this president, but they have not ever thought about giving out. not on themselves, not on each other, and not in america. what is needed in our country today is not complicated a profound. it does not take a special government commission to tell us what america needs. what america needs is jobs, lots of jobs. >> know this. our problems can be solved. our challenges can be met. the path we offer may be harder, but it's a better place, and i'm asking you to choose the future. i'm asking you to rally. around a set of goals for your country, goes in manufacturing, energy, education, national security in the deficit. a real achievable plans that will lead to new jobs, more opportunity, and rebuild the

economy and a stronger foundation. that is what we can do in the next four years, and that is why i am running for a second term as president of the united states. [applause] >> find in the speech from both the democratic and republican conventions on line at the c-span video library. book tv coverage from the 2012 rose above reading festival continues. mary stuck the talks about her book, the finding americans, the presidency in national identity. >> now i have to try to be engaging. i think the most important thing to understand about the presidency in this context is that we always have choices. when you pick a president you are absolutely picking a particular kind of policy, but you're also picking a definition of our national identity -- identity.

if you hear president and you like what they're saying to make you feel yourself call to the presidency than they are speaking to you about a sense of the national self that is deeply imbedded in all of us, and every time there's a presidential alexian will one of our previous presidents learned to his sorrow has the vision thing is really an important part of what the presidency does because we see ourselves as a nation through the ways that presidents talk that nation into being. so what i'm going to do today is talk a little bit about franklin roosevelt version of what it meant to be an american at this particular moment in our national history. i did this a little bit earlier, but i want to go back a little bit today and say that prior to roosevelt presidents tended to be very hierarchical in the way they understood the nation. there were often very explicitly exclusionary. it would be people like immigrants or african-americans

and sometimes women who didn't get to be citizens and two were specifically located in presidential rhetoric near the bottom of the hierarchy of the nation, and the nation was understood as hierarchical or as local. for many presidents the south became the sort of demon region. and there are reasons for that because there are building coalitions that depend on including people but also always on excluding people. and one of roosevelt's great geniuses as president is that he almost never actively excluded people attended to base his notion of the nation on a very inclusive sense of what that meant. and so that's what i'm going to talk about right now. this book is actually going back a little ways. it's a book on the presidency as a whole and which franklin roosevelt as the pivot. he is the actual center of the

book. and in the larger book i examine the complex ways in which our national history can be understood as a struggle to live up to our highest principles while also maintaining a region car keys of class and race that allow for stability. in that history of these things are sharply contested during the roosevelt administration. the economy lay in ruins. african americans were making increasing demands for human rights. women were increasingly flexing their political muscles. emigrants were increasingly being incorporated into the -- all of these groups for integral to the coalition which continues to have an important influence on our politics. it was through roosevelt's rhetoric as much as three is actual policy that he crafted this coalition which is proven to be one of the most enduring, one of the most fractious and complicated international history. roosevelt's vision of the nation and the world of citizens within and was routed in a pluralist political tradition which require flexible says that the

president could juggle the various claims menem government. indeed, the metaphor of the juggler, which i clearly and not , was one of roosevelt's favorite ways to describe his understanding of his job as president, the others being cat and magician. he accomplished using for prairie tactics, inclusion denial of the flexion in the for all. these were all unable by his overarching understanding of america as a nation perpetually in progress. the president said i do not look upon these united states as a finished product. your stroke -- still in the making. it is notable that prior roosevelt it was always these united states to be after roosevelt the nation on the stick itself as the united states. it had moved from the notion of collective state to one of an actual mission. from fdr the nation, hierarchies, and citizenship or promised in the future and the present. first inaugural he declared that

the basic thought underlying his policies is not merely nationalistic but the insistence as a first consideration upon the interdependence of various elements and parts in the united states. for roosevelt the entire nation was interconnected bill was not there for static and fixed. it was always in motion, all was developing. therefore required constant attention and adjustment, the kind of attention that only a strong presidency did in a strong central government could give. importantly he understood the nation has already fundamentally united. the various interests that make up the nation were perpetually contesting against one another, but there were not your vocally opposed. some people who visit us from other lands across the sea find it difficult to credit the fact that a nation's wrong from many sources, 130 million strong, stretching 300 miles from east to west and all the great essentials of the civilization,

much gasol for not only do speak one language, not only of the customs and habits of our people essentially similar in every part of the country, but we have given repeated proof on many occasions especially in recent years that we're willing to forgo advantage for such advantage should only be obtained by one part of the country at the expense of the country as a whole. because the nation a share, believes, common culture, and common interest some groups would be granted by the president temporary political. others would be legitimately deny the clinton government command of a planned to be deferred while others were deflected. most importantly the roosevelt administration was marked by its enormous efforts a political inclusion. these efforts, as clear in his willingness to offer assistance to the poor, differing sharply from previous practice roosevelt treated all the poor as if there were deserving right-hander had been always the distinction made between the deserving and the undeserving.

relief under fdr was a matter of right in every legitimate needs also legitimate demands on the political system and therefore earn their loyalty. in addition he legitimate of organized labor in ways that had not been previously seen. upon finding the national industrial recovery act to said its coal is the assurance of a reasonable profit to industry and living wages for labor with the elimination of the radical methods and practices which have not only harassed on his business but have contributed to the ills of labor. note here that the importance of capital and labor, the subject of this discipline. he made a distinction between honest business and radical business. we on of the roosevelt did not hesitate at all to criticize business and businessmen challenging enter analogies and his famous story in a welcoming their hatred in 1936. the flip side of this antagonism to business was that organized labor was able to see him as their champion and did so even

when his policies were substantially more pro-business than his rhetoric. this is important because roosevelt became an advocate for labor. he argued as if organized labor was good and worthy and important to life the nation to be the subject of business to differentiation, distinguishing between good business with the government would support and that which the government would not. through this kind of rhetoric fdr was allowed to include labor which coincidentally included many members of the immigrant groups has already fully integrated into the american system while also protecting business as a whole. only bad business practices would be subject to his discipline, capitalism remained the absolute foundation of the nation. as the new deal continued to the mid-1930s to become a little more suspicious. the passage of the wagner act, while in convenient to say the least, in his relationship with labor leader. increasingly he began to

differentiate between good and bad labor justice to give the business. he helped labor become more politically visible and often more politically powerful and he expected them to be decently grateful which for him and unlimbering political support for fdr.gggggg one of the important side effects of its inclusion, as i mentioned briefly earlier wasgç the inclusion of an occurrence. americans in the 1930's remains somewhat suspicious of immigration. often associated with equally the also groups such as catholics and jews. people sometimes refer to the june deal. shattering. throughout the decade there were various efforts to restrict immigration to americanize immigrants and to control the behavior of new rivals. roosevelt avoided all of these tendencies in favor of a narrative of inclusion. in one of my favorites of his

speeches he says the night has fallen and the spirit of other days prudes over the scene. andrew jackson looks down at us from his printing steep. one of the four corners of the square in which we are gathered around the daily lit christmas tree guarded by the figures of the intrepid leaders of the revolutionary war. this is in keeping with the universal spirit of this festival we are celebrating. he days the inclusion of these immigrants back to the revolution. this is not new. he's arguing these people have always been like this, spin incorporated. it's time recognize that. it is hard to imagine a more eloquent claim to national unity , at least for those of us who trace their ancestry to europe, and it's clear that this rhetoric was meant to be inclusive, although it also is exclusionary for all those who don't see themselves reflected.

it is well worth noting that he does include many of those who were previously marginalized and that this inclusion might well have been one of the reasons why members of these groups just about democratic with such consistency. blue-collar immigrants, catholics, african-americans, and jews, from who are subject to rhetoric of join the new deal with what can only been called antigens to force. this rhetoric was based on the centrality of share value. man who said everywhere throughout europe your ancestors and mine suffered from the imperfect and often unjust governments of their homeland. there were driven by deep desire to find it not only security but in last opportunity for themselves and their children. it is true that the new population flowing into our lance was a mixed population differing often and language, external custom, and habits of thought. in one thing we were like. they shared a deeper purpose to rid themselves forever of the jealousy, prejudice, entry, and

violence either internal or external that disturb their lives on the other side of the ocean. yes, they saw the life that was less cluttered by expectations of some fishman said that the governments that were not free. a wider opportunity for the average man. i read this. i heard ronald reagan's tax in the back of my head. the reason for that is that every president since fdr has used this invitation of the american dream of one. another, but it was to find for us by roosevelt. in such passages the roosevelt narrative, a consistent story of america personified not by those who had founded the nation by more recent immigrants, those who despite they're surface cultural differences would be participants in the american dream. americans are united by previous

experience the oppression and therefore by both the desire to be free of it and the will to act on a desire. that's what constituted the american citizen. that, of course, becomes extremely important in the lead to world war ii. in that sense all americans, no matter how recently arrived or understood as a legitimate defender of the founders, the citizens who were -- on sorry. at least all americans were willing to fight oppression as it was variously defined of the course of his administration were descendants. those founders unfortunately also had some children who grew up to the money changers, doubting thomases, economic loyalists, appeasers, and in general pretty much anybody who opposed fdr. those people were excluded sometimes from the quality and sometimes simply for the rhetoric. he never spoke to asian-american groups, visited american indian reservations, spend time with

hispanic and latino communities. never spent much of his effort on african-americans. simply his efforts matter here. >> -- unlike some presidency did not spend any rhetorical effort explicitly in excluding these people but he simply ignored them. and he did attack groups and individuals and it made more than his fair share of such attacks it was an assault on behavior rather than demography. he never attacked people for their class or race but only for their behavior. he failed economic wireless, and jeered at the john and in the so at, selfish and cynical to describe them. he undermined their status, question their motives, and caricatured them with a demonic plea. he made them up but of many famous joke. never quite the same. he was as capable of using interest humor. continued growth is the only evidence we have of life get growth and progress in variable and inevitably are opposed at

every step, bitterly and blindly wouldn't that be fun to be the target of such an attack. enemies are not treated as people with legitimate concerns the festival of reasonable point of view but as a malevolent obstructionist been on destroying his ministrations and the viability of democracy. it's important of these people are not identifiable as members of any particular race, ethnicity, religion. to the extent they have a collective identity it was a vaguely defined class or a set of economic interests and occasionally during election years as political affiliation he demonized most brutally those who were already well central in the american political regime and never the people who were at the margins. he did protect many of those old hierarchies. and the steps of this. the tendency the balance interest against one another to produce the common good tended to ignore inequalities in and among and between groups but was

applied to add nearly every group of one. turn other. mr. for labor has found itself the target of rows of attention, also his criticism. it was true for african-americans. he granted political visibility. never saw a single piece of sill rights legislation passed during his administration. he did understand african-american needs not as racial but economic. many new deal programs were legally desegregated. of racial justice was important, especially if you happen to be one of the people who was lynched, starving was also important. fdr tended to translate every group interest into an economic interest and would to what he could economically even if he held his hand socially. ..

>> but instead relied on language like, quote: we know the human l factor which enters so largely into this picture. we're trying to apply it to all groups needing aid and assistance and not merely to the a few scattered or faired groups. demanding more than the president was likely to give you meant that he would castigate you as selfish or unfair.

this rhetoric had a powerful nationalizing function for citizens were encouraged to think of themselves as part of a greater national whole rather than members of small local or statewide communities. he deeply believed in the importance and reality of democracy' essential fairness and argued consistently that his policies were designed to promote and maintain that fairness which would always work itself out as evenness over time. for fdr being a good citizen meant being a good neighbor, able and willing to accept temporary sacrifice for his or her behavior, everyone should have equal access for the necessities of life and above all, an overriding commitment to the common good. these values are important. they do, in fact, undergird the national sense of ourselves, and let me be very clear, i'm not arguing against them. but i am noticing that in making these kinds of arguments roosevelt was making the challenge of building a unified nation seem a bit easier than it was.

he ignored structural inequalities and regional differences, and he thus enabled their persistence. he allied local identities in favor of a false national commonality. he disregarded the very real and sometimes principled opposition of republicans, anti-interventionists and other points. his unifying rhetoric, like tha0

>> which aims at a larger good. good citizens thus obeyed the president as good soldiers obeyed their commanding officer. the evocation of a nation organized to fight a war was powerful and at the time comforting. it was also potentially dangerous, for while the military model is a useful one for certain kinds of endeavors, even here in hyde park in the shadow of west point no one is going to argue that the military is an ideal model for democratic government. as suzanne dawgton has noted, this is especially important because in fdr's public rhetoric there's an explicit combination of wartime unity with a specifically religious view of the nation, and there is no doubt that roosevelt had such a view. we cannot read the history of our nation was reckoning the place the bible has occupied.

its teaching, it has been suggested, is plowed into the very heart of the race. for roosevelt the united states was predominantly judeo-christian nation built on the foundation of belief in god. that religion underpinned and authorized his leadership. criticizing the president became very nearly an un-christian act. combining two kinds of the generalship and the past rate, combining wartime and religious claims to authority meant that challenging the president was a particularly difficult thing to do. however well this may have served roosevelt's immediate political end, evoking military and religious leadership as models for democratic leadership remain problematic, especially in the context of his claim to be a protecter of democracy and given the rise of dictatorships in europe, these models set into the fear he was promoting a democratic dictatorship. whatever the problems with fdr's particular brand of leadership, its success is unquestionable. roosevelt argued consistently

for a unified nation under the guidance of a strong chief executive. that unity was premised on what he understood of the fact of increasing national interdependence. he also understood citizens less as geographically-defined units and more as members of economically-defined groups. he thought of citizenship in national terms and of citizens as connected to their economic interests. all these interests were roughly equal and had roughly equal plans on a national government. the president's main task was insuring a balance among and between these groups so that the nation would be both stable and just. but when social justice is understood in largely economic terms, something important is being overlooked, for community life explicitly defined in christian terms as something akin to social justice is not reducible to economics. and when the president puts himself in charge of deciding when social justice has been achieved, those who are underprivileged lose the right to decide for themselves what such justice might look like and

when it might be appropriate for them to push their claims. make no mistake, the roosevelt administration is an important moment of very real progress for the american disenfranchised. earlier presidents have been prone to argue paternal listically for the validity of specific and clearly demarcated national hierarchies. fdr assumed position of spokesperson for those placed an the bottom of those hierarchies, the common man atop his rhetorical order while still leaving the social, political and economic orders largely untouched. roosevelt relied on a form of civic nationalism, of inclusion on the base of commitment to common belief rather than on ascriptive hierarchies, and this moment the disenfranchised had powerful warrants and inclusion on an equal basis. this became incredibly important following the second world war, of course, as african-americans, women, american indians among others all began the arguments and debates that would explode throughout the 1960s and would

eventually lead to unsettling the national order in ways that roosevelt could not have foreseen and probably not have endorsed. under roosevelt the national narrative centered on the immigrant experience in ways that sharpened and defined the national identity as one in which certain ideological positions were presumed to be shared, and in that sharing constituted an american public among those people who came to the u.s. with specific sets of goals and expectations in mind. one author has argued the world we live in is still franklin roosevelt's world, and in many ways, for better or for worse, our national identity is still very much the one he bequeathed to us. thank you. [applause] >> plea minutes earlier -- three minutes early. >> if you have questions, please, move to the microphone and ask them -- [inaudible] >> [inaudible] shifted between the new deal and

world war ii years. >> you know, i don't think, i don't think it shifted all that much because what he, i mean, there's very clear evidence from the archives that roosevelt was sort of on to hitler from a very early moment. and when he started arguing in the mid 1930s, so even before his '36 election, he starts arguing against dickty to haveship -- dictatorships and for democracy, and he does it in explicitly christian terms. he uses light and dark, up and down, all of those kind of metaphors. and because that language was so consistent over time with this slight hiccup for russia -- [laughter] right? because, first off, russia is, like, on the side of the dictators and are bad, and then luckily for him -- luckily for him -- there is this siege of stalingrad which allows him to

then talk about the russians in exactly the same way he can talk about the british, right? but he keeps that same light and dark christian kind of movement throughout, and that language authorizes his domestic policies and also makes very clear the argument he's making for war. and it causes the anti-interventionists all kinds of problems. because the anti-interventionists end up having to argue that there is no moral principle at stake in world war ii. and hitler makes that argument increasingly tricky, right? and the more people know about this, the more people have to say there's nothing at value, there are no american values at stake in this war. and that argument just becomes absurd after a while because you have to end up saying that there are no moral values that matter. this is, essentially, what happens to lindbergh in america first. and then roosevelt does some

nasty things to lindbergh, but -- yes, sir. >> following up on your theme of exclusion and inclusion and disenfranchisement, my understanding is that the right to vote had been confined not only just to white males, but to white male property owners, real property owners. >> that's certainly true in the constitution, yes, sir. >> did roosevelt take any active role in expanding the right to vote? >> no. because by the time, by 19 -- by roosevelt's administration the last group to get the legal right to vote is, of course, african-americans who get no policies under him. american indians get the right to vote following world war i, and the argument is very similar for the american indians as it becomes for african-americans later. they shed blood in the war for the nation, they have a right to citizenship. and that becomes a very

important parallel in the civil rights movement and the right to vote. but fdr didn't ever, as far as i know, she says looking at an archivist, there's no evidence at all that he was interested in extending the suffrage, is there? yeah. >> yes, i was just curious because fdr grew up in a relatively wealthy upbringing -- >> it was relatively wealthy. he was stinking rich. >> the guy was rich. [laughter] i've always actually kind of wanted to know, though, what really triggered -- because a lot of people of his class actually started hating e him for the fact that he did kind of -- >> a traitor to his class. >> -- towards or the downtrodden and, you know, the poor. what exactly triggered the idea? because, you know, he simply could have just not cared in a sense -- >> sure. >> and, you know, because, you know, a lot of the other rich

american dynasties of the time certainly didn't really have this humanitarian instinct that he did. so i was just always kind of curious what really brought him to be the man who, essentially, before he became the greatest world leader of all time really, how did he become, like, also the man who looked for the, towards, like i said, the poor? >> yeah, there's two answers to that. i'm not a psychologist, i'm a political scientist. the one answer that a lot of his biographers give is that there was a combination of a certain no bless oblige combined with his experience of polio and his experience at warm springs that allowed him to both understand suffering from the inside out and to really experience poverty among people who welcomed him, um, at a time when polio was such a tricky disease that they were, polio victims were often ostracized, and yet it was the

poor people of warm springs who really welcomed him in ways that -- so that's one answer. um, the political science answer is probably a little more cynical. barry goldwater was once giving advice to richard nixon -- how's that for a hour risk combination? [laughter] and when asked how would you build a coalition, goldwater said go hunting where the ducks are, right? if you want to get elected, find the votes. and abraham lincoln is the guy who said god must love the poor people, he made so many of them. you want to get elected, the democratic party has always had, to the the the extent that the democratic party has bodies. as will rogers said, they're not organized. but if you want to build a political coalition, you're going to have big chances if you can bring in the new immigrant groups, african-americans who at that time were voting only in the urban north and always for

republicans. so he went hunting where the ducks were. >> thank you. >> sure. i don't know if that actually helped, but -- other questions? >> mary, during world war ii there was a concerted effort -- [inaudible] to look out so that soldiers overseas -- [inaudible] in the presidential election in 1944. so -- [inaudible] the logistickings of insuring their right to work was protected? >> all those ducks. >> also made good an effort to help the naacp and african-americans with, against the white primary. >> okay. i did not know that. >> could you repeat -- [inaudible] so that c-span could capture that? >> can yes. i'm going to get this wrong, though, so this is completely unfair. [laughter] you said that there were concerted efforts made by the roosevelt administration to allow veterans or soldiers

overseas to vote, which would, of course, have included african-americans although not specifically targeted at african-americans. and you pointed out that the democratic national committee? >> the justice department. >> the justice department was helping to overcome the white primaries in the south with what has sob seen as a spectacular lack of success. >> [inaudible] >> come up here or go to a microphone so people can hear you. >> the justice department in the roosevelt administration offered limited help to the naacp when they were fighting the white primary in what became the smith v. allright decision in the supreme court in 1934. >> thank you. i could never have done that. yes, sir. >> maybe this follows up on the previous gentleman's question. it seems that a very prominent middle class sprang forward after roosevelt's administration, and a lot of

people could argue that his policies and attitudes contributed to that. i'm -- and it has become a definite part of our national identity since then. and i'm wondering if that was intentional on his part. was his vision to create the great middle class that ended up coming forward? >> you know, i don't know that he would have understood it in those terms. because the middle class is afraid that so much more current in our time than -- i never saw a phrase like that in the documents of the time. but i do think that he felt very strongly that every person in this country had the right to a living wage and the right to a certain kind of security, a small home, you know, the ability to feed your family. those things seemedhim to be a fundamental -- and he would have called it a fundamental

human right. but, and it's interesting because he understood so many things in this economic terms, and the u.n. itself had so much difficulty over the question of economic rights. so there's a lot of interesting speculation as to what the u.n. would have looked like had roosevelt lived. >> thank you. >> yeah. well, thank you all so very much. [applause] >> booktv has over 150,000 twitter followers. follow booktv on twitter to get publishing news, scheduling updates, author information and talk directly with authors during our live programming. twitter.com/booktv. >> let me just say i think you could sum up -- a very timely book. i hope you enjoy it. it's, um, i think it can be summed up in really one

sentence, that seldom, if ever, in our history have we seen such a concerted series of vicious personal attacks directed against any president of the united states. completely funded, in this case, by a pair of brothers, big oil barons named the koch brothers, with the assistance of an all-too-compliant american media. and you add those three elements together, and you get the obama hate machine. i'd just like to say a little bit about each of those elements and then open it up for questions until c-span tells us the cameras are turned off. and, you know, let's start with a hate directed against obama. and, first of all, i've got to say, though, i think criticism of any american president is fair game. i'm part of the white house press corps, i go to the white house every day, would have been

there today if we weren't coming down here, and every day in front of the white house on pennsylvania avenue there's a crowd of people protesting something. you know? and i love that. i really do. i always make a point of checking out what they're there for, what the issue of the day is. it's a very healthy part of our democracy. and criticism of presidents, of course, has been around for a long time. if you want to go back to the ugliest presidential campaign in history, you could probably go back to 1800 and john adams and thomas jefferson and the things that were said particularly by their followers, not so much the two of them, but the followers against each other. but with president obama it's been attacks not on his policies so much as on him as a person. and we haven't seen that, i don't believe -- and i went back and did a lot of research in presidential campaigns and presidential history -- we haven't seen that directed, that severe and that ugly directed

against any president, pardon me, since abraham lincoln. we think of lincoln, of course, as st. abe -- abraham. he wasn't thought of that way during his lifetime. it was only after he was assassinated. when he came to washington, he was introduced to the nation by the kentucky statesman as follows: abraham lincoln is a man above the medium height. he passes the six-foot mark by an inch or two. he is raw-boned, shamble-gaited, bow-legged, knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, slob-sighted, a shapeless skeleton in a very tough, very dirty, unwholesome skin. his lips protrude beyond the natural level of the face but are pale and smeared with tobacco juice, his teeth are filthy. [laughter] peat your president, your new president of the united states. [laughter] at the same time, another paper

published this profile of mr. lincoln. mr. lincoln stands six feet tall in the his socks, which he changes once every ten days. [laughter] his anatomy is composed mostly of bones, and when walking, he resembles the offspring of a happy marriage between a derrick and a wind mill. [laughter] his head is shaped something like a route bag georgia. he can hardly be called handsome, though he is certainly much better looking since he had the smallpox. [laughter] flash forward, right? president obama called a racist, a marxist, a fascist, a dictator, a muslim -- that's not meant as a positive term, by the way, a man of faith, a muslim meaning a terrorist -- a nazi, a

foreigner, jack an -- jackassa lie offon the -- liar on the floor of the house. this obsession with obama as a person is what others have called the otherring of president obama. they have to kind of prove that he's not like us. and a lot -- some of it, not all of it, but some of it, of course s the color of his skin. he's black, and we're white, he's the first african-american president. but it's also he is not a true american, he wasn't born -- the whole birth certificate nonsense. all to show that he is, again, something different, something else, something foreign. it's really this obsession, as i say, to try to destroy president barack obama personally. david horowitz, one of the most conservative commentators out there, actually calls this, he himself calls in the obama derangement syndrome.

they just can't help themselves. and i don't know how many of you heard about this, but it goes on. last week the leading federal judge in montana sends out an e-mail on his official judicial e-mail account to his friends this joke about, um, little old barack obama asking his mommy, you know, why am i black and you are white, and she says well, for all i know about your father, i'm surprised he didn't bark when we had sex, meaning having sex with a dog. i mean, he did this on his official federal e-mail, and he said, you know, i don't usually send jokes out to friends like that, but i just thought this one was particularly funny. that's how sick these people are, and that's what we have seen over and over again. again, directed not so much against -- you can disagree with president obama's health plan, that it wasn't strong enough or that it's government takeover of health care. you can disagree with him on

taxes or whatever. but this is against him personally and trying to destroy and discredit him personally. the obama hate machine. and it's not just fox news. it's out there because the couple of people that most americans have never heard of, the famous koch brothers, charles -- now famous, charles and david koch. and, again, we've seen, um, corporate-sponsored attacks against presidents before, particularly -- and i outline two of them -- franklin delano roosevelt. by the way, with that it was the dupont brothers. there were three of them at the time. they actually banded together, put their money together, formed a thing called the liberty league to deny fdr a second term. and, um, then with bill clinton, of course, was richard mellen scape who funded the investigations that led to paula jones and on ask and on, articles in the american

spectator. but nothing compared to the money and the organization that we've seen on the part of charles and david koch. who are the heads of koch industries, they are the third and fourth richest men in america, people in america, both men. you know, we know about bill gates and warren buffett. these are number three and number four. combined wealth of $50 billion. they have but more money in -- by the way, i have to say this, they do some good things. particularly david koch who is the wealthiest man in new york city. you thought michael bloomberg was. no, it's david koch. but he funds the metropolitan opera, big supporter of it, the metropolitan museum of art, cancer research centers around the country. but most of their money goes into political activities, and they are everywhere. the heritage foundation in washington, d.c., koch brothers.

the cato institute when it started, koch brothers. some of you may know now the koch brothers, cato kind of went its own independent way, and the koch brothers are now suing the cato institute to get it back to being a totally-controlled koch brothers operation. people -- americans for prosperity, is the most active political organizations today, all funded for the koch brothers. freedomworks, dick armey's organization, koch brothers. john kasich in ohio, koch brothers. candidate -- bought lock, stock and barrel by the koch brothers. same as scott walker in wisconsin. everywhere. in many california a couple of years ago there was a measure, prop 23, on the ballot to repeal the new clean car standards put in by arnold schwarzenegger. that measure to repeal those standards, which lost -- prop