into that history. sean looks again at how political majorities are made

and why they are unlikely to be permanent. but i'll let him tell you about it. sean will speak for about 45 minutes, and then we'll take your questions, and then adjourn to a reception outside. sean? [applause] >> hello. my name's sean trendy, i'm the senior elections analyst for real clear politics.com. and, yes, that is my real last name. [laughter] i say that because not a month goes by that i don't get an e-mail from someone who thinks that it's a little bit too cute that someone who analyzes political trends has the last name trende. i won't belabor this point, but i just love this story. someone pointed out to me that my title, senior elections analyst, is actually an acronym for my first name and suggested to me that i was just an amalgam of people writing for real clear

politics. [laughter] um, it had never occurred to me, and that was such a weird coincidence. it was a bit of an existential crisis, like maybe i really do live inside the matrix. but after reassuring myself, no, i am real, i tried to convince him it was just me and could not. he still thinks i'm five or six people. i'd be remiss if i didn't say thank you for that kind introduction and for this opportunity to talk about my book "the lost majority." it's truly an honor and a privilege to be back here today. the staffers who are here today or viewing this outside, i'd like to reiterate what a special place the american sewer prize institute really is -- enterprise institute really is. seriously, the things you learn at american intervise institute pop up throughout your life in strange ways and, indeed, have kind of provided the inspiration for my entire way of looking at politics and for this book. it was here, for example, that i

first learned from my mentor, dr. meltzer, about the work of a colleague of his named keith poole and develop ago method for measuring the ideology of members of congress. my session with this method turned out to be what would be my master's thesis, the 2001 blockbuster hit, the making of an ideological core of -- [inaudible] from 1901 to 1945. you're stuck with a bout of insomnia, i'll gladly send it to you, and it'll do the trick. the master's degree itself grew out of an opportunity afforded by aei. after thumbing through american politics in the library one day, considering the makeup of the seats the gop was vacating, i became convinced that the gop was on track to become the first party that didn't hold the presidency to lose seats in a midterm election since 1934. i asked carl if i could do a friday forum on the issue which

is an opportunity for staffers to present to other staffers and scholars, and she obliged. this attempt at prognostication induced me to seek a master's degree along with my law degree and enabled my current career. in every congressional election safe for 1997 won since the civil war, the president's parties lost seats in midterm elections. now, political scientists have labeled in the rule of midterm loss, broken only in the highly unusual year of 1934. now, laid over this concept of midterm lost is another idea, and this is the concept of the six-year itch or as i like to call it, the 60-year myth. it's a simple enough concept. every sixth year of a president's term tends to be an especially bad midterm election. 1938, the sixth year of the roosevelt presidency. 81 seats, the republicans gained. 1946, the sixth year of the second six years of -- eight

years of the roosevelt presidency, the republicans gained 55 seats. in 1958, the sixth year of eisenhower, 49 democratic seats. 1966, 47 republican seats, 1974, 49 democratic seats. a pretty good trend. the problem, and this is a problem that's endemic to political science s that this overlooks the simple fact that most of these election losses resulted not because they occurred in the sixth year as such, but because they occurred in years where parties suffered from particular contingencies. in 1938 we were emerging from a horrific recession in the roosevelt administration had overreached with its court-packing scheme and the third new deal. in 1946 we were struggling to deal with the postwar economy and the removal of wage and price controls. in 1958 we were, again, emerging from a bad recession. 1966, the vietnam war was moving to increase salience in the -- and the democrats had overreached with the great

society. and in 1974, of course, we had the debacle of the watergate year, also a very bad recession. in other words, these parties just ran into some horrible luck in sixth-year presidential elections. well, in 1998 none of that was true. there was a scandal, obviously, but bill clinton's popularity wasn't suffering from it. the economy was going gangbusters, and he had actually reined in his agenda from what was a very aggressive agenda in the first two years. and so i thought to myself, well, if none of the con tin general says that had driven midterm loss in the present in 1998, the experience we had would not be present in 1998. and this experience helped to solidify my thinking about political prognostication in general and emphasize the difficulty of doing projections based on present events. it brings to mind the famous -- [inaudible] of harold mcmillan when he was

asked by a journalist what could possibly derail his government. he simply replied, events, dear boy. events. [laughter] what mcmillan had picked up on is something that's largely eluded our political class with its incessant focus on realliance and emerging majorities of both the republican and democratic persuasions. political science teaches -- and this is in the first month of classes -- that elections move in 32-year epicycles. as flushed out by the great, and i'm not being facetious, walther burnham, we have ears like 1860, 1896, 1932, and then things start to kind of fall apart. but on this kind of 36-year cycle where it seems like a different political party becomes the majority in this country. and i think this concept of permanent alignments and realignments has driven a lot of

the conversation and the discussion of the 2008 and 2010 elections erroneously. i'll get to that in a second, but i just have one quick thing to say about this generalized concept of it. it's my view at the end of the day that our politics are much more developed -- dependent on short-term events, these contingencies, than they are on any long lasting coalition or realignment. while parties may seem to put together long lasting majorities by a time l winning three, four, even five elections in a row, that's really not that unusual. the odds of tossing either five heads or five tails in a row is 1 in 16. with 55 presidential elections under our belt, by simple chance we shouldn't be surprised to see more than a few lengthy runs for parties you should our belt and, indeed, we do have a few examples -- not many, but a few -- of parties winning four or five elections in a row. so this idea that elections are largely due to short-term events is what underlie as lot of the lecture today.

now, in my book i take things back to the 1920s to show how political alignments have come and gone much more quickly than people appreciate, and what a great role chance plays in elections. i could talk for three or four hours about this, but we don't have three or four hours. i love this stuff. but today i'm going to focus on what i think is the most sal credibility and what people really want to hear about, the 2008 and 2010 elections and what this means for 2012. i will say my discussion of 2012 when i'm peeking will be in the -- speaking will be in the big picture. i anticipate a large number of the questions from q&a will focus on specifics, so i'm just going to try to lay out my generalized view of things and allow people to ask whatever specifics they're interested in about 2012, who's going to win, who's going to come first in iowa -- we know iowa, new hampshire, south carolina general election. for now there's three questions that i would like to answer. what exactly happened in 2008,

how did things fall apart so quickly for the obama administration, and what does this mean for the future? now, to understand where we were in the 2008 election, we have to take a trip in the way back machine. you may recall pundits spoke of an historic victory and one that would transform the nation's politics. we can start with one barack obama ii who spoke of transforming the nation's politics, bending the arc of history and wiping out the politics of the past 30 years. now, i have no evidence for this, but i don't think the 30-year reference is an accident. my view is that obama and his presidents were keenly aware of this idea of 30-year cycles. he is, after all, an extremely educated man. believed that reagan had realigned the country in 1980 as many suggest and that we were due. this is, after all, the central thesis of a famous book that was one of the two or three biblical books of the net roots in the early 2000s, the emerging

democratic authority. that book drew directly on realignment theory and suggested that at some point in the 2000s we would see a flip from republican dominance to democratic dominance, and i think obama and his advisers really believed they had chaptured this -- captured this. having won in 2008, 28 years after president reagan, he was destined to effectuate major changes in our politics, and this is what helped drive that majority to its doom. as an aside, i should note though that in the book i'm not just picking on president obama. i'm sure he's relieved to know that, but the same idea drove the bush administration as well. everyone remembers after the 2004 election and the 2000 election karl rove speaking famously of his idol, william mckinley and mark hannah, and how they had put together supposedly a permanent majority in 1896. rove believed he had accomplished a similar majority in 2004, and i think that helped drive some of the bad choices, politically speaking, of the

bush administration in its second term. and, again, i take this back to the 1920s as something that happens again and again in our country's history. the lost majority that i discuss in the book is any number of lost majorities. some that have come and gone on our political scene. some have been successful, lasted three or four cycles. some, like carter's win in 1976, kennedy's win in 1960, coolidge's win in 1924 have only lasted one cycle before they were replaced by something else, and coolidge was replaced by another successful republican majority that only lasted one cycle. it wasn't just obama. the new republic's john judas celebrated the vindication of his emerging democratic majority thesis. we can go on and on, harold meyerson exhorted the president-elect to bring on the new new deal while paul krugman said it all with the title. title of his column, franklin delano obama.

my all time favorite has to be this week's "newsweek" cover. [laughter] as rick perry might say, oops. things didn't turn out this way. the easy answer to why that's the case is obama overspent, americans turned against his health care bill, and the tea partiers brought about a resurgent american right that helped derail his congressional majority. all this played a role, to be sure. but this begs a more fundamental question. if obama had really assembled an fdr-like coalition, he should have been able to overcome these forces. after all, you'll recall -- or maybe you won't -- in fdr's presidency the democratic nominees from 1920 and 1924 and 1928 had all joined together to oppose his presidency by the 1934 midterms. there was a huge backlash among, in the democratic party elites and a lot of republicans, and it did no good because the coalition he had assembled in

1932 buzz a strong one, and his method of governing in 1932 from 1936 pleased the majority of the country. obama didn't have a majority like this. barack obama's win in 2008, contrary to the conventional wisdom, was nothing more than a narrower but deeper version of bill clinton's coalition from the mid 1990s. what bill clinton had done was to take what had become a democratic base of minorities, liberals and union members and embrace what judas referred to as progressive centrism. he used this new democratic ideology, if you will, to grab suburbanites on to the democratic majority and shore up democratic strength among jacksonians in the heartland of the country. these latter voters who are some of my favorite people in america to study were white southerners, largely of scotch-irish descent who had largely stuck with the

democratic party through the 1960s and 1970s. they didn't vote for richard nixon in 1968, and they didn't vote for george wallace. they voted for hubert hum free. most of the successors did relatively well among these jacksonian voters, at least for southerners. if you look at a map of the county by county map, areas in eastern kentucky, east central tennessee, west virginia, even across arkansas and into northern texas, these were areas of unusually strong democratic strength among whites in the south even after the democratic party had flipped to become the party of civil rights in the 1960s. now, obama changed this coalition, but not necessarily for the better. take a look at the maps. now, what i've done here is taken, basically, every -- a state that was basically tied in 1996 or 2008 is white. and as it becomes, as a

republican gets a point, it becomes a little bit redder. in other words, like georgia in 2008 which was barely won by mccain is light red, and as mccain does a little bit better, it gets darker and darker, and the same is true of the democrats. you'll notice that the blue states in 2008 look a lot like the blue states in 1996. why is this? because from 1996 to 2008 only three states moved more than five points towards the democrats. vermont, nevada and barack obama's home state of hawaii. where's the change? the change is right in the middle of the map. the states that i was talking about with the jacksonians. west virginia, kentucky, tennessee, arkansas, oklahoma and then the changes in alabama and louisiana actually come mostly in the northern tier of the states which are the most jacksonian. these are the states that all moved more than five points away from the democrats. from 1996 to 2008.

so obama didn't build the democratic coalition in 2008. he narrowed it. counties that bill clinton had carried by as much as 45 points in eastern kentucky went republican in 2008, some for the first time since the new deal. while -- what barack obama produced in 2008 was a narrower, deeper version of clinton's '96 coalition. and what i mean by a deeper version of clinton's '96 coalition is among the areas, the groups that bill clinton had brought into the democratic party, the suburban identities, northern virginia, fairfax county, that area of the country became bluer. barack obama engendered a huge turnout, as we all know, among minority voters. but that was an expansion of the democratic coalition. that was just doing better in areas that had also voted for bill clinton. to get a better idea of this, this is the west, south central and east central regions of the united states, counties carried

by democrats in 1996, 2004 and 2008. you see what i'm talking about. eastern kentucky in 1996, very democratic. you have this belt in central tennessee, northern alabama going across into arkansas. obviously, bill clinton did well in arkansas, but even into the little dixie region of eastern oklahoma and across north texas the democrats managed to continue to win in 1996. the map becomes a whole lot redder by 2004, and then it become even redder in 2008. almost every county in kentucky and tennessee goes republican in 2008. and what makes this all the more remarkable is that in 2008 barack obama's running five points ahead of where john kerry ran in 2004. the country was shifting bluer as a whole as these areas of the country were continuing to abandon the democratic party.

obama was unable to build the coalition that enabled democrats to remain competitive in these states even in an extremely favorable environment for the democrats n. this region at least, the democratic coalition was narrowed significantly. now, to engage in a little bit of obvious foreshadowing, three democratic senators hailed from these states. after excluding minority/majority districts, 15 democratic congressmen came from these states. democrats controlled half the governorships and 11 of the 16 statehouses. so if trend we had begun to see at the national level of these states finally abandoning the democratic party filtered down to the congressional and state level, it foreshadowed a debacle for the democrats. now, there is a positive side to the ledger. obama ran very well among minority voters, as i said, and suburbanites, but the overall result was a wash. obama actually ran slightly behind clinton's 1996 vote total. by the way, when i'm talking

about 1996, i'm splitting the perot vote evenly. obviously, barack obama's percentage was higher than bill clinton, but exit polls showed that ross perot was polling about evenly from clinton and dole. so if you split the vote in half, you come out with clinton running a little bit ahead of obama. this shows up, too, if we look at the trajectory of the 2008 race. even if we measure from the beginning of june when obama clinched the nomination, his lead averaged a modest four points. for most of the campaign, obama found himself unable to top 50% in the polls, and it wasn't until october 7th in the middle of the financial collapse that he fist hit the -- first hit the 50% mark in the rpc average. mccain had successfully drilled the drilling issue during the summer and had used that to narrow his deficit with obama. after the election david axlerod

admitted that the one thing they did horribly in the campaign was handling the energy issue in the summer. now, this was one of the, um, major uncommented-upon side effects of the financial collapse, was that it drove the price of gasoline down significantly by election day, and it took away the main issue that john mccain had set himself up to run on in the fall. this was the issue that was the reason that he picked sarah palin as his running mate because alaska has a lot of oil, and it was gone on september 15th. and on september 15th is the day that barack obama finally begins to substantially pull ahead of john mccain. i'm not just talking about the postconvex bounce -- postconvention bounce because everyone knows john mccain was ahead of barack obama after the conventions, but on the first day of the democratic convention, john mccain was tied with now-president obama in the polls. what i'm trying to reiterate here is not to take anything away from president obama's win. it was -- a win is a win, it was

a successful win. but it wasn't this revolutionary win that commentators were falling over themselves to declare and that i believe the obama administration believed it had achieved. [background sounds] >> so now that we understand the nature of obama's victory, that it did not represent a see change in american politics, but rather was due to certain contingencies that came along and a narrow coalition, 2010 becomes easier to explain. you see, a narrow coalition is rife with problems, and i'll use a simple analogy. let's say you have two groups in your coalition, and you start out with both of them approving of you at 100%. over the course of your first term, one of the groups continues to love you, but one of the groups falls down to 0%. well, you're at 50% which isn't great, but it's better than if you only had that one group in

your coalition, and you were all the way down to 0%. when you have a narrow coalition, you just don't have as much room for error among groups, and by excluding the jacksonians from the democratic coalition, the democrats were in a situation where any losses among working class whites or latino voters would be absolutely disastrous for their presidential coalition. and a congressional election in particular, a narrow, deep coo big is very, very bad. especially for democrats who already start out with their vote concentrated in minority/majority districts in urban areas. once in office obama's politics quickly became defined in the minds of the american voters. on february 17, 2009, he signed the american recovery and reinvestment act, better known as the stimulus, providing for about $800 billion in spending. the public supported it, but the support was heavily democratic which is something we see again

and again in the president's approval ratings. they hold up reasonably well, but it's concentrated among democratic voters. only 28% of republicans and 56% of independents supported the law. a few days later the president's approval rating dipped below 60% for the first time as the support among independents trickled downward to 54%. by june he had fallen to the 50s, and while the economy was taking the toll on him, it wasn't the major issue. americans approved of his job approval on the economy in june by 55% to 42%, and this is from gallup. where they disamoved of him and -- disapproved of him and where the president had been the most aggressive and where he'd also promised to be the most aggressive was spending. the government promised to loan money to general motors and chrysler, majorities approved of this in every region including the auto-producing midwest. on controlling federal spending,

45% of americans approved of the president's performance while 51%, already a majority, disapproved. at this time the only other issue where the president was upside down was his handling of the federal budget deficit, 46% approved, 48% disapproved. so even at this early day at a time where americans still approve bed of the job he was doing on the economy, it was spending that was driving his job approval downward. by mid june the share of the country that's self-described as conservative showed a statistically significant uptick to 40%, and for the first time since the 1990s, a plurality of americans viewed the democrats as too liberal. and this is critical because what it meant was that bill clinton's rebranding of the democrats as the party of fiscal responsibility, the progressive centrism that the democratic majority theory was based on had taken a major hit in the eyes of the american public. by mid july the president's approval rating in the rcp

average was at 50%. once again, the leading issue -- according to gallup -- wasn't the economy. 24% of americans claimed they disapproved of obama's job performance because he was spending too much while another 15% cited leading the nation towards socialism/government bailouts. the notion that the economic stimulus plan just wasn't working came in a far third place at 10%. by november the democrats were in serious trouble. the number who agreed that the government was trying to do too much had spiked to 57%, the highest number seen since the 1990s. this was not supposed to happen. this was supposed to be the resurgence of american faith in the government to fix things. we were all socialists now, and yet six months later americans were saying 57% the government was doing too much. ..

i don't really count what we had before that unless there's a functioning party in any sense of the term. what happened in virginia was in critical to the clinton coalition that had been brought on board due to president clinton's progress of centers and if you will left in northern virginia suburbs which had been going heavily democratic went

back to and mcdonald carried to the suburbs over all and tracks county which has been slipping towards the democrats over a series of elections. but the biggest changes came in western virginia, the jacksonian. western virginia is actually the coal mining country. it's voted for democrats in every presidential election i think since 1972 going back in the uaw in the 1920's and it didn't vote for barack obama this time. now these are fairly and populated counties but we added them up it comes up to a lot of votes and this is how they managed to put together 59% of the vote which is a tremendous vote total in the state. of course in 2010 we had a little bit of a shocker in massachusetts. but even that, the scott brown win kennon critical areas. the liberal areas, the western and the in our boston went from

earthecho cui just as strong as they had from barack obama. it was the white working-class area in the south and the kind of l in the state but swung toward scott brown and also the suburbs and around the globe are bound boston these were the areas that swung heavily toward scott brown. these were the areas bill clinton and decorated in the democratic party. in november, 2010 the clinton coalition absolutely fell apart. democrats lost 66 house seats while picking up three seats for republicans. we are for showing any party in the house election since 1948 any party in the midterm election since the 1930 age. we can see the type landsea this chart shows democratic lost by 2010 and again the clinton collision pieces where they suffered the greatest losses,

greater appellation which is the jacksonian region, 14 democrats lost. what we see in the rural south 90's are areas bill clinton had kind of invigorated the popularity for the democrats and the falloff was that the northern suburbs, 13 democrats lost in the northern suburbs and four more in the southern suburbs. we can debate about whether the district in west palm beach counts of a suburban but regardless it was the suburbs and appellation that did the democrats into the areas that had been trending democratic because the democrats defend the party of fiscal responsibility and social moderation that swung back towards republicans when the democrats took a swing for the left. to put things in perspective all gore and john carey won 47% of the suburban vote and barack obama improved to 50% in 2008.

but the congressional democrats of 2010 when only 43% of the suburban two-party vote. to put this in further perspective michael dukakis won 42% of the suburbs. as we are talking about a collision that added as of the end of 2010 kind of had been put back where they started from to the point they are winning in suburbs about the same as michael dukakis but they don't have the strength michael dukakis had in greater appalachian. it's not a good place for the democrats to find themselves in 2010. among white catholics the american action vote share 47% in 2008 to 39% in 2010 with popularly the democratic russia and among the group in the 1920's white voters without college degrees and you can probably generalize this to be the class swung from authority% obama group in 2008 to 33% democratic vote in 2010. suburbanites and white working-class voters pulled away

from the democratic coalition in 2010. i'm skipping in the interest of time but i do have to share one of my favorite quotes. southeastern oklahoma's was running for a seat in the state legislature in the county spent 170,000 on the bid for the oklahoma state house against a longtime incumbent. this is a district where 80% of the voters still registered as democrats and he managed to win. his comment on the race kind of sums up 2010 for me. i'm still just a state of disbelief. i never thought i would live to see the day when the republicans could be elected in the county. you are going to see a lot of that in these regions that have maintained the democratic allegiance over the 200 years there are really abandoning today. so where we go from here? the key thing to understand is that nothing that happened in 2008 or 2010 is written in stone to continue in the future.

as i said, voters are smart. they know what's going on and pay attention to what politicians and parties are saying they don't automatically attach themselves anymore to republican or democratic party. they pick up on the democrats shift over the course of not really over the course of 1996 to 2008 and made a similar shift to the republicans. if the republicans are hard to reach they will go back to the democrats. but i think there are a few big pictures that i need to cover because a lot of what we've heard in the media and especially after the census being released its kind of a resurgence of this emerging democratic majority of this idea that the demographic shift in the country are driving us inexorably to our democratic dominance and will make it difficult for the republicans to win in 2012. to emphasize i'm firmly of the opinion the demographics are destiny i don't and you can do a straight line projections and this is why.

there's four parts to the basic emerging democratic majority as described. minorities, the white working class, women and people living in mediapolis which are kind of upper-middle-class trendy suburbs. later on if added millennials to the i.t. which are the younger voters who they say will maintain the democratic allegiance. a few of these i can take care not pretty quickly. the white working-class and suburbanites i talked about quite a bit in the context of the clinton coalition they've been abandoning the democrats because the democrats are no longer seeing this as a party of fiscal responsibility and social moderation. we can debate whether that is a fair branding but it is a fact that they no longer few democrats that way. the idea of the women vote propelling the democrats and this is a fact that for every action there's an equally and opposite reaction. we can talk about a gender gap but regardless of the size of the gender gap it may go like this or it may go like this but

also it goes like this and this. the flip side is democrats don't do as well among men and men and women are about equally distributed in the population. a few more women in the electorate about 52%, but still this shifted up and down and just as republicans to have a problem with women voters, democrats have a problem with male voters. as for millennial, i will just give a simple fact. in 1972 george mcgovern got blown out of the water. he lost by historic margins to richard nixon. but there is one group my age group that pulled the lever for george mcgovern. who was that? that was our 1829-year-old voters. who are the groups that are barack obama's strongest opponent today? is the exact same 18 to 29-year-old voters that were going for george mcgovern in

1972. if you do the math, 1972 to 2012 is 40 years so a voter that was 18 to 29-years-old batvinis 58 to 69-years-old today. you can't say what it is doing when he's 18 to 29-years-old as we did not what he's doing when he's in his 50s or 60s. a look at changes go on. it may be the case. i would be shocked if it was. i want to spend the last ten minutes or so talking about the latino vote because this is incredibly important to the country's politics. the basis for the democratic counterrevolution in the 1960's and the famous book the emerging republican majority kevin phillips noted that the kennedy club had provided a new level of political consciousness for hispanic americans in texas for the first roman catholic president most likely the northern program. phillips estimated the 1960 to 1972 mexican-americans gave 84% of their vote to democratic presidential candidates.

this is critically important. why? because mexican-americans don't get anywhere near 84% of their vote to the democratic president candidates today. in fact, if we look at the democratic and the hispanic electorate and i like latino better i don't know why hispanic there by a year from 1980, exit polls don't go back before 1980. you have to estimate about and this is relatively speaking. if the democrats were winning 57% of the vote would say nationwide and the latino voters want 62% for the democratic candidate i would say that is a five-point democratic lead. you can see the trend is actually towards republicans. gradually over the past few decades compared to the country as a whole latino voters have converge towards the center of american politics. this is contrary to following everything you ever read in the news about latino voters. you also hear that latino voters

art and exploding portion of the electorate. it's not true. in 2002 they made at about 8% of the electorate. 2,004 come 8% of the electorate. 2006 from 8% of the electorate, 2001 from 8% from 2010 to 8% of the electorate. latino voters are growing rapidly as a share of the population but they just are not entering the electorate at the rate that you expect to see from the census numbers. in fact, writing in 2001 and 2002 they had predicted that by 2010 the minorities constitute 25% of the electorate while in 2008 professor alan bramlette of emory university predicted that in 2010 no more than 76% of the voters would be white while at least 11% of the african-american, at least 13% hispanic or members of other racial minority groups. he went a step further and predicted that because republican candidates would have to win almost 60% of the white

vote to win 50 present of the overall national popular vote in 2010, and because republicans haven't done this since the republican year of 1994 and a matter of fact the only 158% of the white vote that year it would be almost impossible for republicans to take over the house in 2010. all of these predictions were wrong. the minorities didn't constitute 25% of the electorate. whites were more like 76% of the electorate and republicans won more than 60% of the white vote in 2010. in house races whites constituted 77% of the vote and these are non-hispanic whites. a larger share in the 2004 were the 2008 elections and democrats received only 37% of white votes. latinos made up 8% which is they had in 2006 and 2004. what's happening that goes beyond this is that immigration has topped off in this country with the onset of the great recession with a modern

depression or whatever you want to call it. latino immigration isn't occurring. what's happened is that -- and this will show when the census numbers as well while there has been an explosion and latino growth most has been children born to latino people who are already in the country. not this is incredibly important to the future of american politics. why is this? well, let's take a look over the last decade. first the republican share of the african-american vote was by ideologies. a little african-american voters, moderate african-american voters and conservative to african-american voters both heavily democrat. non-hispanic whites on the other hand sort neatly by etiology. you can see that white liberals give ten to 20% of their vote to republicans, moderates about 50/50 while conservative whites get about 80 to 90% of their vote to republicans. latino voters to or less the

same thing that white voters to. conservative latinos don't vote quite as heavily republican as non-hispanic whites do. liberals both about the same and moderate latinos vote slightly more space than the white counterparts to. but latino voters are diverse in their voting pattern. what makes the latino vote so heavily democratic to the is there aren't as many conservative latinos as there are conservative whites. we see the same thing if we do it by income. we see that african-american voters, regardless of income coming and talking about race is a difficult thing. i just want to make clear that you have to generalize if you are going to be talking about voting patterns but it's clustered at the bottom. similarly, the white vote is clustered towards the middle and richard white's obviously but quite a bit more republican than the poor whites. we see the same trend with latino voters. again there is a bit of a shift downward from the white vote

patterns but it's roughly the same. again, the reason that the latino vote has been so heavily democratic as of late is that there aren't as many wealthy latino voters as there are wealthy white voters. this is going to change dramatically in the next ten to 20 years as latinos become more a simile did in american society as latino children go to college here in the graduate school and become doctors and lawyers just like my italian and irish ancestors did they will eventually join the ranks of the metal class. indeed statistics said just as they do that they will become much more republican and that is why we have seen when they were voting about 85% democrat today when mexican-americans what about 60% democrat we see this large shift because of the increase of the assimilation into american society. i don't see any reason that trend doesn't continue.

in closing i think there is one other thing to keep in mind. we've seen again and again in american history the coalition of everyone just can't continue to exist. in a diverse country different groups of the voting populace are going to have different interests in the outcome and this is one of the major problems the democrats ran into in 2008. they had a situation where once there were getting unified control of congress therefore forced to pick winners and losers and that always happens when you get them in control that happened to the republicans in 2000, it happened to the republicans in the 1920's and to the democrats in the 1930's. we can see this for example in arizona the senate bill 1070 the racial profiling bill absolutely drove latinos out of the governing coalition. she did not do as well latino voters buy any stretch as john mccain have done.

the flip side of the the reason she actually ran ahead of john mccain in the state is that it drove the white moderate voters along the course of the republicans that year and that's a potential problem for anyone chongging to put together a coalition of everyone its debt of certain issue of the latino interest won't lineup with the white working-class interest and you won't be able to keep both in the collision. we see this within the democratic party and inner cities where in places like los angeles and denver to see the multiracial coalitions come part because of tensions between the groups within the democratic party in those states. so in short, as we move towards 2012, don't believe the hype about where the democratic -- the megatrends are sending as to be i wouldn't be surprised to see this light. i wouldn't be surprised to see it stay the same or drop a little bit. it african-american turnout comes back to the traditional levels of 11 per cent, that is

2% of barack obama as vote that gets knocked off the top from the 2008 turnout and i will say one other thing, the president's approval rating among the whites right now is 33% and that is a huge problem because the minority vote in this country is free disproportionately spread out. you have a large contingency instincts the door already have lewd because liberal whites live there as well such as new york and california and then you have states like mississippi and louisiana we're very conservative whites aren't numbered. where this becomes critical and the president's weakness, longstanding weakness among them middle class and now among the suburban voters is in that year of the northern states which are heavily white, states like iowa, wisconsin, minnesota, ohio and pennsylvania. if the numbers don't improve their the democratic coalition doesn't have a chance in 2012. [applause]

>> thank you very much for a very interesting lecture. if you could state your name. >> my question is what is a major issue in the 2012 as the election is concerned? >> the question is what is the number one issue in the 2012 election. poll after poll after poll shows that it is jobs, jobs and more jobs. everything else is going to be a side show. did i say jobs. you know, it's interesting because we see this unemployment rate continuing to trend downward and we get seen a lot of hoopla about how this is great news per the president. the problem is something to keep in mind whenever you see these economic numbers coming out as they are just measuring a broad

sentiment about how the economy is doing and so when you have a situation like we have today where the unemployment rate drops but it's because people are leaving the work force and the work force participation rate has actually than cratering i don't think the unemployment number of 8.5% as the same to the extent it can have a positive and that it would have in other situations. if you hold the labour participation rate steady from the first day of barack obama's presidency it's got to 11.2% and i think that is what really is going to drive the americans' perception of the economy going into 2012. >> this gentleman here. >> i'm at georgetown university. to what extent did the fall of and support and obama to relate to health care? i was astounded that the

democrats especially the blue dogs didn't really defend their health care vote, which is amazing. and i'm wondering if the president and the democrats didn't sort of lose the narrative. they are presenting what obama did that made them seem less liberal than maybe they are and the health care reform is a good example. there is a lot of competition. there's a lot of cost savings, there's individual mandate which was originally a republican idea. so to one extent does the presentation and dreaming of the issues by the president account forbes his current and the democrats' current dilemma? >> there are two important observations there. the president was in between the rock and hard place. he couldn't come now to and from this as a conservative or moderate health care bill because he was trying to

persuade the liberals the loss of the public option didn't make this a stop for insurance companies and there again it is the difficulty in maintaining a political collision. democrats to win control of congress have to win in the districts that lean republican by a couple points because of gerrymandering. will be about four points now after the 2010 redistricting is done and so to have a large majority of the to wondered 58 democrats you have to have democrats who represent the conservative districts as well as the plus 45 districts. so it's difficult to have a method that would apply to all these groups. but the health care bill i think absolutely illustrates the difference between the obama administration approach and clinton administration approach. clinton kind of waved the white flag and went back towards the incremental approach on health care that got quite a bit done. portability in 1997 or 1996. the introduction of schip which is a small program that has

since grown to be a significant program. this is what a moderate incremental approach can do, whereas trying to do something that is perceived by the american people was out there and radical even though it is arguably not leave the party of position if you assume it is a 50/50 election there is a chance this won't go into effect. so that's the difficulty they find themselves in. >> michael verdone with a e.r.a. and the washington a examiner. you talked about how it's difficult for a coalition to come to hold more than 50% together in a diverse country. but perhaps all the questions would be about 2012. you do speak in the book about the eisenhower coalition and suggest number one, that it

exists which with past political scientist still not. it's part of the roosevelt years because it was a general. in your view i think it persisted. can you say a few words about that? >> yeah. this isn't something college students should read on your exam because mica was correct this is my revisionist view of american political history. dwight eisenhower it's a really bad rap by historians. it's improved over the past few years but if you think of the constituent components of the next and maturities in '68 and '72 and think about the role reagan coalition it is southerners, white working-class voters and suburbanites. was dwight eisenhower's questioned? he was the first republican president to come close to carrying this out. he carried the deep south louisiana in 1956 him. he did incredibly well in the suburbs to tory growing part of

the american political scene and swung the white working-class voters in the camps he did very well among the catholic voters and union voters to get he was kind of the reagan majority and i would go so far to say the majority is a completely based on the eisenhower majority. if you look county by county they win a lot of the same counties. why was this able to persist for so long? part of it is contingencies, it is the coin flip. the republicans happen to come in and in times the economy was on the upswing and the democrats or not fortune a refined i don't want to get into the debate, but you had the johnson presidency that entered and the carter presidency that ended disastrously. more to the point i think the cold war played a critical part in keeping eisenhower presidency to get there. if you think of the three legged stool of the republican party social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and foreign policy

conservatives this kind of continued existential threat the democratic party had some trouble dealing with gave some type of unifying the and to all these groups in the republican party that persisted in an unusual period of time at the same time the democrats in the 1960's due to some structural reform growing out of the commission they put together to redo the way the converse was structured in the process took a turn to the left at the time the country wasn't going leftward and this also goes together with what we see is the end of the eisenhower collision. the cold war is removed the pieces of the republican party coalition start to fray. suburbanites begin to exit towards the democratic party. bill clinton has since moved the democratic party towards where they see it is a little bit safer. bill clinton becomes harder on crime and there is in this idea that you're going to be sold out to the soviets to vote for the democrats that i think persisted

for a lot of the 60's and 70's and that helped keep the coalition together. >> the institute of religion and democracy. we see the reports that have led the obama administration has all it given up on the white working class mail. is there another member that he is looking to perhaps pick up the slack in your analysis on that? >> there's a great debate that's been going on at the new republic and few of the other sites about whether obama should proceed in 2012 with what they called the ohio strategy which would be focused on the working what class voters or what they call the colorado strategy which is the kind of a novelist that

they used to talk about the upscale white voters. i think it is clear that obama has chosen the latter strategy, the colorado strategy of reinvigorating the upscale suburbanites. i think it is problematic because i think without the 401k -- i think a lot of the reason that the suburbanites shifted so hard towards the democrats is because of this perception of the responsibility, the perception that the taxes wouldn't go up and this perception that the democrats wouldn't be walking the vote and i think that in 2008 when you add into that what are the two things when you register from college and take your job at a consulting firm or baltimore school and you are in associate and the law firm what do the older people there told you to do now that you've been initiated into the government last? the till you start putting money in your 401k and buy a house to protect your assets.

to get from me that wasn't such great advice in 2008 and 2009. and that is a fundamental problem that democrats have right now. they are not perceived by this group as fiscally irresponsible as they were in the clinton years. they're again fairly or unfair that is the perception. there hasn't been the recovery in housing values and in the stock market of the 401k. a little better on the 401k but still not what you'd want to see for the return rate. it's going to be really tough to get the appeal to these voters in the same high levels it was in 2008. >> you discount long-term trends but talked about short-term events. i contend that clinton may have been the response of no new taxes in the ross perot affect and override the mandate

overstepped and only became fiscally responsible after 94. and then followed up by the bush administration that was compassionate conservative and really wasn't a small government movement now that we have seen the democrats once again overstepped and people are starting to realize what true space means are looking for we've got the tea party coalition come to the republicans miss an opportunity if they don't increase the tea party movement towards the smaller government if we just put in somebody that once again is going to talk about the big government? do we fail to define ourselves as people who are interested in letting people work on their own? >> i have the book for you. i agree with all that. i'm getting the kind of abridged version here but you're absolutely right. bill clinton had a false start from '93 to '94.

got shellacked in '94 because he over read his mandate and had the good sense to learn from that mistake. and that is what really brought back the progress that he had run on a 1992 to the as far as -- you are right about george dalia bush and his presidency. i'm fairly critical of it in the book because i think that there was a sense among republicans that they had finally overcome. they had brought together -- the eddy elected the unified control of the congress for the first time since 1952 and then really liked it for the 61st time since the 1920's and the trajectory was just going to keep going up and i think that drove of the decision in 2005 and 2006 that kind of brought about a backlash pity the as far as where the rebel within scope, and i feel that the compassionate conservatism of george w. bush did a lot to kind of reenforce the frame many americans had of the democrats, the clinton democrats as a party of the fiscal responsibility.

the deficits are the most obvious comparison and the democrats for the first time in history even with republicans on issues like prosperity and government spending in the bush administration i don't think that's accidental. the tea party movement is a tremendous opportunity for republicans especially the claims control for the presidency. but it's also a classic a sample of when talking of the difficulty of putting together these broad coalitions if the republicans go full tea party are they going to be able to hold white working-class voters who depend on programs like medicare to a disproportionate extent? will they be able to hold together christian conservatives who want to see social issues addressed especially once you finally get unified control the government will they be disappointed if republicans don't deliver on the social issues? there's going to be all these conflicting portions of the republican coalition that will be making life difficult for the

republicans if they take control in 2012. >> if your name went from sean trendy to david plus what are the three policy issues that you would advise your boss to barnstorm on to maintain your 2008 electoral map? >> i think obama at this point is pretty well tied into the path he has to take. he has to pound on the rollin plan which i think it is a potential weakness for the republicans to begin with and i think they've done a terrible job of selling it. you can even argue that paul ryan has backed off of the plan otherwise entirely. you need to barnstorm and african-american community because you absolutely cannot let the african-american vote called on to 13% to ten or 11%. if you knock the 3% off of barack obama's total against john mccain against mitt

romney, the increase in the republican support among the white is just going to overwhelm and so it's not even an issue that you need to push. you just need to be very and reinvigorate the sense of excitement of this historical nature of reelecting the first african-american president to help drive that. remember a lot of the voters that came into the democratic coalition from the african-american community in 2008 it wasn't -- these were marginal voters that had typically voted before by the historic nature of the candidacy even though there's almost certainly wide scale agreement on the issues among these voters the third thing to do is you absolutely need to drive on the social issues because i think -- i will say this spigot people don't appreciate the strength the social issues give republicans. white evangelicals give republicans more votes than

african-american latinos, and give to the democrats. i'm not trying to begin debate to denigrate the issues to the republican coalition that because barack obama needs to try to get that of scale white vote which isn't so heavily infested the issues back up towards the 2008 levels i hate to say he has to spare some people, and i think that is the only way to do. >> three questions in a row here in the back and then you in the front and we will take three at one time and this person. >> clark judge. it sounds as if you are describing a coalition that was driven by spending or a vote that was driven by spending over the last several cycles driven away from the republicans then driven away from the

republicans. and you are saying this time it almost sounds as though you are saying that doesn't matter anymore. that concern over spending and jobs. is that what you're saying if you or a republican how do you hold your coalition that came to you in 2010 to get there? >> well, two thoughts. first, if i sound like i'm saying it's all spending in 2007 finally simplifying. it was incredibly unpopular by the time the 2006 elections. the financial collapse in 2008 that major issues. i think even things i thought when the teri schiavo vote was cast this was going to be gone and forgotten by the time the election wasn't a big year and that was kind of my route in terms of the prognostication because i think it reinforces some of the views the upscale suburbanites have about the republican party is to the social issues. so i don't mean to go full force

spending spending to be i do think a was a large part of its. >> [inaudible] >> it is a job as the election. they are so terrible to the extent we haven't seen -- i really think since the 1930's if you dig down into the economic indicators it should be overwhelming issue and as far as how you hold it together long term, the answer is you don't. it is impossible in the large diverse country like this to hold together the broad coalition over the series of elections you have to pick winners and losers among your question. i think that there's a very important point that michael barone me on the panel i was on the and is referred to in the 2009 health care debate which is important to keep in mind majorities are for doing stuff, not for winning the next election and so there is a lot to be said for not keeping your coalition together but the ending the ark of history like

the 1946 congress is for the republicans partly ruin that coalition and some of the other things republicans did but it made this country what it is today. we would be in a very difficult or a very different situation today of the republicans played a safe in 1946 and just tried to win in 1948. >> let's put these on the table starting with you and then you can choose. >> brian jack from a pack. i understand the number one issue is jobs and more broadly the economy. but within the different demographic blogs of the electorate, do you see other issues like immigration of latinos come out way or rival the economy as the number one issue? >> there's an interesting article before thanksgiving by ezra climate talks about the

difference between the way fdr came into office and the way obama can into office. the point that it made is that the depression had gone on for three and a half years before fdr came in and in the obama's case, it really peaked right at the election time and went on for another free to four months and then since then it's been a very tepid recovery. so that is one huge difference. the other one was that at a time roosevelt was being pushed very hard mostly by southerners, people like jimmy byrnes of south carolina, who wanted the to do more not less because the south was suffering so badly. the south is suffering badly now but that is not where the pressure to do something is coming from. i wonder if he would comment on that. >> we will but walter ask the

final question. >> what about the foreign policy and defense policy on the elections? you mentioned the republicans may have their genesis in the eisenhower collection and now for the first time since eisenhower, you've got all of a sudden the isolationist republicans getting a lot of votes or at least with in the primaries. what effect do you see of that? >> issue on latino voters and immigration, the answer to this does destroy them, know. polling after polling shows that latino voters the top issue is jobs. and the issue of immigration with latino voters is one of the largest disconnect between the perception and reality. if i had one request a network about these debates would be please, please, stop bringing up the latino voter to pass them on immigration question. it's condescending. but in 2008 if you look at the exit polls, 54% of latino voters said that either immigration was not an important issue to them

or that it was an important issue to them and they voted republican anyway. probably the first time you ever heard that if you dig down into the exit poll numbers it is absolutely true. and as they become again increasingly bored in this country instead of immigrating to this country the immigration issue is going to just like immigration was incredibly important to my italian grandparents who came off the boat. to me it's not as important and so, but yeah in this election it pretty clearly shows the job elections for latinos. fdr, probably the most misunderstood president for people who don't actually study fdr you are absolutely right about the relationship he had. the south that the time was split and it kind of this today between really conservative people like carter, people talk about the tea party rhetoric. 1933 the last democratic senator from virginia referred to the

new the alaska mcclure, a transparent effort to transplant hitler on to the border on to the shores of the country. but people like jimmy byrnes wanted the new deal to do more and part of the whole idea behind the new deal was to try to transform the south to make it more economically mobile with the idea that as people became more rich in the south they would be more like jimmy byrnes and less like carter glass. it didn't end up working out that we, but i think the main problem with the analogy to fdr and i think it is an important one think about what the new deal did. was all relief efforts. the first 100 days and i can't name all of them, but you have the banking act of the agricultural adjustment act, the national nra, the national recovery act, you have the currency reform, going off the gold standard, you have the reform of wall street. all these things are done in the

first 100 days and it's not until the second half of roosevelt's term after she's one of these historic victories in 1934 the democrats expand their majority which no one thought was going to happen that's when he finally begins to turn to things like the labour legislation and social security. compare that with barack obama. what did obama do in his first year in the presidency to address the economy? the stimulus bill. and you can say the bailout which were incredibly important. my personal view is the number one problem in the obama administration at least in the early days was it didn't split the bill up a committee should have had ten the stimulus bill that added up to $787 billion but reach 780 billion-dollar bills that hammer home the idea we care about the economy. i think first off how many republicans standing alone would vote against the tax cut bill? i'm sure some of them would, but

it wouldn't be zero like it and that being from the stimulus. how many republicans would vote against the infrastructure spending, standing alone that was going to send projects to their districts a lot of them but it wouldn't be 100% and that would have given president obama some momentum. a 50 hour momentum to do these other things and still blows my mind that financial regulation was put off until almost the end of the first half of his term. if nothing else that is what the american people sent barack obama to do and was put on the back burner. it's from a political perspective to me it's mind-boggling. there may have been policy reasons for that and i don't want to denigrate but i'm here to talk about politics. final question about foreign policy. it's just not a foreign policy election. i find the ron paul phenomenon fascinating. in part as a student of history. libertarian but i see him kind of as a resurgence of the tackling of the party.

probably due to the fact -- i don't think that it's accidental he's 80-years-old and became of political age when bob taft was running for the party. i don't -- truthfully. is there a future for that in the republican party? i don't know. i think younger voters are inclined to be. i think that is probably true across the generations. we will see these young voters in the republican party look like in 20 or 30 years. >> final question from walter. speaking to the microphone. >> when one hears that they talked about the electability as to whom they were voting for on the basis of their elective ability does it matter? the personal characteristics of these candidates have an effect on the outcome of an election?

>> yeah. people are saying they want elected devotee, but that kind of begs the larger question. i mean, no one votes for rick santorum unelectable in the generally leche or ron paul. the wrong path supporters are convinced ron paul can win a general election and i don't want to fly in box with hate mail so i will just leave it at that. the personal characteristics of these candidates though i think it is something that matters to people. it is something that drives the perception of the candidates and whether they can win. if someone is a mess i think it makes it difficult for people to convince themselves that they can actually win an election. you remember even in 92 people had written bill clinton off in the general election. there's actually a great book that was written and i would plank on the name of it as soon as i started talking about it, but it had a great quote from one of clinton's b5 top advisers talking of the early stages of the '92 election when he was

below 20% they were below to the country to witness because he fell below the 20% threshold and the modern democratic party as we know it. and a lot of that was due to the personal issues surrounding clinton. ross perot kind of came into the spotlight and gave him the chance to improve but i do think the character still counts in american politics. i think the character drives perceptions of the candidates and whether they will be, you know, actually do what they say they are going to do and actually be able to appeal to the american people. whether that wins this time, we will see. we have got a long way until november. [applause] >> thank you very much. >> thank you very much and please join us for the reception of sight. the books are for sale.

>> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you so much. >> road to the white house coverage of politics takes you to the candidate events.

>> all the best to you. thanks for coming out. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. i appreciate it. >> i want to see members of the people of new hampshire right now. >> as we follow the campaign trail meeting voters. >> i am for very strict rules. >> to control the border is a big first step. [inaudible conversations]

like some of these other issues that took a while. we've been talking about cybersecurity for ten or 20 years, but now it's something as a result of the data breaches as a result of some of these high-profile defense and just the increasing reliance of society on the internet to run critical sectors of the economy and infrastructure there's an awareness that this is very real. federal petitions commission chairman genachowski of plight proposed changes to the government's lifeline program aimed at reducing fraud and adding a broadband to internet. the provides phone services to the poor using a portion of the universal service fund on everybody's telephone bill. speaking of the third we think tank in washington, chairman schakowsky said the program could save $2 billion over the next few years, enough to pay for the addition of broadband.

this is 25 minutes. >> we are delighted to have you all. you know, when i was growing up my grandmother used to write out phone numbers beginning with letters. her number was gp 6814 if you want to call her. and i remember calling her from our house with the rotary phone pity if those loans were still on the wall of my parents' house my children would not know how to operate. and at third way, we are about addressing challenges of modern ideas, bringing these into the 21st century just as the funds evil into the 21st century technology and that is precisely what the chairman are doing today. we are going to hear more in a little bit about some of their efforts to modernize this government agency. we are in the middle of a concerted effort to create and to reform programs that will

empower consumers and meet america's communications needs in this century. julius genachowski is just the person to leave that job. of course appointed chairman in 2009 where he was returning to the agency he served as the chief counsel. before that he spent more than a decade in the private sector working on technology and the media industries. he was elected not one but two supreme court justices david souter and william brennan and he worked in congress for them representative now senator and third way chuck schumer on the other jobs out there. the chairman is spearheading the commission's reform to accelerate the deployment of broadband and third way strongly believes this is a vital part of creating jobs and economic opportunity in this country. as we would hear none of the chairman is working with its colleagues on efficient and transparent reforms which is six ackley what we believe needs to

happen in agencies like this and we applaud the tireless work to eliminate waste and drive growth. with that is my pleasure to introduce the chairman julius genachowski. [applause] >> thank you. thanks for the introduction and for welcoming me. for the reasons you said, a perfect venue for a talk on smart responsible government. thank you all for coming. i know there's a lot of competition for your attention. you've got the football playoffs, the new hampshire primary or a policy speech once again you chosen the less obvious, the third way. it is a pleasure to be here to talk about the proposal to reform and modernize lifeline and fcc program created by

congress to help ensure low-income americans have access to basic communication service. this is one of the many initiatives to harness the opportunities of the communications technology to benefit our economy and all americans. it's an important part of our ongoing effort to modernize the programs, to modernize them for broadband and to ensure that they are efficient and fiscally irresponsible. what is our mission? since becoming chairman i've worked to focus the agency on driving innovation, driving investments, promoting competition and empowering consumers. there's never been a more exciting and challenging time to be at the fcc. broadband internet, a lawyer and wireless is the most transformative new technology since electricity. it's changing almost every aspect of our economy and our lives. it's why we developed america's

first national broadband plan, a comprehensive strategy to build a world leading broadband infrastructure and bring the benefits of high-speed internet to all americans. for the past two years, we've been working to implement that plan and 2011 was a year of accomplishment for all of the commissioners and staff. we adopted a major modernization and overhaul of the largest part of the universal service fund and of the carrier compensation system, multibillion-dollar a year program that we have reformed for the modern age to meet our 21st century strategic goals. we put in place strong balance rules to preserve internet freedom and openness and spur investment innovation throughout the broad economy and indeed over the last year if you look at the broadband economy, both network and infrastructure and also services across the ecosystem investment up,

innovation, up, jobs, up. it's a thriving sector of our overall economy although there is still much work to do. we took many steps over the course of 2011 to make sure that the u.s. has a strategic broadband advantage in the global marketplace and that we drive investment innovation in the u.s. to foster competition and in power consumers. one lesson i learned during a decade in the private sector and think you for mentioning my background, a lesson i learned as an executive and investor is that an organization that devotee to advance its mission depends not just on what it does, but how it does it. since day 1i have made it a priority to improve the way the fcc does business emphasizing the need for smart responsible government, and i want to commend my fellow commissioners for being part of this effort.

one of my first acts of chairman was to appoint a special counsel for the fcc reform if you don't organize the reform you are less likely to have reform. a director to lead the review of the rules and policies we've already been pursuant to that effort eliminated more than 200 outdated rules and dozens of unnecessary data collections at the fcc. and at the same time we have cracked down on fraud and abuse. and in fiscal year 2011 we lost a record $67 million in enforcement penalties and settlements. consistent with a number of congressional directives to ensure modern connections are available to all americans, the fcc had ministers a number of programs to help connect underserved populations, rural americans, children and low-income americans. ..

that is why we have also asked if programs need to be modernized to meet today's needs and be effective? we found that we have inherited a series of programs that needed to be updated for the internet age and must, most also needed, careful scrubbing to ensure they were carrying out their missions effectively and efficiently. and so we have worked to form -- reform and modernize their programs rooting out waste fraud and abuse and ensuring our programs are serving the right

policy goals. for example, we reformed the video relay service which provides vital communications for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. the program that suffers from serious abuse, now we have made changes to eliminate incentives for fraud and have already saved taxpayers about $250 million. our e-rate programs helps connect american schools and libraries to the internet. it's a successful program and we have reformed it to make it better and more efficient. we eliminated unnecessary restrictions and red tape giving schools and libraries the ability to get higher capacity and more cost-effective broadband services. we removed barriers that kept schools from opening their computer labs and hotspots for their communities. allowing them to provide internet use when students aren't in school of allowing what we call school -- reflecting the increasing use of digital textbooks and tablets and the need for continuous

reinvention of our programs. we are also running a learning on the go pilot project to test the use of e-rate funding for off-campus mobile connectivity. most recently, i mentioned we approved a once in a generation overhaul of the multibillion-dollar program that ensures communication networks reach rural america, the largest part of universal service that are relayed system. we took a system that was still focused on supporting 20th century telephone service and in doing so but pretty wastefully paying as much as $2000 a month for single phone line in some areas and subsidizing multiple carriers in other areas. we transformed it into the connect america fund which will efficiently and effectively spur wired and wireless broadband buildout to hundreds of thousands of homes in the near term and universal broadband deployment by the end of that

year. by using smart market-based policies and cutting waste and inefficiency we are able to do this while for the first time putting the fund on a budget. are intercarrier compensation reforms will eliminate billions of dollars in hidden subsidies on consumer phone bills as per the rollout of innovative new communication services. now tomorrow, i will circulate to my fellow sec commissioners in order to reform and modernize the universal service fund lifeline program. the circulation of this draft order is an opportunity to take another major step forward in our efforts to modernize their programs for the digital age and to make them efficient and fiscally responsible. lifeline is a vitally important program. it implements congress and i'm quoting from the statute, consumers in all regions, including low income consumers should have access to

telecommunications and information services. over the past two decades it has helped tens of millions of americans afford basic phone service. lifeline recipients rely on their phones to do everything from finding a job, coordinating childcare to calling 911 during an emergency. the other day at the fcc we heard from a lifeline recipients who had a chronically ill daughter. she said her lifeline support and enable her to make multiple emergency calls to her daughter's doctors at children's hospital, meaning this assistant can literally be a lifeline. the program is also had its problems and we can't and won't ignore them. some carriers are providing lifeline service to individuals that already have lifeline service from another carrier. this currently no database of recipients that carriers can check against before signing up a new customer and we have received reports that some unscrupulous carriers are

abusing the program, obtaining support for consumers who did not sign up for lifeline by mailing them phones already set up for lifeline service or signing people up for lifeline who aren't eligible for the program. defrauding a public program designed to help our most vulnerable citizens is flat out wrong. it's flat out wrong, it's simply unacceptable and we have launched multiple investigations into these reported violations. where individuals or companies have unlawfully defrauded or abused our program, we will penalize them and we will make it clear that it does not pay to rip off the government. the reforms we are proposing would only modernize the eligibility and clarify rules that further tackle the issues of duplicative or otherwise improper support. in some cases old rules may have invited and runs and created loopholes from carriers or

exploiting. this order would close those loopholes. lifeline has also lacked adequate cost control. as the economy improves or worsens in the lifeline eligible population shrinks or grows the size of the program will naturally all naturally fluctuate in this explains part of the reason there is growth in lifeline spending during a down economy. that flexibility is crucial to ensuring low of income americans remain connected to our communications networks particularly in tough economic times when for example the need to call about job opportunities or to obtain basic services particularly are a cute. but much of the program's recent growth stems from waste and inefficiency and that can't continue. the program needs cost control and it needs a budget designed to address those issues consistent with the program's purpose. finally, the programs in-house

data focused on phone service for high-speed internet has become our vital communications but on. the commission started the process of reforming the lifeline program with the release of our national broadband plan in early 2010. shortly thereafter, after the federal state joint board and universal service examined the lifeline program and offered recommendations for reform. which it did. last year the fcc -- on the board's recommendation in the order being circulated tomorrow implements many of those ideas. we haven't waited for this order to take concrete steps. last june the commission adopted an order clarifying that an eligible consumer may only receive one lifeline supported service, creating procedures to detect and d. enroll subscribers of duplicate lifeline support services and establishing an unprecedented process in partnership with major lifeline

providers to detect and eliminate duplicative lifeline support process now underway in 12 states that will expand to additional states in the months ahead. as a result of these actions we have our ready identified more than 200,000 duplicative lifeline subscriptions for elimination, saving millions of dollars every month. the order to be circulated tomorrow continue support the work and if approved by the commission would reform the lifeline program in a number of significant additional ways. the order would for the first time establish clear goals for the program, clear goals and metrics to measure progress towards those goals. putting goals and metrics in place is crucial to ensuring that the fcc and usac, the entity that administers the program, are accountable for program performance. one of the goals is minimizing the contribution burden on consumers and businesses who

ultimately pay for the program. consistent with the draft order to sustain the number of significant measures to constrain the program's growth and make it more efficient. for example to prevent multiple carriers from receiving support for the same subscriber. the draft order would create a national lifeline accountability database. the order would also set a budget for lifeline. for the next few years this will help ensure that reforms successfully eliminate unnecessary spending while the program continues to provide enough support to connect eligible consumers to our communications networks. to ensure accountability every carrier that receives more than a specified annual amount of support for the program would be subject to independent audit every two years. the order would establish national eligibility criteria to ensure access to lifeline service for all low income consumers to meet federal

participation program with a direct mission of the unique circumstances facing tribal communities. states would be permitted to add to these criteria. the order would make lifeline reimbursement more transparent and streamlined so that carriers receive funds only for so skypers they actually serve, common sense. the order would also take a number of steps to protect and empower consumers including new measures to ensure that consumers are informed of the program requirements. altogether a staff estimates that the reforms proposed in this draft order could save the fund as much as $2 billion over the next few years which would be money in the pockets of american consumers that otherwise would have been wasted on duplicative benefits, subsidies for an eligible consumers or fraudulent misuse of lifeline used. these reforms would put the program on a firm footing.

it would put an important program on a solid foundation for the future so it can more effectively serve low-income consumers including helping low income consumers put forward broadband, which brings me to the final but perhaps the most important point. beginning the process of modernizing lifeline from telephone service to broadband. broadband has gone from being a luxury to a necessity in the 21st century. it is essential for finding a job for example as job postings have moved on line. and for landing a job as companies increasingly require basic digital skills. over 80% of fortune 500 companies do all of their job postings on line and require on line applications. one third of americans haven't adopted rock band at home. and the majority of low income

americans are non-adopters. this is a negative cycle, where the people who most see broadband access in order to find a job, develop skills and participate in our economy are the biggest disadvantage. we know there are three primary barriers to broadband adoption, cost, digital literacy and relevance for our work, the work of pew and other entities confirms this, relevance refers perverse effect of too many americans don't perceive broadband as having value to them. as i said before, there is no single solution to closing the broadband adoption gap. that is why the fcc has taken a number of steps in this area including working to launch the connect to compete an initiative which in less government, nonprofit, private-sector leaders to tackle the barriers to adoption. on digital lit literacy partners ranging from best buy to the

nation's libraries have made significant commitments to teach americans basic digital skills on costs, cable industry world out a basic $9.95 a month broadband plan for families with kids on the school lunch programs. this is a very significant initiative. government is another powerful tool for accelerating broadband adoption. for example the winners of the fcc asked for communities challenge develop tools to help people find jobs, connect the homeless services and the public transportation writers know when their bus is arriving and in general accelerating e-government at the points were government into racks with low income citizens is a real opportunity to address the barriers that we have identified to broadband adoption. causes i have mentioned members have connects to compete at making broadband service as well as computers available to

low-income americans at significantly discounted rates. we believe that lifeline, the program that ensures low income americans can afford vital communication, can and should be part of the solution. that is why the order i will circulate to my fellow commissioners tomorrow includes ensuring the of the -- availability of broadband to low-income americans as an expressed program goal. and the first of towards transitioning the program to support broadband we would establish a broadband adoption pilot program, using savings from other reforms. the pilot program would test and determine how lifeline can best be used to increase broadband adoption among lifeline eligible consumers. the program would start by soliciting applications for broadband providers and a select number of projects starting this year. life and would help reduce the monthly cost of broadband

services but applicants would be expected to help address other challenges to broadband adoption including the cost of devices and digital literacy issues. data from all the projects, together with data from other low income broadband adoption program's allowance the country, comcast internet essential, centurylink internet basics would be rigorously analyzed to ensure full understanding how best to transition lifeline to support rod band. and a proposal that a company is ordered seeks comment on using savings from universal savings to increase literacy training at libraries and schools which could eventually arm more americans with the digital skills they need to fully participate in our 21st century economy and society. lots of people have worked to bring together our broadband adoption initiative and their lifeline reforms in particular. i do want to thank the people

who can chew beaded ideas to the proposed order especially the states in the joint board as well as the government accountability office, gao which studied the program and is made suggestions. wanted commend the staff of the fcc for their hardware crafting his proposal and i want to thank my fellow commissioners for their input. this has been the subject of discussion internally and their input is reflected in many parts of the draft order. i look forward to working with those of my colleagues to ensure that the lifeline program is sufficient, fiscally responsible and that we modernize it to meet the needs of low income americans in the broadband world. thank you for coming and thank you for listening. [applause] >> thanks everybody.

[inaudible conversations] one thing will be tracking as we always do cybersecurity. this is becoming increasingly something that is come to the forefront like these issues that took a while. we been talking about cybersecurity for 10 or 20 years but now it's something as a result of the data breaches and as a result of some of these high-profile events and the increasing reliance on our society on the internet to run critical sectors of our economy infrastructure there is an awareness that this threat is very real.

c-span's roger the white house coverage of politics takes you to the candidates events. >> all the best to you. >> governor, good luck. >> sorry about the house.

[laughter] >> thank you very much. i appreciate it. see all i want is the endorsement of the people of new hampshire now. >> i'm for very strict rules. >> we control the border and that's a big first step. [inaudible conversations] tomorrow night watch our coverage of the results of the new hampshire primary with candidates speeches on c-span television starting at 8:00 eastern and join the conversation by phone along with your comments from facebook and twitter and watch events on line at c-span.org/campaign

2012. >> i was out trying to -- and went to a shop in mountain view. paul terrell, that then owner of the shop said he would like to take 50 of these computers and i saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. >> steve jobs biography is number one on "the new york times" bestsellers list.

author walter isaacson on business advice, the apple co-founder got early in his career. >> one is to focus, really keep your focus. the other is empathy, not the perfect word for it but it's basically make it an emotional connection for the people are going to buy your product and then the third is also not a great word, the word imputed by the means cast an aura around whatever you do so that the minute you, you know, steve even throughout his career had his own personal name on the patents for the boxes, the packaging, the apple product so when you open it up and there was the ipod cradled, it imputed that it was something really cool, just the way it was and that is what the apple ii does, it impedes that it's a really cool machine.

>> , today's white house briefing with press secretary jay carney. he addresses reporters questions concerning the iranian conviction of a former u.s. marine. the 2012 presidential election and the publication of a new book on president obama and first lady, michelle obama. this is 35 minutes. >> i want to ask your forgiveness that i had to switch around the briefing schedule a couple of times. actually have to be done at 1:45 p.m. so i'll try to move quickly through your questions. let me begin with an announcement, rather a statement. on wednesday president obama and vice president biden will host an insourcing american jobs forum at the white house focused on the increasing trend of companies choosing to in source jobs and invest in growing in the united states.

as part of the insourcing american jobs form the president will meet with business leaders on experts to discuss why its competitors to locate in the united states and what more can be done to work with companies to take similar steps to insourcing reckon jobs. following that meeting the president will deliver remarks to a group that will include leaders from the government and private sector that are taking steps to encourage companies to in source and invest in america. in the afternoon cabinet officials will host panel discussions with both small and large businesses and experts on insourcing and investing in america. there will be over a dozen large and small businesses in attendance at the event that it made decisions to bring jobs to the united states and increasing investments here. they will attend the form. with that i go to the "associated press." >> thank you, jay. i wanted to get your updated reaction about what happened in iran. iran has convicted and sentenced to death in american that iran accuses of spying. i know the white house has demanded his release, but i'm

wondering what more the white house and perhaps specifically the president can do, given that his life is on the line. >> well, it's accurate that we have seen iranian press reports that mr. hekmatyar's been sentenced -- sentenced to death by an iranian court. our state department is working through the swiss protecting powers in iran to confirm the voracity of those reports. if true we strongly condemn such a verdict and we will work with their partners to convey our condemnation to the iranian government. allegations that mr. hekmatyar worked for or was sent to iran by the cia are false. they reigning regime has a history as you know falsely accusing people of being spies and soliciting force confessions and holding americans for political reasons. the state department can give

you more details on that. >> the question still stands, if true, what more can you do other than making these calls? >> well i mean that's a broad question, then. we are putting a great deal of pressure on iran broadly excessive it's rogue behavior, if you will, the fact that won't live up to its international obligations with regards to its nuclear program. those actions we we are taken in concert with their international partners have had a significant impact on iran, on the iranian economy. i believe it was just last week where the new sanctions, when they went into effect, had the impact of causing the iranian currency to drop dramatically. so we work with our partners as well as unilaterally to increase that pressure. as regards this particular incident, we will work in a manner that i describe to you,

to call upon iran to release mr. hekmatyar immediately. >> has the administration considered any option to intervene? >> i don't want to speculate about that. we take this matter seriously and we are addressing it in the appropriate manner. >> on another topic. wednesday's anniversary of guantánamo bay and i'm wondering what the white house says now to critics who look at this is a pretty clear broken cross -- promised. there is really no end in sight. how do you respond to that? >> well, the commitment the president has to close the guantánamo bay is as firm this firm today as it was during the campaign. we are all aware of the obstacles to getting that done as quickly as the president wanted to get it done, what they

were in the and the fact that they continue to persist. but the president's commitment hasn't changed at all, and it's the right thing to do for our national security interests. that has been an opinion shared not just by this president or members of this administration to senior members of the military as well as this president's predecessor, and the man he ran against for this office in the general election. so we will continue to abide by that commitment and work towards its fulfillment. >> you think you're closer to closing it than you were the day he took off his? >> i think this is a process that faces obstacles that we are all aware of, and we will continue to work through it. yes, reuters. >> thanks jay. did the president watch any of the republican debates this weekend? >> i didn't speak with him about that. i know, because i know him, that

is unlikely, not because they were debates but because he tends to, when he is watching television, not watch news or politics but sports or movies. so i will venture a guess to say no. >> as the republican field starts to narrow a little bit, and is the front-runner is gaining traction, what has the president said and what is the white house thinking about your own strategy in the next few months? >> jeff as you know there is a re-election campaign located in chicago and the president is doing the things he needs to do to prepare for his campaign, but the level of his engagement is relatively low now, because he has to -- work to do as president. he is very focused on the number one priority which is doing everything he can as president, working with congress for using his executive authority or working with the private sector, to grow the economy and create

jobs. we have had some signs of improvement in the economy, some indications that the recovery is strengthening, but we are a long way from where we need to be as a country. and that's why this president is focused on the initiatives that he is has put forward in the american jobs that, including the extension, the full extension of the payroll tax cut, full extension of unemployment insurance, working with congress to fund infrastructure projects that will put construction workers back to work but also in ill the foundation for this economy that we need to be competitive in the 21st century and doing the kinds of things he will do on wednesday like this insert -- insourcing forum to focus people's attention on the fact that america is a great place to invest. it's the right place for american companies to insourcing if you will, to bring their investments and jobs back to the united states. so he will use every tool in the toolbox to do that.

the campaign, when it comes, in terms of his enhanced engagement, will consume more time at the appropriate time. but that is not now for him. >> but even if the two operations are separate is clearly they are, aren't things like the nomination of richard cordray last week and even the insourcing event now milestones that will be used for the campaigning season as well for this president? >> that's like saying that anything you do as president is inherently political. the fact is he is running for re-election to a political office, the presidency of the united states, and he will obviously have a lot to say about what has been accomplished during his time in office and even more so what needs to be done in the ensuing four years. and why he believes that he has the right vision for the country going forward.

and having said that, his job is to be president. his job is to do everything he can to help the american people as we emerge from the worst recession since the great depression, to work with the private sector, work with congress, use his executive authority to grow the economy and create jobs, to make sure that he is doing everything he can as commander-in-chief to ensure the safety of the american people both here and abroad, to take the kinds of actions that allowed him to fulfill his promise to end the war in iraq, as he did late last year, and to continue to draw down forces in afghanistan, even as we step up our fight against al qaeda. all these things are part of his day job and they are quite consuming. and because he does not need to now, he does not engage

particularly aggressively in his re-election campaign. it's only january. there is not a republican nominee. >> isn't the recess appointment engaging on some level? 's b. i can't remember, i guess maybe you weren't here last week, but the president recess appointed richard cordray because republicans refused, despite overwhelming part partisan support, overwhelming testaments to the fact that he is enormously qualified and the overwhelming need to have the consumer watchdog in place, the republicans in the senate refused to confirm him and refused to give him an up-or-down vote. every day that there wasn't a consumer watchdog in that office was a day when americans weren't protected from abuses by payday lenders, non-bank financial institutions, mortgage brokers, student loan providers. so he insisted that he was not going to wait any longer to

allow those americans to be unprotected. republicans who opposed that nomination almost to a person have said it's not because they have any problem with richard cordray, it's because they have a problem with the bureau itself. and our position is, if they want to change the law they should do that through the legislative process. it is the law. is passed by congress. wall streeter form is absolutely essential given the crisis we went through that can should be due to the worst recession since the great depression and richard cordray needs to be on the job. that is what the why the president made that appointment. let me move around. mark. >> thanks jay. if i could come back to iran for a moment, the sanctions that the president signed into law over the holiday you know, sort of requiring the u.s. to go go to a lot of long-time allies and make the case that they should curtail purchases of iranian oil. i am wondering in the week or so

that those sanctions have been in effect, what is the earlier response for countries like china, south korea, japan? are you confident that at the end of the six-month period mackie will be able to go to congress and say in each of these cases these countries have significantly reduced the amount of oil they buy from iran? >> i don't want to speak for the countries. our belief is that for the sanctions to be most effective, they need to be multilateral and have multilateral participation. they need to be timed and phased in a way that avoids negative repercussions to international oil markets and in ways that might cause more damage to ourselves than to iran. so that is why we worked so closely with congress to ensure that the flexibility was there, to allow us to implement this legislation, to implement the sanctions in a way that had the most negative effect, if you

will, on iran while protecting our international partners and protecting us from shocks in the oil markets. and we are proceeding with that approach. >> at the risk of getting into the weeds a tiny bit, in order to go to congress and ask for a waiver in any of these cases, the phraseology is you need to show that these countries are importing significantly less oil. can you be more precise? what constitutes in percentage terms, a significant decline in purchase of iranian oil? >> i won't be more precise. i know that we believe strongly that the flexibility that is necessary for the president to implement this law effectively exists in the legislation. we worked with congress to make sure that was the case and we are now in the process of doing that. all the way in the back. >> thank you, jay. pakistan's new ambassador to the

u.s. sherry rehman has arrived here. my question is, since november 26 when there was another cross-border attack in which 26 pakistani soldiers were killed, you had tension in relations between the u.s. and pakistan. is the president satisfied with the kind of cooperation you are receiving from pakistan now after that incident? >> as you know, and i've discussed from here on in numerous occasions we have important relationship with pakistan. if a competition relationship with pakistan. and we continue to work on it because it's in the interest of the american people and in the interest of american national security to do so. i don't have any updates on that for you, except to say that we are working with pakistan precisely because it's in american national security interest to do so, and we will continue to do that.

yes. >> jay, there's a lot of interest in jody cantor's look that comes out tomorrow, it details tensions between the first lady and some, while former top aides to president obama. i'm just wondering what you think about her accounts in the book. >> well, but me just say that books like these tend to over hype and since then she'll wise things -- sensationalize things and i think that is the case here. the fact of the matter is, and i think this is depicted in the book, that the relationship between the president and the first lady is incredibly strong. they are committed to each other, to their children and to the reasons why the president ran for office is all very strong. the fact of the matter is, the first lady is very focused on the issues that matter to her, helping military families,

fighting childhood obesity and she has done that remarkably well. and i think that is reflected also in the book. >> would the maaco the count that's getting so much attention that robert gibbs cursed the first lady in a meeting with top white house aides? >> again, think of books like these generally over sensationalize things. i know some people grown a little bit when i do this, but i've covered a couple of white house as myself and the fact of the matter is i've been here all three years, although not in this position. the atmosphere and collegiality here is much better than any of the white house as i have covered and that's been the case from day one here and continues to be the case. but these are high-pressure jobs. there is always a lot at stake, and the commitment the people show to the president, to the first lady and to the causes that rocked them here is fierce. and sometimes that intensity leads people to raise their voices or have sharp exchanges.

but the overall picture is one of remarkable collegiality and a genuine focus. i think you guys know this. a lot of you have covered previous administrations in previous white houses. this is a remarkably harmonious place, given everything that's at stake in the enormity of the issues that are discussed and debated here every day. >> can you just speak to the voracity of the gibbs -- >> yeah going to get into the individual anecdotes from there. i will simply say that isolating one incident where there were sharp words, whether it's accurate or not, it doesn't reflect the overall atmosphere and tenor here, or doesn't, also doesn't make clear that in some cases these anecdotes, what really is the focus here, which every individual at the senior level that i know is determined to work for the president, work

for the first lady towards achieving the things that they set out to do when they came here in january of 2009. so that is what i see every day. that is why sais on my first two years and my other job and i think it's a testimony to the commitment that the folks here have to these causes that we have this kind of relationship among ourselves. >> follow-up to that? in your three years has it been common for mrs. obama to express interest in the west wing policy? dishy voice her concerns? >> no, think is the author of this book herself said just the other day, if not today, but in fact no. the first lady is very focused on the issues that mattered dearly to her, military families in the fight against childhood obesity. she is also very focused on raising her two children, and

giving them an upbringing that is as normal as can be in these rather unusual circumstances. >> she was not in -- not unhappy with or upset about the loss of the senate seat? >> there wasn't anybody who comes to work here who wasn't appointed by a political -- disappointed by a political loss. she doesn't come to meetings in the west wing. but i think everybody had hoped for a different outcome to that race. >> why did the white house confirmed the time that johnny depp was here? >> this is a perfect example of why it goes right to my first and how these books take these things out of context. a couple of outlets that i won't

name reported that a secret party -- why was there a pool report? this was an event for military children and their families inside the white house where the press came. photographs were taken. it was can tempore kneisley known who was here. if we are trying to hide something by bringing in the press, were not very good at it. so again, i think many people have said in the wake of those reports, it's an example of the kind of hype and sensationalizing that looks like this do. >> for the record, there's not one statement from this white house. >> but again, the purpose, for any of these, we do a lot of these things. july 4 and other events here, including other events that are geared towards military families and their kids, where the purpose isn't to publicize them externally for you guys but to have a nice event for them here, which is different from trying

to hide anything. again, you don't bring the press send. you don't have photographs going out of here in real-time if you are trying to keep something on the down-low. but the focus of this event was on celebrating and giving a nice time to military families and their kids, and the event itself was overwhelming -- overwhelmingly for children. >> but the allegation that the author is making indirectly is that the white house did deliberately keep johnny depp and just in general the hollywood angle out of this because of the recession. >> then why were there pictures of johnny depp instantly available? there were many people in the white house, public and staff

and others and there were photographs out there. honestly ed, i mean, again their outlets that have reported that this is a secret party which is just silly. and it's irresponsible reporting to suggest that, that you would have a pool report and the press at an event that secret secret and have attended by hundreds if not thousands of people. so the focus on military families and their kids, and it was not on publicity outside of here. it was on those who were invited. >> so if you say the book is overhyped and sensationalized including that anecdote, whited 33 people around this white house include senior aides cooperate with this author? >> well again, that happened before the book came out that we cooperated with all of you on the stories that you worked on. we give access to you, the get you interviews. some of your stories turn out to accurately reflect what we know has happened here and some of

them in our view don't necessarily reflect that. but you know that's part of our job in the pressure appears to work on broadcaster reports, radio reports, print reports, books, prose, poems, short films. [laughter] haiku. >> all that kind of stuff. >> are you aware of the anecdote that robert gibbs was apologizing to the first lady about that? is that something the president was upset about? >> while i was at the white house i wasn't in the meeting at that time and i don't have anything more for you on it. what i can tell you is that robert is, as you know, focused on helping the president get reelected. he is out there if he did as much as the team and a member of the team as he was back then. and i would point you to what i said before about these are high-pressure jobs with a lot of -- a lot at stake.

the fact of the matter is the overall story here is how collegial and harmonious and focused everyone here is on the task at hand. stephen. >> what is the white house's response to these attacks on the president by republican candidates over iran, saying that his policies, sanctioned policies are feckless, weak and ineffective? >> again i don't have anything specific to those criticisms. pretty clear about what our approaches to iran. we have sanctions that are unprecedented, that are having demonstrable effect on the iranian economy. iran is isolated in a way that it's never been and the pressure on iran is significant and increasing. we will continue to work with our international partners to pressure iran to change its behavior, to abide by its international obligations.

and i think, stepping back, this president approached a foreign-policy, the successes he has had i think are pretty clear. so, when that debate comes, he will be ready to engage in it. >> can i just follow? >> let me get some more folks in the front row. >> let me go back to the book, sorry jay. has the president and the first lady responded at all to this so far? and then secondly, what's the response to sort of the overarching theme in the book of the first ladies, what seems to be her unhappiness with her role or seemed to be back then and what's described as living in a bunkerlike atmosphere of the white house? >> i would point you to, because obviously she hasn't interviewed for this book she has given interviews and answered this question as recently as in the

last few weeks. i would point you to the first lady's words to answer that question and broadly you know, i think you have to remember that the story here is of a husband and a wife, a mother and father whose lives were enormously different five or six years ago, from what they are and what they were when they came to the white house. and that's an incredible transition that i think observers rightly point out has been done with remarkable grace and success in terms of the priorities that the president has set for himself and for the country and in terms of the priorities that the first lady has set for herself and her family. so, that's my reaction.

>> but have they reacted personally to it? >> no. my guess is they both have a lot on their plate. maybe they have seen a story or two, but it's probably not something they're going to spend a lot of time reading. don't forget, there are tons of books written about this white house, this administration, this president, this first lady. this is just another one of them so my guess is they stay focused on the things that matter most to them. >> what is the white house doing to prepare for the challenges from congress, for recess appointments? what is the counsel's office doing? any conversations with members of congress? >> i don't have any specific conversations or meetings to report. you know our position. we feel very strongly about the legal foundation for the course of action that the president look. the fact of the matter is, and again, if you have any doubts, please had up to the hill and

check it out for yourself. congress is in recess. the chambers are empty. the halls are quiet. senate republicans, despite overwhelming support from across the country for republicans and democrats, attorneys general, decided to block this nominee and prevents middle class americans from having a watchdog, looking out for their interest here in washington. like i said before, financial institutions have a lot of well-paid lobbyists in washington working with congress to try to get their interests served. the american people deserve, and this president believes they deserve, consumer watchdog whose only job is to make sure they are protected from abusive practices and that is why the president took the action he did. >> can we expect more recess appointments while congress is in recess? >> i don't have any announcements with regard to appointments to make today. >> and also general dempsey said the u.s. would take action to open the strait of hormuz and iran closes it.

what kind of action is he referring to specifically? >> while i would refer you to the department of defense for any specifics. we are very confident in our capabilities and i will leave it at that. julia. i'm sorry, bill, then julia. >> going back to the america prisoner in iran. you said that you heard reports. do you not have any official word from the swiss? >> we are working through this with this was protecting powers to confirm those reports. i'm not saying that we doubt them. i'm just saying we have seen the reports and we are working with the swiss who represent us and with whom we work to represent us in tehran and their dealings with the iranian government. >> so no official word yet? >> again, that's what i said. were working with the swiss to do that. >> this death sentence that he's reported to have received a subject we understand to confirmation by a larger supreme tribunal of some kind.

so, while the usb pushing to have it reversed? >> well we are pushing very clearly, as i just stated, that iran release him. i clearly stated and others have that the charges against him are false, and we want to see them release. i mean, the intricacies of the judicial process in iran are not what interests us here. our interest is in seeing him release. you said he's definitely not cia? >> that's right. kristin. >> thanks jay. angela merkel and sarkozy met today to discuss the european debt crisis. has a president been briefed on the meeting? as has he made any phonecalls to them? >> i don't have any phonecalls to report. he may have been briefed on it at his presidential daily briefing earlier today. i don't know that for sure but

i'm sure he is aware of it. they continue to work with our european partners, the president does, secretary geithner does, others involved in this do. and we continue to monitor the progress of the european leaders are making towards ensuring that the right measures are taken and are in place to stabilize that situation and bring it to a decisive conclusion. >> and given the current situation, how much concern is there and it administrations that more european countries will see ratings agencies downgrade? >> well are concerned about the potential for that situation to worsen has been there and continues to be there. we have seen some progress by the europeans. there is more work to be done. it's always a reminder in this case that we need to focus on the things that we have control

over that can strengthen our economy, improve prospects for growth and job creation. that is why the president will work with congress to extend fully the payroll tax cut, to extend fully unemployment insurance and he hopes to pass other measures of the american jobs act to put people to work and grow our economy. you need that kind of insurance in a global economy like this because whether it's europe or other shock that we saw in the global economy last year, the arab spring and its effect on oil prices, the earthquake and tsunami and its effect on global supply chains. these are the kinds of things that you sometimes can't predict or often can't predict, that have effects on the economy. you need to do the things you can do. that is what the american people sent this president here to do and that is what american people sent to members of congress to washington to do. i think they need to focus on that challenge when those members of congress returned to

washington. it would be i think a great gift to the american people if, upon reflection over the recess, members of congress, republicans in particular, decided that cooperation was the right way to go for the sake of the economy. let's extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance without drama, without

i don't think house republicans are in a position if they are serious about growth and job creation to try to play politics with this. we saw how that went not that long ago, and i think the american people would be extremely disappointed if that approach were taken again. we can do this. we can do it quickly and without drama and we can move onto the other priorities the american people have. one more. yes, maam. >> thanks jay. on north korea, north korea announced yesterday that north korea never, ever give up their nuclear programs. how do you respond to this? >> i would have to refer you to the state department. i don't have a specific response on that. thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> if we begin now, to match our policies with their ideals, then i believe that it is possible that we will come to acquire this country not simply because we were born here, but because of the kind of good land that

you and i wanted to be and that together we have made it. that is my hope. that is my reason for seeking the presidency of the united states. >> as candidates campaign for president this year we look back at 14 men who ran for the office and lost. go to our web site c-span.org/the contenders to see video of the contenders who have a lasting impact on american politics. >> the leadership of this nation has a clear and immediate challenge to go to work effectively and go to work immediately to restore proper respect for law and order in this land, and not just prior to election day either. >> these young people when they get out of this wonderful university will have difficulty finding a job. we have got to clean this mess up, leave this country in good shape and pass on the american dream to them. go to our web site c-span.org/the contenders.