by joanna and i highly encourage you to pick it up at your bookstore today. thank you so much, joann. >> thank you, you're welcome. >> c-span where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created by a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, everybody, thank you for coming out this afternoon. what a great crowd for 4:00 p.m. we are excited about this event. before we get started, i have a few housekeeping thicks. we are not going to be be able

to do that today but the books are semisigned already. it's a beautiful book, i don't know if you had a chance to see it. we have plenty of copies up front so please help yourself, great christmas and holiday gift, i might add. otherwise the event will run as it usually does, our panel will be up here to lead the discussion for a while. we only have one mic. it's over here. we really do hope that you can make it to a mic if you have a question. we have our own video going on youtube and we also have c-span and we are also doing this on facebook live as a live stream. please try to make it to the mic if you have a question. for those of you who were members of politics and prose, winter sale in the next three days. so please come on out for that and if you're not a member and want to join, we are always

happy to have you. easy thing to do. lastly, i think we all know that there's been a lot of news around ts block, the 5,000 block of connecticut avenue in the past few days since sunday and brad and i -- by the way, i'm melissa, i'm one of the coowners of the store. we just want to express our really truly heart felt thanks to our community on behalf of all of our staff, the outpouring of support and concern of the after math at comic ping-pong on sunday has been truly overwhelming, positive and a sign of us, a testament to the incredible strength of the community, it's why we are here, we are here and proud to be part of this community, we hope we contribute in some small way as

to the other businesses on the block but it really is about the people of this neighborhood who support our businesses, who believe in solidarity in the face of this kind of assault on values and community. we can't thank you all enough not only conveying support but being here and showing the support in the way that you do so thank you very much. [applause] >> now onto what we do this is this kind of thing. we are so happy to have the incredible panel from the world of politics and journalism who we know are going the give us all of the exact answers. [laughter] >> to what has truly been one of the most bizarre elections in the country and in our history. i think, i don't know how many of you, if any were here, we did air the presidential debates here at politics and prose all three of them, we were kind of surprised how packed the store was, i guess, i don't know whether to say misery, but

showed the interest and engagement over the past year and a half around this election. so we are really grateful today to kind of follow that up with this panel of experts from cnn who are going to discuss the election and its after math, i think you recognize all of them. they were all on coverage throughout the campaign, on my far left brian who will moderate the discussion, i'm sure you know the host of cnn reliable sources, the network sunday morning show about the news media before working at cnnbrian covered the media for "the new york times", he's also the author of new york times best seller, top of the morning inside the cut throat world of morning tv. next we have -- i'm going to go in a different order. there you go. it's fine. amanda carpenter, we are delighted that she's with us

today, she's also a political commentator at cnn. 8:00 to 10:00 crew. very familiar to people in washington, dana bash, she's the chief political correspondent for cnn and her resume covering politics would take us the entire hour so i'm going to have to make it shorter than that. she's reported on the white house, congress, presidential campaign, a questioner in quite a few primary debates, most recently she focused most of her attention on the republican presidential field during the 2016 campaign. she had one-on-one interviews i think with virtually every candidate or a lot of them, a lot of them. [laughter] >> any way, except patty's, i said republican. >> that's true. >> okay, anyway, a pearl among prose. thank you so much for coming and last but definitely not least cnn political comment at a commentator and former colleague

from the clinton administration patty solís doyle. patty worked for a long time as top adviser for hillary clinton, most recently she also on the many cnn round tables that she watch offering analysis of the 2016 primary and election campaign, patty and i also have the wonderful distinction of being of children who were in the same class in school and i'm going to say no more, one was a boy and one was a girl. [laughter] >> as you also know when we do events there's always virtually a book involved and that's certainly the case today too. it's off the presses, it got published this week, unprecedented, there it is. the election that changed everything. it includes a forward cnn anchor and jake tapper who also, i think, you all know is from this neighborhood and pieces by a variety of cnn contributors also

pleased in the audience and i'm not sure where they went off to, let's see. anyway, we have jody who helped -- there she is. there's jody. jody is responsible for the book actually literally coming together. she was the editor of it and we have john morgan, publisher, john. there's john, thank you all for being here. they deserve a lot of credit for the final product as well and we are thrilled to have this event and thank you all for coming and thank you most of all for being here. >> thank you very much. it's great to be here. my first time here so i'm really thrilled to be talking today. i want to first mention the book and why the book is so incredible, i have no idea what this meant that cnn was making a book about the election, this was at least a year and a half ago and candidates entering the race. cnn assigned jody, the editor, the main writer of the book to -- to go off to not have to worry about the dade campaign

but the document what happened. when you think about the title unprecedented, we all went into election night thinking i think most of us thinking hillary clinton was about to be the first female president, unprecedented story. well, the title in some way stands even more strongly today. one month later unprecedented about living history and this book, here is what amazed me, i don't know how you all did it, jody, it reads like trump was going to win. this book saw it coming and sees why it happens and explains why it happens, i was worried to read my own essay because i wrote it before election day and interesting things as you read the book as the words hold up, but it really does in the final, final days right after the election, they were able to get this done in record time. i highly recommend check it out, read the essays, all three of the panelists today also contributed to the book, contributed inside to the book, so i wanted to start actually with our boss, with words from jeff, head of cnn in this book,

i thought this was intriguing, i don't think donald trump ever thought he was going to be the republican nominee for the president. let's remember he was running nbc so he has known trump for many years. i think he got into this race to varnish his brand and finish second or third. i think that's what it was all about until he realized he could actually win. now, looking back 18 months, dana, does that true to you as the reporter the whole time? >> after he said that, absolutely. no, i do agree. no question. just watching him, it was -- he was just kind of doing his thing, making it up as he went along and obviously using his master marketing skills and celebrity status to do it. i mean, the first interview i had with him was at his winery and i remember sitting over this

, beautiful scenes of vineyards and the hill top and, you know, he had come in on the helicopter and instead of walking up the hills, ten steps, they drove him in the suv and i'm thinking no one is going to relate to this, and because i was thinking, it's marketing and, you know, turns out people did relate a lot. >> even the night of the election trump's team was trying to lower expectation and trying to blame people like mitt romney for their loss, they didn't see it coming that night and so you talk about unprecedented, they didn't even imagine themselves in that scenario because an hours before he was president elect, they were saying, these guys are the reason i lost. >> doesn't that explain some of that has happened months since election night. dozens seem like we are seeing

normal transition, not most preparedness, is that because there wasn't an expectation of winning? >> sure, according to reporting, they had a transition team and they saw what was put together and put it window. >> our form of marketing, by the way. >> you're absolutely right. they weren't prepared for it but i also think we are seeing, you know, apprenticeship-style of a transition because if it ain't break, why fix it. it worked for him throughout the primary, it worked for him throughout the general, why change things, why pivot now. he's been very successful. >> right. >> it's also who he is and how he operates to just kind of fly by the seat of his pants. clearly from anybody who has worked with him and saw from the way he ran his campaign, you know, my sense is that even if there was an expectation that he

was going to win, this transition process probably wouldn't look much different. >> it identify it is real pivot points of the last 18 months. i think about the escalator, clichés of donald trump's campaign. what was it for you, dana, not made for tv moment but a time where you start today realize something was different this year, different from all past campaigns? >> you know, trump would always talk about his crowds, there was -- the two things that were most important and still are poll numbers and the size of his crowds. that's it. >> he had huge rallies on day one. he was having a pool party with 200 people and almost felt too small for him. >> , no absolutely. that quickly changed. until he won the primaries,

started winning, a lot of people thought that people were coming out to see a concert or a show, you know, just like you would buy a ticket to sigh a celebrity showing up at, you know, dar or something and i think in some cases, many case that is was true. but then when those people came to see the celebrity they started to listen and they liked what they heard because throughout the campaign so much of what we talked about understandably and appropriately so were the things that were so controversial but the mainstay of his stump speech the entire time had trade deals are bad, you guys are getting forgotten, the system is rigged, build a wall, build a wall, no, no, he didn't say that at the beginning. he liked the media at the beginning, that's a whole other

story. those are the core ideas and ideals that people really graf stated towards because it was different. >> amanneda, you were kind of famously, cnn had antitrump conservative voices, actually went out and hired protrump conservative voices, when you came on board after having worked with cruz what did you learn what, from that primary experience? >> the real breaking point in the primary season was somewhere between new hampshire and florida. it was apparent that donald trump was for real and debate that christie took rubio. cruz camp saying, well, we have

to get it down to trump and cruz. we almost sort of need trump to beat everybody else and we beat him. wait a second, and so to me the real story of the republican primary was the lack of unity in the republican party, you don't end up with 17 candidates on the stage, 17 people thinking they have a realistic chance of winning unless the party is fractured and that allows donald trump to come in and so before he got the nomination, i thought parties are over, republican party couldn't stop this, couldn't do anything, but now he's showing himself to be a very strong leader. i have reservations the way the leadership style is but the party seems to be falling in line and saluting him in a way that i never really expected and we will see where it goes, as for the democratic party, i don't know what rebuilding is going on over there. the party institutionally has a big problem. >> before we talk about my sad party, i want to talk about the primary process and the things that i found most astonishing

about the primary, every candidate left donald trump alone and i'm sure because they thought he was a joke, but before him getting media attention and nobody laying a hand on him, i think that was the two parallel tracks that caused him to rise like he did and win consistent throughout the primary season and by the time tek went after him and jeb bush went after him it was just too little too late. >> you wrote about jeb bush. >> i didn't think, i did. right before he announced, he

did this international tour to kind of burnish his world-stage credentials because she was thinking like a traditional candidate, by the way, the first thing that he did wrong, first of many, many things including the fact that his name was bush and he couldn't do nothing about that. there was no question. i remember being at jeb bush's announcement on june 15th, 2015 and i remember, you know, it was definitely -- he did very well but took a lot of effort for him to connect and to really emotish and to try to connect, you know, with the crowd and as soon as it was over, all of the buzz in the back at the press table was donald trump is really going to do this tomorrow. i mean, the second it was over, i didn't realize it because i was doing live shots, it was -- it was jeb bush's inability to

really get through to people but it was also -- there's no question in my mind that donald trump announced that he was going to run for president the day after jeb bush intentionally to steal his thunder and it worked. and created contrast, maybe. in terms of the connection. we chalk on the same bush-like inability to connect? >> i'm a little biased because i happen to love hillary clinton very much but having worked for her on many of her last presidential campaign, senate campaign. i know she's a flawed candidate and i know she's not good on the stump and in this particular election, she really did personify, she was the embodiment of institutions, not just washington institutions but the embodiment of all of those institutions that people were just so angry at whether it's

washington, whether it's congress, whether it's government, whether it's banks, whether it's the media, i mean, she just sort of embodied all of that for them so was she the wrong messanger, she was prepared, won the debate, she raised the money. >> she was a girl. >> she was a girl. she did everything she was supposed to do but she was a girl. >> no, i'm saying she was a girl and that's why she did everything she was supposed to do. >> she lost because she was a girl. [laughter] >> how much do you chalk up her gender to her loss? >> it's really hard. >> i'm desperate for more research, there's so much more i want to know why people did what they did but how much do you think in your gut think it is?

>> it's hard to run for office when you're a woman. i just do. the little things that really piss me off, i'm sorry, were she's screaming too much, i don't like the tone of her voice, she was the one treating women badly, it's ridiculous, have we ever heard that about a man? i mean, trump, yes, he has a very melodic voice. [laughter] >> i don't know, was it a factor, absolutely. >> how much were you feeling going into election night at the cndc bureau, how much there was a feeling of a chance that she would lose? >> zero. >> zero. >> i mean, if i'm being honest, zero. i was in the green room with corey lewandowski waiting to go

on for our time at 11:00 o'clock and he was at he started he was, well, and i was very chipper and as the time sort of wore on and he was very, very gypper. >> amanda, where was your head at? >> i was watching cnn go. i thought donald trump would be competitive but i thought in the end hillary would win, she would take north carolina, donald trump had to win these four states and he win florida, north carolina, and once he won those two states, holey molly we have a game. i had cnn on and watching the new york times ticker and i would go walk away and go breath, is this really happening, it's like a roller coaster, delete, delete.

i thought it would be a wild ride, that it would end safe and harbor, no surprises. >> now both of you were mostly in the green room or waiting to go on for a panel discussion, dana you were sitting the whole night sitting across from wolf and with jake and you were watching it all happen and seeing your phone blow up. what happens on election night when there's a shock around the world? [laughter] >> what happens? >> it's like, you know, i probably shouldn't -- like su will --sully landing a plane. there's no emotion, just do your job and try to get the information realtime. ultimate adrenaline rush, ultimate, and just like you

guys, as soon as we start today -- started to see florida look off, oh, okay, but one thing i will say about all of our expectations because obviously we've had a lot of time to think about and i see abigael, my partner in crime, is that we, all of us, these are political professionals and as a political reporter we are conditioned to these modern times talk and study the data, the voter modeling, specially sort of post, i guess starting with george w. bush in 2004 when they had the voter file in rnc and micro targeting trying to finding voters like the way politics and prose find book readers and so on and so forth. fast-forward to now 2016, the clinton campaign had it down to

what we thought it was a science the way they identified voters and frankly the republicans did too. the trump campaign didn't have it but they relied on the republican national committee and we did stories on that. so my point is is that all of their data including the republicans showed hillary clinton winning, okay. now, if we didn't have any of that, if we were back in the times of alexander hamilton over there and we just had our shoe-later reporting, there are two stories that we did looking back and we would have said donald trump is going to win. one was a piece on millennials in north carolina where we talked to so many young people, nope, i was a bernie sanders voter, i'm never going to vote for her, no way, no way and then in pennsylvania it was like two or three days after the access

hollywood, we did a piece on suburban woman and we went to several trump events, ivanka trump was there and these were the kind of women that would expect that say forget it, i'm not going to this guy, he is a dog, to a person we could not find one women who said that, they all said, whatever, of course, we know this about donald trump but he's going to do x, y and z for the economy, by the way, we can't stand hillary clinton, sorry. so looking back if we would have focused on those kinds of stories that we did with real people, we would have said, o okay, but we were relying on the fancy data which have been right for the most part. i just want to add my favorite focus group are cab drivers and we traveled a lot throughout this campaign to the debates and primaries and i always ask my cab driver, who are you voting for? and nine times out of ten, they

were trying to decide between bernie sanders and donald trump and that was a clear warning sign that we just sort of kind of spatted the way, people were hungry for disruption, not the same old, same old and those two -- >> who would have won a bernie sanders-donald trump election? >> i think sanders. >> no. >> i could have voted for trump against a socialist. i think a lot of republicans would have felt that way. >> i don't know if america is ready for a jewish democratic socialist? >> is america worried for a donald trump? >> what do i know. >> i think bernie sanders. >> let me ask about, patti, the night on cnn after one of the debates, donald trump invoked you, suggested you created the

birther movement. [laughter] >> conspiracy theory, tell us about that experience, what it told you about this kind of plague of fake news and conspiracy theory. >> let me set the stage, it was the first debate at st. louis? the first debate. hofstra. lester is the moderator. many of us were at hofstra. i was sitting in a trailer watching the debate and came at the tail-end of the debate and i was there because i'm a girl studious making notes on what i'm going to say on cnn about how hillary nailed the debate and suddenly, you know, and i'm sitting there with other commentators and i'm making notes and suddenly i hear my name. is it somebody in the room, no, it's donald trump, first he called me patti doyle and and

then patti solís. i did an interview with wolf blitzer, i did an interview basically saying that during our campaign a volunteer coordinator, a nonpaid person forwarded an e-mail about barack obama being a muslim and that i fired him, her, sorry, her for doing that so that's not called peddling in conspiracies, that's called shutting it down. but that interview took off on the briebart website. that took off in the right-wing website and donald trump used it as a point in the debate. now, what was great for working

for cnn at the time is that i was able to respond in realtime to that with the help of my friend dana bass who also asked donald trump about it immediately after the debate. so that was good, but my phone exploded people, you know, calling me not nice things, be words and c words telling me to go back to méxico and donald trump when he wins is going to deport me, i mean, it was ugly and there are a lot of the majority of trump supporters who actually believed it because he said it. i don't know -- i mean, same thick happened in our neighborhood, my neighborhood. so i don't know what to say about that. >> do you believe they truly believe what they say or go along with it?

differences or shades to it. >> i think they believe what he says. i think there are people and cnn did a focus group on this, there are people who believe that two million people voted illegally in california. >> three. >> three. >> three million people voted illegally in california. [laughter] >> there's a microphone over here. please line up in the mic so we can record you for c-span, facebook, one more question talking about the title unprecedented, was there -- was there a story that did not get enough play this fall that now we look back in retrospect, dana, you were describing two of the seg mints or interviews with voters, what should have maybe been noticed more before november 8th, to tell us this was going to be unprecedented results? >> because there's so much attention in donald trump in the final months.

there wasn't enough tension on the logistics of what hillary clinton is doing to not getting to battleground states. wait, she only went to wisconsin once in general election. >> she went zero times. >> she went before the general election. >> okay, this was the trump show, trump show which in some cases made -- we didn't see the flaws you were describing of the other candidate. let's go over here for questions. >> following up on that because i'm a big cnn watcher and i'm a liberal and democrat, so if i want that viewpoint i can go to msnbc and see that, i was troubled by what i was watching on cnn and precisely because so much air time was given to trump's antics and nothing was given to -- to hillary and her

speeches, it would be just little clips, there was just so me time giving to trump because, you know, i heard that roy cohen who used to be chief counselor, learned he had -- maybe this is misinformation but he had told a young donald trump negative good news is -- negative news is good news and whether there was internal assessment as to how you handle the reporting of the election and then the only other thing that i would raise is that i've heard a lot about the alt-right, alternative right. i don't know. aren't they extreme ride, radical ride? i don't think the general public would necessarily except for millennials and people who are i

hate to say educated or whatever, i don't think the general population really understands it and i think it minimizes the extremism of that segment of the population. >> let's take your point about cable news coverage and campaign first. what just happened, what did we do right and what did we do wrong, that's what the show is going to keep being. every week we are having the conversations. >> what time are you on? >> sundays at 11:00. that was great. [laughter] >> internally the soul searching needs to happen at every network and news organization and i do think it is maybe not enough of it but i do think it is, we've heard cnn and others say, perhaps there should have been so many rallies shown so often without any filter at all but the counterargument to that and by the way i'm one of those people that couldn't turn the head when trump was speaking, he

was making news, he was incredibly unpredictable and provocative and dana you were there at all of the rallies, he was making news at the rallies. >> he was. that's the struggle because i take your point about being all trump and not focusing enough on what hillary clinton was saying, but because donald trump was saying pretty much every day something that was so wild, we felt a responsibility to talk about it and fact-check it which is got him so mad at us, you're so negative and you don't treat me right and it's because he was -- he had a 50% shot of being president of the united states, we felt the responsibility to really dig into what he was saying, hillary clinton wasn't doing that, she wasn't saying things that required -- i mean, some things required fact-checks and we did so that, i think, extrains but it doesn't

necessarily -- thank you, doesn't necessarily excuse but but explains it because just like everybody here grappling on what to do with the unicorn we were also, you know. >> what i learned as someone who spent years in "the new york times" before joining cnn, i loved sitting in control rooms, my take away from that is, these are minute by minute decisions, you know, you're deciding what to do about a trump rally in realtime not based on months of conversation, not based on a plot to help trump or hurt trump but what's news that minute. that's the reality of cable news world. >> i would say and one point to that and from my experience with senator cruz and watching other republican candidates, they didn't make themselves available, they were saying the same old stuff. >> amen. >> it wasn't interesting to cover potentially ted cruz rallies because he was giving the same speech a hundred times.

>> one of my frustrations -- >> i said it on the air. >> i was thinking at the time why weren't they coming out and trying to learn from trump's antics. >> they were caught up in the traditional -- the fox news primary trying to get influential, they weren't paying attention to cnn, meanwhile trump call them up, take them live. dominated at an early stage and the cameras never went away. they couldn't. >> and on your question about the alt-right, where do you come on the termsnology, the language alt-right which can be sometimes maybe confusing or unclear? >> i'm sort of okay with it because i don't know of a better thing to call it. some are clearly racists, some have not -- >> extreme. >> extreme, racist. >> but to me when i saw this coming very early on with trump

hiring steve bannon knowing very well what happened at breibart news and the things they publish , i never knew what it would be up against. what do you call it? this is not conservative outlet. they're not, they don't have conservative impulses, alt-right, okay. part of this alternative reality. there's no accountability, no fact-checking, no editorial control. i mean, it's the wild west of, you know, internet politics. there's no accountability. i'm open to a better word, but -- >> i like the word extreme. >> okay. >> it's antiimmigrant, antisemimatic, antifeminist. it's antiblack. make called it anti.

>> antimedia and they exist in order to be anti. >> part of what destroyed credibility. there's been many years long campaign of conservative alt-right outlets you cannot believe the liberal media, we are the only ones that will tell you the truth. >> like a bookstore but refuse to stock conservative books or books with a different opinion than owners. another question. >> thank you for the panel, i love your socks by the way. >> thank you. [laughter] >> i watch cnn constantly and what used to bug me is that the need to try to have this -- the term was used false equipment, right, trump did this, but clinton also did this, trump did this but what about clint open and you have folks on your panel, what's the woman's name

kellyanne conway and the other lady -- >> kaley. >> her. for the life of me i felt like throwing my shoe at the tv. >> i hope we don't owe you a new tv. >> whatever hillary clinton may have or may not have done, doesn't compare for what we know trump did, so why was there always a comparison of the two? >> i think that what you're talking about is -- you called it falls i qif -- equivalency, it's call spin. historically there have been issues with objective reporters sometimes doing the false equivalency thing because we are trained to say, he says this, she says that, thank you and goodnight. but we did not do that in this campaign like at all.

at all. and i think that that probably feeds into your question about donald trump getting so much more air time because we had to spend so much more time on him and trying to explain and fact-check and so on and so forth. so just remember who is talking when you're throwing the shoe. patti, tell us about it. >> okay, i know it doesn't appear that way when you're watching us, but kaley is a lovely young woman, jeffrey lord is a lovely young man, we just disagree, we disagree on the issues, we disagree on which way the country should go but they are lovely people and i just want to go on what dana was saying, i think viewers

sometimes don't distinguish reporting and commentating. we are supposed to defend our candidate and we are supposed to defend our party and jeffrey and kaley are supposed to do the same thing and so that's what we do and it's hard to distinguish it when you have a panel reporters and comment at a timers put together, i see that point. >> could i just say one thing and you can disagree with me the, both of you. one of the things that's really cool of experience in 2016 is that you guys do disagree sometimes in an extremely heated way on the air, but in the green room and off camera i feel like you guys have really made friends across the aisle. >> absolutely. >> i think it's really cool. i remember being at one of the conventions and walking downstairs and seeing a table,

they were working out, something that i will never forget and david axelrod. okay, that's happening. [laughter] >> one thing that was really interesting about the cycle is how much cnn actually allowed as commentators to leave it on the field, there were no prediscussions, we were free to let that conversation go where it needed to go when it came to issues of race and gender and, i mean, there were times i'm sitting next to republican congressmen, you're disrespecting women, did i go too far? no, you say what you feel and they allowed us to be passionate and that was emblematic of the feel negotiation the cycle. >> don't go to break, don't go to break, let it play out. remember john stewart.

>> i remember going at it with jeffrey for about three hours, when are we going to commercial, they don't wanting to to commercial, they're not going to commercial. >> that's right. question over here. >> what is wrong with the democratic brand, record number of governship in their entire history, the house raises they got 3 million more votes than the democrats did and the senate, she outran most of the senate candidates in particular in those states where pennsylvania or north carolina or wisconsin where they need to be -- should have picked up those seats? >> everyone is looking at me. [laughter] >> so in the last eight years that president obama was in office we lost a lot of seats, i mean, historical amount of seats

in the house. i don't think historical amount of seats in the senate, i don't think, i think we lost that under bill clinton actually. we lost a lot of state legislators because we kept our eye off the ball. i mean, president obama was and remained wildly popular, he got things done but we lost seats where it mattered and where it mattered were in the state legislators when all of the redistricting was going on and it hurt us. now, we went into this election thinking, we were going to win back the senate, we were going to win the white house for a third term, which was unprecedented, but we thought that was going to happen and we didn't think we were really going to win back the house but we thought we would pick up certainly more than four seats, than the four seats that we picked up.

and we didn't, obviously. and look, we are still pouring over the exit polls, the problem with pouring over the exit polls is that the exit polls were wrong, but we left a very important group of people on the table, we left white-working class voters on the table and that was, i think, our biggest mistake and what is exceptionally frustrating for me is that hillary clinton, this was part of her coalition when i know she ran for senate and when she ran for president in 2008, one of the problems and there were many problems, you know, we are going to be chewing on it years to come, but the clinton campaign was trying to replicate the obama coalition, the problem was that hillary clinton is not barack obama, her coalition is different, her coalition of

hispanic voters which came out very strong for her, consists of women and it consists of white-working class voters and she didn't go after them. >> because of the rest of the party. >> barack obama's flexibility hurt the party. he was able to cons vince people to go on with obamacare which didn't turn out well, including me, i'm on obamacare, my premiums 1100 a month. hillary clinton didn't have the natural likability and nobody could sell the policies like he did and he tried to and failed. >> more about down ticket than the presidential race. >> that's what i mean. down ballot all the years since obama was elected in my opinion. >> let's go to more questions in

line over here. >> yeah, okay, this is about the media. donald trump has threatened the threatening the media with liable, shutting parts down of the internet back in december even though he's using twitter all of the time, do i connect to his idea that there is -- ordinary americans are in peril because of things on the internet weponized and isis, north korea, iran that we ought to worry about and he's not, do you think that -- but this whole wartime idea that civilians can be targeted by over foreign terrorists because of the internet, that could bring to shutting down user content as well as the fake news thing and look at what just happened, what happened down the street to the pizza shop was certainly liable

by the way and the communication , what do you think is going to happen? i'm an independent blogger myself and trump advertises on my blog all of the time, hillary never did. i'm a gay libertarian somewhat conservative libertarian, gay man, some of my stuff is okay but what do you think of this? >> well, i would start by saying that i think we are seeing media lawyers, journalism leaders, groups and first amendment advocacy groups rallying right now and preparing for a difficult climate that may or may not come to pass. what trump had said in the camp -- campaign said on the administration, we don't know. i think i'm slightly reassured

to know that lawyers and journalism, freedom groups are very much taking him seriously and taking him at what it's worth so far. >> i don't think he has an interest of shutting social media. that's his biggest ally. he wouldn't have been a president if it weren't for twitter. >> you're giving twitter the credit or blame for the trump presidency? >> yeah. >> jack dorsey, if you're listening. >> he has been going after individual reporters, he wants to expand liable laws, that he can sue reporters who they think publish fake information. i would expect to see a court case on that. as for user-generated social media, no way, that's his biggest ally proponent. >> more questions here from the audience? >> yeah. i wanted to go back to the white-working class and

obviously i don't expect you guys to speak for all media outlets, but i'm a little confused as to how that's being defined. is the measure -- is when people speak about that category, is it education levels, is it the types of jobs they hold like blue collar versus white collar or rural versus urban or income which is what i primarily think of when i think of the word class or is every poll about the white-working class somewhat different and really not a group that we actually have nailed down and as a follow-up, do you think it's realistic that the democratic party can actually win the white-working class given that they have voted primarily republican in every election as far back as i know and i realize we don't need to win the whole group, probably a huge percentage points but is it really realistic for democrats to go after that group? >> well, i'm going to leave it

to actually dana but i think it's all of the four categories that you specifically defined and i will give it for dana but all four categories that you listed and no, they don't vote republican traditionally, like i said, hillary -- you know how hillary won the senate race in new york state by going up state new york where white-working class voters and they didn't like her to begin, they thought they didn't trust, they thought she was a liar, they, you know, they didn't like her, but she went up there over and over and over again and made her case and she won enough of them to win the state. and democrats have been doing that, you know, and will continue to do that, this was for whatever reason i don't know why, we left them on the table and it clearly was a huge mistake. i'm going to say bernie sanders

was a huge warning sign for that -- in the primary, you know, he won michigan, he beat her in michigan, he beat her in wisconsin, the states that she lost in the general to donald trump and it was a huge warning sign but we didn't see it. >> you know, since you actually ran a presidential campaign you obviously are very familiar with the sort of definition of demographics, but, yeah, specially that we saw the trend very much so in this campaign, white-working class voters effectively were white voters who didn't have a college degree and also white voters who, i guess, you know, for the most part rural but it didn't really necessarily matter rural versus urban, but those with a certain income level, and those were the voters pretty much from the beginning of this -- of this

race at the beginning of the republican party that donald trump attracted like gang busters, like gang busters, i remember exit poll after exit poll, night after night during the republican primaries, those were the people that he was attracting and it were sort of the more traditional elite country club republicans who were voting for not ted cruz but maybe some for ted cruz but marco rubio and sort of splitting among the rest of the 14 or 15 other people who were the more traditional republicans. i mean, yes, there are many rural -- rural republicans who were socially conservative who vote republican but for the most part sort of historically to your point, i mean, just think about back in 1992, bubba, the bubba vote, that was bill clinton, bill clinton went after

those voters because he knew how to speak them. they were traditional democrats. he won a lot of southern states because that was back at the time when southern states were still, you know, because their father and and grandfather were democrats and they were voting too. we saw a shift in the demographics for each party in this election. donald trump took the remaining voters. >> we have five minutes left, a couple more questions. >> thank you very much. there's a lot of number of on -- observers this think among 20 or so presidential candidates, donald trump was the least qualified and prepared in various dimensions, now, i wonder whether you think there's any validity to that appraisal and if so, that puts in doubt the democratic process practice

in the united states or if there's anything that can be done about it? >> i will optimistic and say no. donald trump, i'm not certainly one of his spibbers or defenders, he does have some amount of qualification. he's a highly successful person. running organizations at that level do entail managing bureaucracies, managing budgets, so it's not like he just freshman senator like barack obama walking with no administrative experience. >> we are back on cnn. this is good. i don't think it's fair to say he doesn't have qualification. >> of course, he'll not qualified in the traditional sense, right, in the traditional sense because he's the first person ever elected president without military or elected

government experience, so by those definitions, there's no way to say that he is not unqualified per se, of course, he is qualified as voters in this country believe because they wanted somebody like him, they wanted a disrupter because they were done with the people who had those qualifications. >> let's get another question in. >> so as a result of this presidential election, my fear is the precedent that's been set for future elections. so in your respective opinion, what type of precedent has been set not only at the national level but the state and local level for campaigns? >> you know, i've been working in politics for -- i'm old, 30

years. i've been working in campaigns and on every metric that we sort of look at on a political hat that i look at, he did everything wrong, he didn't have a policy, he didn't raise money, he didn't have a ground game, he didn't -- but he won. he said these horrible offensive degrading things to women, hispanics, and african americans, and he won, right? so now we are looking at -- everyone is looking at subsequent elections, like what now? is it now okay to say these terrible things, has he made it even just a little bit more okay

to say these disrespectful, degrading things? is it now okay not to raise money and not to have ground organization and just run a social media, free-media campaign and win? i think those of us who make a living campaigning, we are sort of taking a long hard look at it and see what it means for future elections because i don't think people really know just quite yet. >> that answer is a perfect pitch for the book. [laughter] >> so thank you all, thank you patti, dana, amanda, thank you all for being here. [applause] >> i want to say congratulations again to thomas, jody, for the publisher, check out the book and thank you very much. >> you're watching book tv on c-span 2. book tv, television for serious

readers. holiday schedule features in-depth live on c-span2. this month authors weigh in on the presidency of barack obama on the weekly after words program. women who have successfully climbed the corporate ladder. political contributors look back at the 2016 presidential race. and with we take a look at the latter years of first lady eleanor roosevelt. that's just a few of the programs you'll see on book tv this weekend, for a complete television schedule go to booktv.org. book tv, 72 hours of nonfiction books and authors, television for serious readers.

[inaudible conversations] .. this is our grand opening week and we are thrilled you got to be part of this new site. we want to be a hub for activity, for the best thinking, ideas and consumer consumer information. we hope you come back more in the future. i work primarily on k-12 education and as i think about the foundational issues undergirding policy and decentralization and nonprofit groups and pluralism and so this conversation is to spoken to me and imrt