policy, i do think he was committed to housing. he was a strong supporter of labor although not an uncritical one. i think there was a domestic agenda but he was careful and civil rights as i've mentioned and he was very lytic leah tunes there. i don't really feel like i am quite developed a coherent final few on what were the main political goals of john f. kennedy. maybe that will be the next book. but it's a great question, it really is and it's an important one. >> is there one more question? >> thank you so much for the great presentation. i have more of a general question. from your presentation it seems that jfk became a president through some kind of a predetermined path rather than any sensational success in the

senate. would you agree with that opinion and you think his success in the senate did not contradict his election as president but it was part of the pathway going to the final roll? >> i do think the senate. changed him and in some why developed him. i think he developed expertise in areas that he hadn't had before and he really did a deep dive on some complicated issues. it was almost like it rants graduate school for kennedy. i think he did use the senate years to learn more about issues and i think he also kind of formed a political identity in which he presented himself as both a kind of a modern new politician, you know a young candidate but also someone who is very familiar with american history and understanding traditions and was very steep in american history. so you know i think he put

together a very powerful political presence that was a forest but i think it does raise raise -- one of the ironies of the american political system seems to me that the "times" that you are most electable may not be the "times" that you are most ready to be president. weather was going to be jfk aarp perhaps president obama or another four or six years in the senate would have done him good but i think they both realize clearly that additional time would not necessarily make them more politically viable. they had to decide this is my time and kennedy often said, i look around at everyone else's writing and i'm as qualified as they are so that was sort of his assessment. >> eight that's fascinating stuff. where can we buy at? >> go to the bookstores here and

tell them to get as many copies. >> order on amazon? >> order on amazon and our publisher, you can purchase it through them as well. >> it's fascinating, thank you. senator durbin. [applause] >> thank you, senator. david devonport research fellow at the hoover institution argues the debate over the new deal in the 1930s laid the groundwork for today's conservative movement. this program is 45 minutes. >> it is my pleasure to introduce david davenport. [applause]

>> thank you christie. it's great to be with you today. this is somewhat familiar territory for me. long ago i worked in senator bob dole's office which i suppose dates me and no, this is a newer building from my time. thank you for taking a break to be here today. you are brave to come and listen to me in particular in an earlier career i was an attorney which is a group not always known for its brevity of speech and now for a long time i have been an academic which is not known for its clarity of speech. as i said you are brave to come on a friday to hear what i have to say. i thought i would again with the 2012 election and as i'm sure you are aware after that election, many people proclaimed the death of modern american conservatism. one commentator said the titanic is sinking, referring to american conservatism. another one observed that

conservative arguments we heard in this election are going to be relics of the museum very shortly. lots of people said that conservatism really needed to change both its message if it's going to win an election again. it's still being debated today. i noticed in this morning's "wall street journal" governor scott walker from wisconsin has a piece talking about what conservatives need to do to be relevant. his thought is they don't need to give up their principles but they need to be stronger on their principles and people are looking for that kind of leadership. so in this book we talk about that in the final chapter of this book. my co-author gordon lloyd from the pepperdine school of public policy and i talk about the future of conservatism in the last chapter. we really began elsewhere and the great writer pearl buck said today you have to search yesterday. in this his book our thought is to go back historically, to come

back to today. in other words it's not really a history book in the sense that we go back to live in an earlier era but we go back to understand conservatism in order to come back to public policy and politics today. the question is where do we go back to find modern american conservatism? the conventional wisdom is you go to the 1950s. russell kirk, a very conservative political philosopher, william f. but we in the 1950s, national review magazine was launched during the 50s and so the conventional wisdom is that's where you find the beginning of modern conservatism. and then amity shlaes this year wrote i think a very interesting book on calvin coolidge and he proposed we have to go further to the 1920s because calvin coolidge was the beginning of modern american conservatism. i saw her a week or so ago and i said you have really launched a

coolidge's cool movement. i said that probably wasn't easy to do. he is not really a 21st century kind of guy. gordon and i in this book think the place to go is to the 1930s. in our few modern american conservatism is essentially response to the new deal of the 1930s to franklin roosevelt. and to us, the conservative response of the 1930s was the beginning of modern american conservatism. that response initially came from former president herbert hoover. lots of people debate how conservative hoover was as the president and the secretary of commerce of the 1920s and i'm to talk about that in q&a if you'd like but we are looking at him in the 1930s when he was shocked really by the excesses of the new deal. in the 1930s the new deal was the height of progressivism and

we are given this book that just as edmund burke, the english political philosopher began modern conservatism as a response to the french revolution, we think there is a distinctive rand of modern american conservatism and that in effect the new deal was our french revolution. the deal change politics, change governance and so responding to our own french revolution herbert hoover starts we think to stake out the case for modern american conservatism. if you think about it in our view we are still operating under the new deal paradigm today. we argue that politics, american domestic politics and american economic policy today are essentially continuations of the new deal. this debate has started 80 years ago between progressives and conservatives between roosevelt and hoover in the 1930s was the frame of the 2012 debate as

i'm going to illustrate in just a moment and we think is still the frame for today. in fact, if you listen to the debates of the 2012 election you really heard echoes of really all the themes that i'm going to talk about today. in our luck we look at three areas where herbert hoover and franklin roosevelt debated in the 30s and where we think that is still a key debate today. and the first of those is liberty versus equality. this is one of the fundamental debates between progressives and conservatives. if you have read some of your american history you will remember that when the french journalist de tocqueville came to america in the 19th century he observed one of the main differences between the french revolution and republic and the american revolution republic is that the french were really all about equality. they talked about liberty but they were really all about equality. he said that contrasts the

americans in and the american revolution is really about liberty. they also talk about equality but what they are really after in america is liberty. this is one of herbert hoover's biggest complaints about the new deal is that it was turning america into a form of european totalitarianism. hoover had spent the early part of his career as a mining engineer doing huge mining projects abroad including in europe and he continued to live in europe when he did relief efforts big food relief efforts during world war i and the post-war era. if you travel in belgium herbert hoover is a hero for essentially saving the belgium people from starvation as well as in other countries. one of the things we noticed during all that time in europe was that it was giving way to various forms of totalitarianis, communism and eventually nazism, fascism and then he came back to

this country and he was shocked. in the 1930s he thought roosevelt was voluntarily turning to forms of totalitarianism. in fact if you look it to cartoon icons of the 1930s if you will herbert hoover like to talk about the rugged individual and franklin roosevelt said it's really about the forgotten man. these are really two great cartoon icons of the 1930s. hoover argued america is about equality of opportunity and it's about individuals having the freedom to decide how they want to live their lives and to pursue that. so america is about equality of opportunity. franklin roosevelt said in this is shocking to me. he said straight out in the 1930s it qualities of opportunity is dead in america. you can't get it anymore. what we have to be about in this country is equality of outcomes. we have to design public policy

around the forgotten man for sometimes he said around every man, not around individual freedom. this i think is precisely the debate today. when people talk about income inequality and how we need to raise taxes on the wealthiest and we need to raise the minimum wage, what they are really arguing for is this equality of outcomes kind of society. this is the way, the forum in which that debate is continuing today. and so we go into this in our book. i don't have enough time to go into it in depth today but if you look at the data, the data is not as clearly supportive that there are massive income inequality problems at its is sometimes claimed that i'm sure you rush out to see robert raache's book about income inequality. it's hot in california and maybe

it's not so hot in washington d.c.. we also argue even more importantly, is income inequality the right question to be asking and inequality of opportunity society? isn't the right question income mobility? are people able to move up and down the income scale not whether their incomes are actually equal. we still have a great deal of income in this country. unfortunately these studies lag timewise. they are very comprehensive but two studies of income mobility from 1996 to 2005 . out that we have a great deal of income mobility that divides income into five quintiles. from that study what you find his half of the taxpayers during that tenure period moved from one quintile to another. you find that half of the people

in the bottom quintile of income moved up to a higher quintile of income which i think you wouldn't normally believe if you were just listening to the income inequality debates today. even a fourth of the people in that top quintile dropped down. there is even mobility going down. it's not like the upper 1% get their money and stay there. even they experience mobility so it's it sort of works up and down. to us that is really the question we should be asking about income. our people in this society still able to find their place and to move up and down and the evidence suggests that is the case. and then of course the question, is it really the governments business to be regulating people's individual income? as herbert hoover pointed out the big problem when government tries to do a quality of outcomes as people become

economically dependent on the government. we sort of loose the american spirit of entrepreneurism, of liberty, choosing what you want to go after. we incorporate favorably this book that came out last year by nicholas overstep a nation of takers in which he points out that's inartful political statement about the 47% of the people being dependent on government is actually pretty accurate. according to eberstadt is 49% are receiving government payments of some form. i think we should have exact herbert hoover's concern. what does it do to the spirit and the will of the people when they are heavily dependent on the government? i think again this is precisely the debate that we are having today. and so we feel like one of the problems conservatism has is that it's not really getting out the liberty message the way it was articulated in the 1930s. i think progressives would like

to turn the liberty bell into the equality bill. i couldn't really find a good quality l. on google images, but i think one of our problems today is that liberty has become a bit of an abstraction. when you ask people what about liberty, well, what about liberty? i'm going to talk a little bit more at the end of the talk about how we can maybe address that. this whole idea of liberty and equality is a debate with then and now. the second big topic is limited government versus big government. jefferson writes he has erupted in multiple and of offices send swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their

substance. we suggest in her book they're probably two ways to look at the government versus limited government. there is a quantitative way and in fact there are several quantitative ways and then there are qualitative issues. on the quantitative side there would be lots of ways i think to add up how the government has become or how far away we are getting from a limited government. one would be to simply add up the number of federal employees especially noncivilian employees which is that a hault on high. you could edit the pages from the federal register. government regulation again at an all-time and frank lee growing at an exponential rate. the most traditional way to do a quantitative analysis is this chart that i have here which is federal government spending as a% of gdp. in the early days of the

republic from the founding say to the new deal it was generally two or 3%. government spent two to 3% of gdp although there were spikes during wartime and as you can see now we are at the 25% level. when my generation, the baby boomer generation gets on the entitlement trained in terms of social security and medicare and medicaid and now help care that number is going to go up much further. and in fact to a range that is untenable for government. we are talking about greece levels of debt and governments governments -- government spending. i think from a quantitative angle this is really a concern. hoover on the other hand was really more concerned about the qualitative aspects of the government. government in his day wasn't all that huge. it was down to the two or 3% levels. his concern was how much of our lives is government impacted and

controlled by government? so one way i look at that today is well, how is the federal government doing in terms of taking over more of our lives? one example we mentioned in the book is the classic local state issue has always been k-12 education. everybody would agree with the one thing that is local? k-12 education and yet today if you'd asked teachers and educators what's the primary influence on k-12 education especially on k-12 reform, education reform they will say the federal government. starting i would say with "no child left behind" in the last decade and continuing with the race to the top grants. today what the federal government has done is write states. they can't force them but they can bribe them with cash to follow their federal approaches and these areas. we have essentially in the last

decade federalized k-12 education. health and welfare was always part of the state's purview. once again with obamacare and i can't can call it that now. the aca now, then obviously health care is essentially federalized. this would have been hoover's concern. how much is government controlled? this was roosevelt's big thing. we need more central planning. we need more regulation. hoover called it economic regimentation and i would say if you look at the areas of our lives of state and policy taken over by the feds that really is a serious problem. the last issue we take up that we think is a then and now comparison is constitutionalism. this part of the book, we founded found in our research to great speeches, one given by herbert hoover on constitution day in 1935 and one given by

franklin roosevelt on constitution day in 1937 to -- so two years apart. it's just a classic compare contrast. roosevelt begins his speech by pointing out that the constitution constitution opens with expression we the people. he said so, this reminds us that the constitution is the people's doctrine is he like to point out. it's not a lawyer's doctrine, to people's doctrine done by the people and for the people. what that means is according to roosevelt when the constitution gets a little antiquated and a little out of date on the 150th anniversary of the constitution are we the people can fix that. we can take over and change that in any way we want and we can accommodate it. if we need more regulation and people ask if that's unconstitutional we shouldn't have to worry about that.

to quit slowing down his centralization and regulation agenda unsuccessfully it turned out that he finally got the judges to go along to begin the cycle of increased regulation and regimentation. so this was roosevelt's and the irony is if you look back of the new deal there were no constitutional amendments that were part of this new deal revolution. the constitution says this is how you're supposed to change it you're supposed to change it by passing in adopting amendments. there were no amendments in the new deal. the only amendment in the timeframe was to say the president can only have two terms after roosevelt had multiple terms. it was all done by a reinterpretation or by workarounds and i will talk in a moment about how we see that today. hoover starts with the first 10 amendments to the constitution and he said what this reminds us is one of the main purposes of

the constitution is protect the people from their own government the rest of his speeches about federalism. he says we have this great system of federalism, checks and balances and balances of power and made beasher nobody can get a hind the wheel of the government and start running over people for running headlong in one particular direction. all of this apparatus is to make sure as the founders called it the cool deliberate sense of the community is carried out, not some minority or majority of faction. and of course you look at the debate today. this is the day we are having today. roosevelt's we the people called it the living constitution. there are all kinds of claims out there. the constitution is antiquated and prevents us from tackling serious problems of the day. it calls for constitutional conventions and just ignoring sort of the checks and balances

because that is slowing government down. there are workarounds. i don't know if you follow them but one of them is the national popular vote act for people who don't like the electoral college. we know we could never get an amendment to illuminate the electoral college so we'll just do a workaround. if enough states pass a law requiring electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote then we have the actively won the electoral college and that is getting a fair amount of traction. again rather than amending the constitution we do these workarounds and make it a living constitution. our final chapter than is about the future of conservatism. at the beginning of this chapter we have two others in this book and we have written lots of op-eds together over the years. when we sat down after the 2012

election which was when we were finishing this book we had a disagreement about the effect that of the 2012 election. one of us thought that this was a no country for old men. i don't know if you've seen the movie or read the book. jones is the rural texas sheriff and his dad up in the texas sheriff. as he comes up against the drug money, the amazing weaponry if you will and the drug. and traffic in his area, he just said this is too much. i can can't handle this anymore. it's overwhelming and he felt like this is no country for old men. that is how one of us felt in 2012. effectively a new majority had come together, a majority that was progressive and not conservative, a majority that had younger voters that had a lot of people receiving government assistance in one

form or another and that were constituting a new majority that essentially wanted government to pick up the tab for what they wanted government to do. if that in fact is a majority that in his view he wasn't sure how we would stop the move toward aggressiveism. the other author was more optimistic. if we stayed with a hollywood movie theme he was mr. smith goes to washington. everything was going to be fine. the former prime minister of britain said a week in politics as long time. a week or three weeks ago republicans were dead for shutting down the government and now democrats are dead for obamacare. people get carried away in this or that election that won one election doesn't decide the future. the american people are center-right and to give them a chance they will come back to

their senses. what we decided was to close the book with what we thought were some hard questions that conservatives needed to answer. i've just listed two of them here that we think are important. one is does liberty still resonate? if you go back to the history of conservatism and you had to hit one theme that is the essence of conservatism i don't think you can avoid liberty. for edmund burke individual liberty was the essence of modern conservatism. when herbert hoover started speaking out against the new deal and his book, the speeches were called the challenge to liberty. that is how he saw the new deal as a challenge to individual freedom. conservatives historically low conservatives are about as defending economic religious and political. that is the heart of conservatism. the question is does liberty still resonate with people today? has liberty become an obstruction to people that isn't part of their daily lives?

i live in california obviously and when my wife and i were discussing redesigning our home i said i need a new showerhead. this one is clogged up. we can't get that kind of showerhead because that's illegal here in california. i said well, i want these kinds of knobs. we can't have those knobs either. those are not permitted where we live. i said if i can't have my shower maybe i'm overregulated. it was one of those moments where liberty was not a distraction for me. i can't keep my shower so i have a problem. if you lived in new york city there was a time when it looks like you couldn't buy a 16-ounce soft drink. you could rise many eight ounces as you want and accumulate up to 32 or 64 but you couldn't buy a 16-ounce cup. a lot of people looked at the silliness of that instead liberty is not an instruction if

you can't buy the kind of coke that you want to have. one of my children just got finally his first full-time job with benefits. you do the math and you see that taxes until march, april and some into me in the think well now i'm understanding a little bit more of the power of the state. it's not such an abstraction. if i may say i think the american people are having one of these nonabstract liberty thoughts right now who in their personal health insurance policies are being regulated by the federal government. if we go back to those two icons of the 1930s, the rugged individual and the forgotten man we think american policy works best when policymakers think of both of those when they are making policy. the individual who wants freedom and wants to be a will to work and get what he or she needs and then the safety net to protect the forgotten man, the person who may not be able to succeed

as the individual. when we have gone off one deep end or another is when we have had problems. if you take health care the last time the government worked on health care in the 60s the great society medicare and medicaid what was the solution? the solution was for the individual and individual health plans. you work for your employer and your employer gave you a certain kind of health plan and you negotiate with your employer perhaps to get the kind of plans that you wanted. and then for the forgotten man the addition of medicare and the addition of medicaid in the building of the safety net, the extension of roosevelt's new deal safety net. but in obamacare there is a huge tip to the scale that the american people are only now seeing. in order to cover the uncovered and i'm not an economist but hoover economists have pointed out that probably only 15% of the american people could not get health insurance.

in order to meet their needs we had to federalize the whole system. now people are waking up that it's illegal to have a policy. it's not just whether the president promised that are not. it's also the liberty movement. i can't have this policy that i worked for and we all agreed that i would have. it's now illegal to have that policy. they just restated that yesterday in california. instead you need a more extensive policy. it probably has things that at least in the case of my children in their 20s don't want or need. that is one of those times when liberty becomes less abstract and more real. i think that is a question conservatives have to wrestle with. it is to resonate because that's the heart of conservatism. the second question that we raise is a time for conservatives to give up on values. there are a lot of people today saying this is the time we need

to get read of all these crazy social conservatives, christian conservatives and the difficult questions, social questions that they keep raising. certainly in california where i am from we have lots of equal who would be fiscal economic conservatives but who on social issues with the moderate, would be liberal and the libertarian and aren't interested in a lot of attention to those issues. but one thing we concluded in this book is we have to remember that conservatism has always had some kind of values-based component. edmund burke, the father of modern conservatism said that we needed a quote manly regulated liberty. they could have been unregulated liberty. in order for liberty to work we needed a manly regulated liberty. the founders also had a free society that works you have to have a virtuous people.

you have to have virtues and values. otherwise freedom doesn't really work. our concern is conservatives not throw out the baby of values with the bathwater but instead probably conservatives have to work on having in our view less specific, less concrete values. and be working on a broader set of values that makes the public work. ronald reagan is being quoted that just because you disagree with someone 20% of the time doesn't mean you can't work with them on the other 80%. unfortunate conservatives have gone down to where if we disagree and 2% we can be friends anymore. i'm sorry ,-com,-com ma we can work together. that's going to be losing a losing proposition. rather than throwing out that we suggest conservatives need to move towards broader sets of values. we also suggest conservatives have to relearn federalism themselves.

i preach this federalism message but when one of their favorite pet issues is at stake they are just as happy to go to the supreme court. we complain about judicial activism that we are right there filing our lawsuits going to the federal and supreme court great if we believe in federalism and probably after practice that ourselves and not make every issue of concern to us that federal issue. so that is sort of the arguments that we make. i think of the old story in closing about the husband-and-wife who are having a conversation and the husband said to the wife i just have to ask you, if i lost everything, if i lost the house and i lost the car and lot lost the boat would you still love me? he said yes, i would still love you. i would miss you, but i would still love you. why i tell that is, after 80 years progressives and conservatives are still kind of joined up here together.

conservatives have been dropped from the scene. progresses are still trying to expand the new deal and add new things to it. conservatives are still in their wrestling against it. it's really amazing if you think about the relevance of conservatism, it's amazing that obamacare was passed and signed into law over three years ago. it's still being debated and worked out today. conservatism isn't dead. liberty isn't dead if you look at the obamacare debate over a law that has been in effect for three years. the political -- says the american people are center-right in their hips in their constitution if you will. i think the argument we make in this book is that conservatives can just give americans some philosophy and some ideas for their heads and their hearts they would kind of matchup with their innate conservatism in their hips.

then conservatives might have a hopeful future. so that is out look. i am happy to open the floor for questions, comments. you don't have to format as a question. if you want to make a comment that's great. just don't go on superlong. let's open the floor and see what you might want to say. yes, sir max. >> you spoke of checks and balances. this administration has been good at the workarounds you're talking about. mandatory spending is obviously automatic that discretionary spending has become automatic too. the nuclear option yesterday is analogous to court-packing previously. how can congress call back some of the authority for the powers we have delegated over the past few years in the administration? >> i think and unfortunately this is not a republican or democratic rovlin.

whoever is in power doesn't want to give up executive power. even in the bush administration will get signing statements and executive orders. each administration somehow seems to ratchet that up further it's not just a problem with a particular president ordered administration. i would give a couple of hopeful signs. one is probably the only institution that you hear willing to roll the clock back a bit if you will is the u.s. supreme court. we have two or three justices on the u.s. supreme court who openly say now that we are not so much slaves to every court decision that has been decided ahead of us to say no i'm sorry we were wrong when we made that decision and go back to the most recent -- that gives me hope that some of that is challenged in a legal sense we have justices on the supreme court that might he willing to as you say roll back

the clock to some decisions that have been made. the second hopeful sign and this is always painful to wait for is there is kind of -- i have potentially view of history. it goes so far and then finally you think okay, enough. i will just say a quick story. i'm from california. the california republican party is apparently hit absolute rock on autumn. there's a two-thirds democratic majority in the legislature. we have the new head of the american -- republican party a few months ago and we were giving him all of our brilliant ideas on how they could do better job. he said i just have one goal and i had forgotten how many seats they have to win to undo the two-thirds majority. he said the only goal i have is to win the same three seats that will undo them and that will give them another round. strategies and ideas and communications. that's great, i only have one

goal. once when the three seats. the republicans party has gotten so bad that they have dug in and said here's the one thing we have to hope that. i would guess that in the pendulum or view is at a stage where even you have some democrats joining some republicans on the recent obamacare is though. you have not very many many but at least three democrats joined the republicans on this nuke the option vote. as i said to wait until the pendulum gets too far is -- so those are a couple of hopeful things that i see out there. other questions or comments? >> ike's from my perspective, whether it's accurate and not, it seems that people who disagree with conservatives whether the moderate left or liberals, and maybe it's the same vice versa but is there a

difference between conservatism and extremism on the right? i am wondering if you agree with that perception and also i thought maybe that was a big problem of why people are saying conservatism is dead, because they just see it all as extremism and then lastly how can conservatives separate themselves or make it clear that they can have conservative principles and values without being an extremist? >> that is a good -- though frankly politicians and i know that sam berman in which we work are sometimes not the best at communicating philosophical conservatism because it comes down to a win-lose on particular

issues. conservative politicians have to win at the end of the day. that sort of the game. i think it is a challenge who they are listening to. that is why i think, that is why we wanted to write a book like this because it seems to us the core message of conservatism is not as extreme as many political leaders have made it sound. we think that some of the political leaders have made mistakes in embracing the win at all costs strategy, where conservatives means we think are important along with conservatives values and if you go back and study the flame f. buckley's conservative means are not as extreme as some of the things that conservatives have done in recent years to win at all costs. in our view we think political leaders need to think about conservative means as well as the ants. they may not win every wounds doing that but it seems to us it will make their message more

consistent in the long-haul. secondly it seems like again this basic message of liberty, conservatives have defined a way to make that resonate with people. personal liberty is not an extreme message but at the end of the day we acknowledge that the message of aggressive as some is sometimes friendlier if you will than the conservative message. there's the famous quote from william f. buckley who said conservatives are the people who stand at history yelling stop. i mentioned earlier i worked for senator bob dole and he was called senator graham lot. he didn't mind and when asked about it he said there are a lot of bad ideas in washington and somebody needs to stop them. that was his idea of conservatism. he had a good line, some college gave him an honorary doctorate did duhcry and he said well at least now they have to call me dr. gridlock now.

when you hear a problem progressives are quick to design a government solution for the problem. we feel your pain and we are going to design something that will fix your pain whereas conservatives are any more defensive posture saying no we don't want to go to the federal government. the next part of the conservative message doesn't get heard. we believe in individual freedom we believe in churches and all of these associational approaches kind of the older president bush's 1000 points of light. we believe in building a safety net not a complete takeover of health care for example. we agreed that i think the conservative message is a harder one to get across. we think that it can be improved and liberty can't -- can be made to resonate with more people. my own children aren't very interested in politics.

i think they are fairly typical of the generation that needs to be reached. one of my son said all of the politicians are just trying to tell us how to live. he thinks conservatives are trying to tell them what to do on social issues and liberals are trying to tell him what kind of insurance he can and can't have. he's just frustrated with all of them. maybe that is part of our messaging. the message is liberty. let's keep the government out so you can decide how you want to live. i think for 20 euros that could be a favorable message. any others?

i would like to ask in regards to modern conservatism between the center-right and the conservatives themselves who would he write in this instance and how can we create more of a unity within the party rather than a separation? >> obviously it is tricky because at the end of the day what conservatives have to do to be most relevant is to win a presidential election and to do that you have to find somebody who both embodies the message and can win.