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but let's start first by showing an appearance of yours, first time on cspan, back in 1986. here we go. >> guest: the general point i was trying to make was that the people seem to sort of assume the responsibility. journalists- campaign for hall monitor

in second grade and they have been running every since.

jeb bush started late but he had business jobs that depended on celebrity. christie was from the prosecutor's office. and their motives are slightly more suspect because this is the next rung on the ladder for these guys. it is like getting to the nfl or making the major leagues. this is to show you are the king of the group you get to run for president. it is the next step in their profession. >> c-span: i want to viewers to know they should go to google and type it in ferguson and republican and -- >> guest: not anymore. >> c-span: they can find all of your columns or the last several years. that is what i want to do is dip in and talk about the writing.

this is a column you wrote early in 2015 about huckabee, christie, and paul. you wrote the fantasy comes to an end long before he reaches the white house gates. we are forgiving people but many qualities americans will not accept in a president. they would not want a professional gambler, sex offender, fashion designer or collector of 19th century doll houses, snow race car drivers, stand up comics need apply. neither do they want a prickly, unconvincing hipster or a 52 year old man who still plays air guitar. >> guest: those last three people are huckabee, paul, and christie who are -- who i lumped together after a bad week. huckabee used to be a part-time

preacher and a tv talk show host and in between was a good governor of arkansas but decided he wants to be a talk show host and a preacher at the same time which is a terrible combination for a presidential candidate. he started showing signs in that regard that week. the prickly, unconvincing hipster is rand paul who showed to be short tempered n a couple television interviews and i thought if he's getting his mad this early he is probably not going to be able to sustain a campaign for long. the last one is christie who had just been the victim of a new york times story in which he was portrayed as returning from a trade trip to england they call it which he was, i think the times reporter used the word

urbling about having been to three different parties with bono the rock star. i don't think fdr went crazy because he met ben crosby or met madonna. i hope he never met madonna. it is not something a worldly guy does. >> c-span: we saw you back in 1987 you were working for the american spectator. how long did you work there? >> guest: i started when it was in indiana. it started in bloomington, indiana. the founding editor is still the editor of it. i think i started in '84. then they moved out here, we all moved out here in '85, the following year, and i think i

worked until '88. i covered the '88 campaign so probably until '89. >> c-span: then what? >> guest: i went to howard as an editor writer and did that for a couple years. and then i was asked to write speeches for the first president bush. i did that for a year. when i started working for him in the hellish year of 1992 when he was running for re-election i started in january when his approval rating was 47-48 and then by march i got it down to 35% and it continued to plummet the longer i worked the worse it got. but it was an invaluable and wonderful experience. i have tremendous respect were him. >> c-span: after that? >> guest: i went to washingtonian magazine for a

couple years. and then i got the call saying we will start a magazine with bill crystals and fred barns and david brooks. let's go. i said it sounds great and i went to the "standard" >> c-span: if you are talking to a bunch of young people today could they do what you have done? what kind of life do you have? a family -- do you make enough to make it work? >> guest: that is a good question. i don't really know because the business in the time i have been here has changed utterly because of the introduction to the internet. we started the weekly standard because there was no weekly conservative opinion magazine. there were monthlies like the spectitator. a bi-weekly. but the pace of news accelerated

to the point where we would be caught behind if he didn't have something coming out every week to comment on what happened the week before. i look back and it is just a joke. now you are out of date if you, you know, are five hours behind the new crisis of the century that just occurred and you have not read the last 47,000 tweets about it. i thought what i do is done for and there is not an opportunity for people to come up and write what i write for is longer, free form and relaxed. when i first came here and you

wanted to be an opinion worker in journalism, you could bow a spectator for the new republic, washington monthly, and that was about it. now there is buzz feed who has a huge political operation, the daily caller, the free beacon, the huffington post. they have like 80 people working for them and that is why you have -- when you go to the bagger conventions there are so many workers. >> c-span: back to the candidates. one of the things i want to do is talk about writing and words and how important they are to you. here is chris christie on the campaign trail and i will get you to comment: what matters is

getting the job done and telling them what you believe from the heart. even if they don't agree with every word. let me say this to my fellow republicans: if the standard you hold every candidate to the standard of agreeing with you hundred percent of the time. let me tell you the only person you agree with a hundred percent of the time is the person you see in the mirror. let me tell you what you will get: liars. >> c-span: your reaction? >> guest: even when making

comments like that he has a way to make sound like he is accusing people. you people don't get it. you are not supposed to get it. he didn't make it to the presidential year but they were saying he is a shoe in. he is so poplar and everything. but iowa isn't going to like him, indiana isn't going to like him. he is a new yorker and they don't like new yorker. i think that is true and i think that is christie's problem, too. it is a harsh, in your face,

unpleasant. >> c-span: you wrote about the history records no case in which a republican hurt his reputation among other republicans by yelling at a reporter. it is always assumed the reporter deserved it just on general principle. >> c-spa >> guest: he got in trouble because he snapped at a new york times reporter on a trade trip. people were suggesting it was a faux pas to be rude to a reporter. i have been around republicans all my life and republicans don't mind it if you are rude to a reporter. >> c-span: why don't republicans like reporters? >> guest: they assume they are all antagonistic. to a large degree they are right. they feel like they have not gotten a fair shake and are an

unknown species to many reporters. there are a lot of reporters who never had the conservative republican in their circle of friends. and to think that conservative republicans must have a screw lo lose. >> c-span: here is something you wrote about antagonistic. the book is pretty good, written in prose, this is the book huckabee wrote, he called dick durbin a wind bag. i liked that. >> guest: i was impressed with huckabee that he came out and spoke truth to power. i am not necessarily big on name calling but when you have the insult and the person so perfectly matched as huckabee does there. >> c-span: does anybody tell you what to write ever? >> guest: no, and i think i

suffered because of it. >> c-span: you have total freedom to write whatever you want to write? >> guest: oh, yeah. bill crystal is the chief editor of the "weekly standard" and i have known him for 30 years. since the mid-80s. we all started the magazine with total respect for each other and if anything my respect for him has grown over 30 years. i cannot say for him. but he has never had call to call me on the carpet for something i said. and i never had reason to feel like i have to leave to say something. >> c-span: in a lot of these columns you have been critical of the candidates. let's watch a little bit of rand paul. you talk about his open shirt and jeans.

you have a governor who is allowing you something no one predicted was there. nobody knew it was there. now is there. you are tapping it, creating all kinds of jobs, and you are in any rich state. why would you give that up? how could you consider another choice? you want to be new york? there is no fracking and natural gas. in california, the monterary shell formation is one of the biggest in the country. it sits there because the idiots don't want to bring it up. they don't want civilization. they don't want to advance. do you want business? jobs? growth? >> c-span: does calling somebody

an idiot work? >> guest: hardly ever. especially if you mean it. >> c-span: does he mean it? >> guest: probably. i would think so. the thing i said about name calling is i have called people names over the years. what it does is it shows that you have run out of other ways to discuss the person or so because you run out of gas your creative juices are all dried up so you will just say he is an idiot or a wind bag. words like that can be used for a good comic effect. if you mean it, and are hurling it -- depends on how you said it. >> c-span: i want to ask you about words and how much you think about it before you write it. >> guest: not at all. >> c-span: with his libertarian

credentials he is posing in the uniform of jeans, dress short and poorly knotted tie, and non-judgmental in important matters and bicycle rider by choice. overuse of twitter and fall helpless before its power to expose the user's most unappetizing weakness. how long does it take you to write something like that? >> guest: probably longer than it took to read it although it took a while, didn't it? it takes a long time. the way i would do something like that -- i think that sentence is a little overdone now i hear it read back. what would happen is i would write that out and overelaborate and there would be too much going on and too many jokes or

too many ideas running around then i have to comb it back and try to do it again so it doesn't sound too extravagant. i have to avoid too much singing and dancing. >> c-span: what are some of your favorite words to use? or words you don't ever use? >> guest: well i can't use them so i will not tell you. you know, if you gave me another ten minutes. >> c-span: you wrote a column on the word issue. >> guest: reach out is a verb meaning i telephoned or asked somebody something. i am not big on the word share for telling. like i shared with him i was going to dinner. i have a whole list of those.

i have been on alert for a phrase data driven. i noticed ms. clinton loves saying data driven and a cousin to that is data drive. data drives their judgment meaning we are not putting emotion into this or thinking off the top of our heads. we are taking the data and going right where the conclusion will lead. i have a word i want to ask you about at the end of the sentence: it is no surprise that a candidate who uses twitter to engage advisary would be uncomfortable with a

six-minute tv interview with a cnbc cupcake. you can get away with that in this day and age? >> guest: i don't use it as -- i have called men cupcakes, too. i use this as a short hand for the, you know, extremely attractive, sometimes to be attractive people, they have reading the news on the cable channels and regular channels who don't really show off a lot of -- it is not like they all went to this same place. you know or they are members of mensa. >> c-span: are you a member of mensa? >> guest: no. >> c-span: what is the requirement? >> guest: something like 200-something. probably double what mine is. >> c-span: another paw politician you write about here

is governor huckabee. >> god, guns, grit and gravy. explain the title. >> it is not a recipe of southern food. there are three major cultural bubbles in america. new york, washington, and we are in two of them, and the other is hollywood. from those three cultural bubbles come fashion, finance, government, politics, music, entertainment, movies, television, pretty much all of the things that set the american cultural table. but the point in the book is there is a big disconnect between the people, the values, the attitudes and lifestyles of the people living in those three bubbles and the people who live out in what we often call the flyover country.

>> c-span: that work? >> guest: his demeanor? >> c-span: talking about the flyover country. you hear a lot of politicians saying washington is horrible and so on. >> guest: right. i don't think it works particularly. although there is a great deal of resentiment toward washington and toward it overclass in general whether it is entertainment from media or finance. what i sort of talk about in that piece about huckabee was the danger that republicans, especially in this hyperspecialized age, where the eco chambers are the only component of the political conversations. so right ringers only talk to left wingers. or they will pick up the remarks from the other side so they can refute them. you can get your own kind of bubble that he is not talking

about there in which and i said this without him -- i thought when he was promoting his book, he got on with like-minded radio show host and he would get in trouble talking. you forget you are in the bubble and always exposing yourself to people that agree with you on almost everything and the internet only tripped the tendency people have for that. >> c-span: the ones you covered and wrote about who do you think is catching on? >> guest: well i think everybody says scott walker who i never met in person. he has a lot of things primary voters like. talk about the bubble.

they want somebody who looks like he is stood up for them. hillary clinton gives her own version of this. i don't think that was actually true 30 years ago. resentment has been part of politics always. but the degree it is the most motivated factor has changed. >> c-span: in your article about jeb bush and part of what i want to tell you is what you envision as the audience reading this, but a conservative publication,

and you show he was active as governor but you drudged up this. he asked what he was prepared to do for black floridans and his first answer was quote probably nothing unquote and that quote was famous, but from a conservative degree which involves disinvowing a part of the population by race, it made sense. >> guest: i think he tried to defend it at the time. it is shocking and graving. pure ideology shocking and degrading to people. i would understand what me was saying. it was '94 when he ran that campaign. i first met bush because he came by the american spectator a

office because he liked hanging around journalist. so that would not have struck me as particularly harsh because i was used to the conservative point he is trying to make there which is not a harsh point. it is simply a point about government either serves everybody or it doesn't serve anybody. if you start dicing the population by you have programs over here, you have programs over there, and you do it moreover by racial classification, it can be something quite different. >> c-span: he wrote later women on welfare should be able to quote get their life together and find a husband. unquote. >> guest: it is funny because he talks about the mistakes he made about the comments for the

programs for black people but he didn't bring that up much. >> c-span: how much time did you spend researching on this? >> c-span: a -- >> guest: a long type. >> c-span: you did an article on mitch daniels when you talk about his split marriage and that was the first time a lot of people knew about that. where do you find this stuff? >> guest: i don't remember the daniel's thing. i think a friend told me about it. >> c-span: do you worry about the damage to these folks? >> guest: absolutely. that one i was worried about. i never met ms. daniels. i have never against her. her life is her own.

her husband thrusted thrust himself in the public light. i went back and forth on if this should be brought up. but i thought i had to mention it because if he is going to run for president someone will mention it and someone will say ferguson missed this. so it was covering my rear end professionally and also because i thought somebody should say it and if someone was going to push it to the front it might as well be me. it was just mentioned briefly in the piece. >> c-span: let's change it to another politician running for president just recently announced ted cruz. you did a long piece on him. you went to houston to see him? >> guest: they were quite accessible. >> c-span: when? >> guest: this was last year? >> c-span: september 2013. >> guest: '13. so a year and a half ago.

time flies. they were very accommodating. it is not about me but it is about the magazine. they thought, you know, they would like to reach that audience that the "weekly standard" reaches so they were lapy to let me tag along with him as much as i wanted. >> c-span: you wrote you will soon discover that ted cruz is far more than a freshman senator from texas. only eight months in office, these are in quote marks, mccarty, bully bomb thrower known for his extremism and arrogant disregard of the facts. what are you getting out? >> guest: i think the title was washington builds a bug-a-boo. my point is here is this guy coming along who wanted very much to become a polarizing figure. i think he thinks that is the way he is going to rise.

the establishment was happy to make him look more extreme than he is. the so-called fact checks run by magazines and newspapers are much more complicated than checking facts. i go into quite a few of them in there. miracle of miracles they kept finding half of what ted cruz was saying was not true. it is much more ambiguous. this was a method by which they turned this guy into a monster when he is not. i am no big fan of his but he is not what people want to be scared of.

>> c-span: let's look at him on the screen. >> thank you very much. thank you for coming out. god bless the great state of new hampshire. i spend all of last week in -- spent -- in washington, d.c. so it is great to be back in america. jennifer, i enjoyed hearing that you said you thought new hampshire was ready for hillary. i am actually told that they are trying to get hillary to come speak. unfortunately they couldn't find a foreign nation to foot the bill. >> c-span: why is it politicians take their tile?

you know? when it is one of these candidates dressed in a suit and then the tie comes off. >> guest: because they are folks that just want to talk to you. they want to just get down and shed the formalities and talk straight. >> c-span: god bless the people of new hampshire. your take on that? >> guest: well, it was terrific. a lot of the piece i spin in there is about his personal -- the way he comes across in his person which is, you know, i trace it back to his being a champion, i think, national champion debater when he was in college. and he had started in junior high and high school. a woman who helped coach him in high school said he would stand in front of the mirror for hours and practice gestures and make

sure everything was moving right and of maximum affect. you still see that. this guy looks like you wound him up and let him go. if you came back two years from now he would still be making the same hand gestures and using the same jokes. >> c-span: you are writing in this piece about 2013, he paused, lost for a moment and said, you know, i am convinced the real divide in american politics isn't between republican and democrats. it is governor the people and the entrenched politicians in washington, d.c. it sounded like an applause line for me. coming from nowhere he called to abolish the irs. he did this for a while until leaning on the couch and his press secretary tapped on her black berry. he began to sound like he was giving a stump speech. you mention that more than once.

>> guest: that is what i mean about winding them up. then he was riding around in the back of the car and in kind of close quarters and he started doing the same thing. in fact, kind of quoting himself of what he had already told me. it was one of the odder experiences i had reporting on somebody. i made a joke in the piece and thought how badly would i get hurt if i open the door and slipped out and fell on the tarmac and let them keep going so he could keep talking. and actually this tells you a lot about cruz, i guess, his press secretary told me not long ago that after the piece came o

out. >> c-span: what kind of column or storyiodue like? -- story do you like -- >> guest: i really like doing an essay where i have four or five books. they stay put. i put them on my desk and they are there when i come back the next morning after writing. whereas, literally, a human subject is a moving target. it is almost infinate the amount you can accumulate. >> c-span: switch off the little political candidates to other

columns. this is talking about the man who is famous for it death of novel as an art form and if to prove the point he kept writing them. let's watch a little bit of gore vidal here: >> nowadays, the progress lich literature is first to print the book and then you publish it. this saves such a lot of time. it is fun fraefshd. everybody -- everybody can dance around the fire and celebrate

living in a glorious era. bill? bill? usually i let him out at midnight. >> c-span: he is talking about the deceased bill buckley. >> guest: they had a long running feud. >> c-span: you were the year? >> guest: started in '68 and they debated each other on abc. he called vidal an unmentionalable name referring to his sexual relations. and he called him a nazi and if got worse from there.

i was with luck -- buckley once for a show. ted copple was going to interview him. he was a well-known abc reader. he had a setup with a screen and showed buckley the tape of that famous encounter from '68. and buckley, one of the few times i have seen him taken a back and speechless and it was because he was told there was no tape of the confrontation. he wasn't proud of loosing his cool. i don't think he was happy to see it. >> c-span: in your column you

write about the death of gore vidal and you talk about something said by dianne swayer saying she identified vidal as a quote celebrity novelist while taking care to tag buckley as the art conservative unquote. then you write why arch? the two tags make for a curious imbalance. buckley's views were on the right ward edge of the american poplar agreement and vidal was shared by few yet it is buckley to earns the intensifier arch of ideolo ideology. >> guest: it was right after vidal died and i don't agree with speaking ill of the dead

but that doesn't mean the fans as well. he was an anti-semite and his views were so far beyond what ordinary people would think of as plausible. huge conspiracy. but for some reason, when he died, people held him up as a para god. it was almost like a sense of the establishment protecting itself. >> c-span: let me read briefly what you said about his work. the man must have felt bulletproof with implausible romances like lincoln, he filled more readers heads with more

historical crapola than anyone since carson weims. where did that word come from? >> guest: i don't know where it came from. >> c-span: i found it in the last couple years the subject you wrote the most about is dwight eisenhower. this is all about the proposed memori memorial. here are comments from general carl who is the executive director of the dwight eisenhower commission. >> these images in eisenhower square will be framed by three transparent 65 foot tall tapestries depicting the pictures rendered as you see here.

this will be the only national presidential memorial placed in a very difficult urban park setting. this is a suburb site and it will be directly accessible to millions of visitors. >> c-span: why have you written about it so often? $44 million have been spent on something that doesn't exist already. >> guest: right. and probably another $100,000 planned for when they build it. this story appeals to me in many ways. i actually get kind of irked and passiona passionately irked about this which i don't often get emotionally entangled in what i write about. i do revere eisenhower. i think he was an amazingly

great man in all kinds of ways i don't think some people realize even. this is another thing about the wagon. this commission went out and hired an architect who was the most famous in the world and they seemed to hire him because he was the most famous arct -- architect in the world. he came up with a mess to put in the middle of this park in downtown washington not far from here actually. it seemed like a classic case and that is most average people are so intimidated by the ass t

assertion of superiority. but frank gary comes along and throws it in your face and they are like well, he must know something. and 44 million is out the door and we are stuck with a big empty square on maryland avenue. and no memorial to eisenhower at all. i am worried nothing will get built. >> c-span: you went to oxidental college? there is a man who worked for

ketc out in los angeles and he did a program on occidental and its relationship to barack obama. i want to show you his promo of that and then ask you why you wrote about occidental and barack obama. >> we spent the entire day on occidental college whose claim now is that now president elect barack obama spent the first two years of college on this campus. we met his first political science teacher and also stood on the very steps that barack obama stood on to make his first political speech every and we visited his exact dorm room. it is still there in one piece.

i got inside information about his dorm days with one of his dorm roommates from back then. >> c-span: huel howser promoting there. you wrote about a dvd and explain. >> guest: you can see he was a wonderful television presence and so excited about things and that went through the screen and grabbed you. he was a wonderful performer i thought. he applied that kind of excitement to barack obama's time at occidental college. the thing about barack obama's time at occidental college is he left no impression of any kind. there is a little shrine setup to him in the lobby of the student library, or it used to

be there, i think it is still there, it is supposed to be obama's time at occidental. but there is really -- he wrote a poem in the littery magazine but there is no trace of him -- literary -- the school twisted into a pretzel to try to assert importance in obama's life. it wasn't important. it got him out of hawaii but at columbia is when he started having progress. it is a perfect metfer for people trying to drum it up.

he stands there and there is a place where obama supposedly gave an anti-partide speech. he stands there with the camera on him. he is standing with the announcement happened. it is like it is overwhelming to him. >> c-span: i would suggest to our audience they can look up the column from june 18, 2012 because we don't have enough time but the remainder is talking about two books written about barack obama. one from a conservative and the other from david marnes. and you liked david's book more. >> guest: it was a wonderful book. edward cline is the other write who claims to be a conservative and where guess he is but the book is just trash. to tell you the truth as a

conservative republican i am always kind of saddenned -- saddened when the standards on the left are higher. i drifted because i thought the left abandoned standards but instead of further embracing the standards so many of the people in the conservative side fall for books like this. >> c-span: the last time you were here, i think, we talked about your son's -- you wrote a book on your son looking for a top. >> guest: right. crazy you is what it is called. -- college -- >> c-span: did he go to brown? >> guest: no, he went to uva. >> c-span: now, i remember that. i was looking on the web and

thought i saw a picture of him. >> guest: he has brown hair. >> c-span: how often can people see you work in the "weekly standard"? >> guest: if you ask my boss i am sure he would say not often enough. you know i will gathering stuff and doing stuff all the time. >> c-span: do you have a book? >> guest: i am doing a sequel to crazy u. we are supposed to be making a movie of crazy u. so it would be great if i could time the next book's release to the movie coming out. >> c-span: andrew ferguson, writer for the "weekly standard," and book writer, thank you so much. >> guest: thank you so much for having me.

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