>> the seasoned bus is on the 50 capitals were visiting every state e-uppercase-letter and hearing about each state priorities. he kicked off the tour on september 15 in dover, delaware. we have now visited 12 state capitals. the next stop is tallahassee, florida. we will be there on december 6 with live interviews during washington journal. >> former presidential speech writers discuss their time working in the white house and how the media landscape has changed and how they communicated the president's message over several problems including social media. this is just under an hour and a half. >> good afternoon. i am dean of the georgetown university school of business.

it is our privilege to hold on to host the annual professional speech writers association world conference again this year. will come back. here at georgetown we are firm believers that learning never ends. whether you are attending a conference like this one, seeking an advanced degree or working with our executive education team to develop a customized curriculum for your organization, there is always an opportunity to understand even more, to learn and to explore. by nature, universities are created and centers of knowledge. at georgetown the work of our faculty and experiences of our students are enhanced by our location in the global, capital city of washington dc. we have access to national and global leaders in business,

policy, government and much more. where else would you expect to find a session named all the presidents [inaudible]. thank you for being with us today. thank you for david murray and the entire ps team for organizing such a wonderful conference. is now my distinct pleasure to invite robert/engler, author of white house ghost and moderator for next session to introduce the panel. [applause] >> thank you, dean. thank you to david for putting this together and thank you to georgetown for hosting it. we have a terrific panel and i will briefly introduce them and will get to their thoughts because their thoughts are much more interesting than mine. going from your left to right,

chronologically, not any indication of the political spectrum we have [inaudible] was a hat trick presidential speechwriter having served president nixon, ford and reagan, if i recall correctly. we of bob ratcliff, speechwriter for jimmy carter and is now a candidate for congress in florida. we have clark judge was a speechwriter for president reagan, mary k carey, speechwriter for george w. bush. george, speechwriter for president clinton and sarah, speechwriter for president obama. i think we might be joined in progress from the george w. bush team as well. it is inevitable these days that we will get to the proverbial man of the moment in our thoughts about him eventually because all conversations turned back to him these days but i

want to talk about the moment first. which is the age of social media and what it is like for president and those assisting him to communicate in the age of social media and i want to start with arrow and in the case of the earlier presidents asked what would how would your bosses handled social media and as we get down to the person who can answer that question with real experience i would like the panel to talk about is that a good thing for presidents to be able to engage on social media in engage the public in that it directly. >> it's a good thing for presidents to know how to drive but more of and some are more reckless than. [laughter] i think politicians is a lagging indicator because by the time

they are in public office they've already formed and they are learning after other things have learned these things. nixon, the first president i work for he would have needed physical help. he was a total klutz when it came to pushing buttons but he would've figured out the effectiveness of using social media would have done a very cautiously and judiciously. jerry ford probably would be very meat and potatoes when there was a legislative issue or something but he wouldn't be. ronald reagan, will get into that more later but he was a communications natural and early in life was in at the very beginning of several communication epics. radio, as a factor for the first time. television "after words" and of course hollywood was a unifying social factor. i think they would all learn how

to do it and know what they were doing was with effectiveness and style. carter was skeptical of communications as artifice and not wanting to seem like he was using too much rhetoric or trickery, what do you think he would've made of social media. >> remember he was a [inaudible] and he gained the office of the presidency by basically going out into the grassroots and winning in iowa and all these other places that you can so i think he would've been embraced that part of it as a useful tool but would he have been good at it? i don't know. he wasn't very good at speeches. he didn't like to give speeches and he especially didn't like speech writers. [laughter] he wanted people to understand

what his policies were and all the rational reasons that they were good for them and he didn't want to have to go out and explain that so it was a challenge. he would've been okay at social media. social media back then really was cassettes and people would trade cassette tapes and speeches and whenever we would feel the press and the speechwriting staff we pull out a tape of gerald ford speech to the north carolina future homemakers which he had this great line that said you can be proud that you are a homemaker and a tar heel homemaker at that.

put all your laughter and have a great old time and feel much better. [laughter] >> how would the great communicator has handled and engaged in social media track. >> the same way he handled all media. by the way you missed one from the media that he was on the ground floor of which was films. one of the district he entered the movie industry shortly after he goes to sound so he was very good at adapting speech form that came along. the key for reagan's medication was his own intense and personal discipline. he learned things and made it a point to learn things and he made it a point to understand the dynamics of the media, of the medium, and then to adjust the way he delivered to it. here's a thought. when we, in 1964, i think it was, the average soundbite on television was about a minute

and a half. by the time you get to 1988, according to the new republic during the 88 campaign, it was eight seconds. what is eight seconds? it is a. a lot of what we did and one of the things we made a point of mastering was how to get media to put us and that is how soundbite became important. we had three little portals, four or five, the evening news shows, cnn was just coming on and didn't have much audience and at the very end of our administration "the new york times" which is not exactly [inaudible], "the washington post" which was the next woods during and bernstein moment and it's not great if you're sitting in the white house but a few

others and those quotes would be about as long. the president made a point and taught us how to capture media on the sentence you wanted. i think he would've done very well better. >> george hw bush very much send my possessor was the great communicator and i am not that guy and i didn't want to be that guy and how would he has handled this age he lived in? reporter: as clark said when we came into office after you were leaving cnn had just started and there were huge word processors with floppy disks that were about this big and he would make a lot of jokes about the f7 but and he would say f7 that guy. [laughter] he will be the first to admit that he was not the most tech

savvy. in general, i think if president carter and they did not like it speeches is not the great beginner and he was very good in small groups, one on one, he would much rather do a press conference with the give a speech and i think outside of social media if had existed for the plate strings. is a very good sense of humor and i think that would have brought it to the floor and so many people now, as i go around the country talking about him, say why do we not know how funny he was? i think it would have helped him get reelected. the other thing he faced was all four years of a democratic congress and was able to get through quite a bit of big, bipartisan legislation, the americans disability act, the senior act and things like that and i think having social media would have shown some of the things he was doing behind the

scenes to rally the votes in unify the coalition he was building and that would help to have seen it and it would've been great his first lady would've been very good. oh yeah, she would be great. >> clinton was technically the first president of the internet age and i remember the story you were working on a speech and he said no, no, this is a speech and i just want to talk to people. how would he have handled it? >> i think he would've had trouble with 140 characters. [laughter] it is interesting to watch a month for now and i don't know how many of you follow president clinton but he's not making a lot of news on her. i think that is by design. he's been pretty restrained in his use of. he has advanced a couple of ideas and he's not president of the united states so he doesn't

have that need to president arguments but i think that for me what it prints out is he was president and the time of intense transition and maybe that will always be true and maybe he was the first president of the information age. he wrote many speeches about the information age and the world wide web and what an amazing thing it is and was. at the same time i think he was uncertain about this new technology itself. is actually very hard to put yourself back in the mindset of the late 1990s because it was similar and yet it was dramatically different in terms of what can be taken for granted. people were afraid to buy stuff online because they didn't feel their credit card was information was safe. i don't know why anyone would think that today. [laughter] the president needed to demonstrate that this, it was,

was safe and we set him up and we vetted him to buy some christmas gifts online and to show that it could be done. got him a laptop and set them up in the west wing and he did have one of his own and we felt looking at it that this was the product placement for dell and it was very presidential. one of the junior people in speechwriting operation it up on the color laser printer at the presidential seal and we cut that out and we started to the back of the laptop and the president went on the laptop and someone brought up the website that would allow him to buy a smoked ham or something like that and he's looking at it online and he starts to touch -- either he was totally out of touch or way ahead of his time.

[laughter] it doesn't work like that. you can't touch it anymore. i think he was in transition and the technology was in transition and in terms of the utility to us the jury was still very much out. we are at the mercy of the 24 hour, 247 news cycle but the technological tools that we had i don't think we felt enabled us to do anything affirmative. we were dealing with coming at us but we didn't have dinner and we didn't have facebook, video technology online was not such that you could put your speeches out there and have that be a useful thing to do and i think we were uncertain about what to

do other than touted as for the us economy. >> that brings us to -- you alone appear can talk about the actual real world experience of having to deal with this in a community's and sense for a president fully in the social media age. can you give us a sense of what that was like? >> what is interesting is although the internet has obviously been around by the time president obama came into office his eight years was really an evolution of social media. twitter and facebook and all these other platforms through with his presidency and i came on during the second term and they already had a pretty robust digital strategy office that was integrated with the communications team and with the speechwriters and i think what it actually meant for us in addition to dealing with this fragmented media landscape where target slice and dice a speech

and then put the newschannel and the message intended wasn't always the message received it also presented in numerous opportunities for us. president obama instead of a speech might not become the only avenue through which to deliver a message. maybe we would start with the speech about higher education and that would be the opening of the message and from there who might turn into an instagram picture of the president and the first lady in her college sweatshirt and reminding kids apply for college and fill out their fafsa and that it might turn into a basic post that would get shared and it out and turns into a # and now that # spreads it further. it was the way to deliver policy initiative and direct them to audiences that are watching his speech that is being shown on c-span and that the audience is needed to get the message and a

couple of years ago i remember the president in the coming occasions i was convinced the president to do some interviews with youtube stars. i don't even really understand what that means but basically it means as though there are young people on youtube have millions of followers and millennial's and teenagers or someone watches them. [laughter] what is happening what is this? but he said i've got important messages to deliver to the young people and let me do these interviews with the youtube stars and you can imagine the media was not happy about these two -year-olds and this young woman who promoted makeup styles getting the interview with the president. but it was a great way for him to reach young people in these young people, to their credit, ask them really good questions. one of these young women asked the president very boldly about why the female sanitary products

are taxed and the president gave a thoughtful answer and that turned into a policy push. i think that president obama sort of strategic in his use of social media and often times someone like me in the spee10 office didn't always know the latest technology and i think maybe having two teenage daughters helped him stay on the curve because he knew things. he would say should we do this is a facebook live event where people can watch me talk about healthcare or should we do a snap story which i still don't know what that is but he was thoughtful about how to do it and i think he also saw twitter and contest and as a way to reaching a lot of people and still be the voice of the president. while it may have been in formal compared to speech and obviously truncated he very much got into

when it was appropriate to treat and what he might be and from whom he was trying to reach and why. oftentimes they were bigger events and things that he wanted to comment on very quickly that he was strategic when it came to the social media. >> i could say something about that and follow-up and complementary of the president obama. not something you'll hear me do very much but president obama based to communications revolutions, both of which he handled well. the first is cable and you think of the primaries in 2008 and every night you may remember clinton one week, obama the next, clinton the next week and it was back and forth and it was custom for the winner to wait for the loser to concede.

they each were getting about ten minutes. mrs. clinton would come out whether she was first or second and she would do what politicians have been doing forever. she would recognize everybody in the audience, by name, everyone who had helped her. by the time for ten minutes. she was just getting to message. president obama at that time, senator candidate, did exactly the opposite. he would come out and went right into his message and so by the time his ten minutes. he had reached the whole nation or at least the whole party with why they should vote for him and that was a clear, understanding of the new medium environment that no other candidate in the campaign displayed. you now move to 2008 and the reelection.

[inaudible] 2012 in the reelection and the obama campaign very much did what you are prescribed -- i wanted to contrast to president. they very truly used it as a way to segmenting voters and reaching the voters in the segment whether it was a woman who is best known for taking bets with froot loops or one of the media stars and i think that sounds funny and you didn't laugh back. >> you have to improve your training skills. [laughter] >> that was a way of segmenting voters and reaching voters to that segmentation. the difference between that and what we've seen over this campaign though there has been some of that is that the trump

strategy for and other social media that he personally controls is not really aimed at the segmented voters. it's aimed at the media and it was his way of continues to be his way of capturing the television and newspaper, new cycle. it used to be that each day began in news and began with "the new york times", washington post, and the morning shows would follow from them and they basically had the papers out and they would be reporting and the first time the white house would really reliably and into the conversation would be at the noontime news briefing and that might get them on the evening news. think of this watching morning joe today and those are two nbc's which these days

republican is to acknowledge but that's another joke. everyone. [laughter] think of it. you get "the new york times" and washington post still have their story and they're all primed up and they're focusing on that and along comes the and it controls the show. it's a different strategy and there is still the obama strategy and the power of the strategy is you use the social media to drive all media. >> it is also a way to taking over the air out of the room. no even when trump does a tweet that may turn off the people and the noise of people in puzzle some people but he was dominating that day to the

exclusion of most of his up a position with what he was reacting. in addition, he so often that people fairly rapidly forget the first people they were annoyed at. [inaudible conversations] there is a gradual numbness that sets in. does that hurt the effectiveness of presidential communications where if people are becoming numb to presidential announcements and is that cheap and the presidential work? >> it works. >> how can you argue with his success to market it dominates the conversation with these ridiculous things and they keep coming in every day there is another one. he is such a moving target and i don't know what to talk about

with him when i am discussing issues. i go after paul ryan. [laughter] >> i would draw a distinction between dominating the news which is deathly doing and leading the discussion. dominating the national discussion without actually leaving it. what i mean by that is they have shown again and again and he is probably done it while were sitting up here that he fires off the heat or makes a straight statement and no one can talk about anything else for the next four hours. he does everyone, as you just said, everyone off their stride but what he is not doing is what every president representative on this panel has done which is to try and a sustained and disciplined way to lead the nation to a particular outcome.

how do they do it? by all sorts of means but speeches and public statements are a huge part of that. it won't surprise you that we will all say that but we all believe that deeply that whether people are from congress or turn public opinion in your favor on a particular issue or an ally to subscribe to you got to be out there consistently and you got to be speaking with clarity and you've got to lead a discussion and it is difficult to do because you are not the only ones who get to the stage and there is more and more noise out there that there has ever been before. the noise is coming from the oval office right now and i think it is effective in the sense that everyone pays attention although i'm not sure that will work forever but it is not effective in getting anything done. there is not anything that president trump has done during his time in office that is the result of the careful effort at the pulpit.

he has signed executive orders as all previous presidents have done but he's not led the nation to do anything and that is a huge earlier i think of rhetorical leadership and presidential leadership. >> i also think -- [applause] >> all the presents that we work for they all saw the role not to just advance an agenda or drive us toward an outcome but to unify the country that was divided and be the president of all people who didn't vote for them. i don't have a ton of nice things to say about your boss either but things turned out beautiful. i think where trump is in addition to everything else that is horrific that is happening in the way he communicates in terms of not meeting the news he is also not creating any kind of

cohesive narrative that all of us to follow. even presidents that we might publicly disagree with would tell a story of america that they believed in and that would under which we can all cohere in some way and that provides credibility as a leader. he doesn't have that in addition to other things that he has done to erode his own credibility or never develop any. i think that becomes a problem when it moments when a country needs to come together, people do need to see a leader there is a vacuum and an absence of their. he's very much president of just a few people and a bully pulpit all the avenues of social media that we have now are an opportunity for the president to use it to actually offer that narrative and even if it is not one that we don't necessarily all agree with. very segmented. >> there is an element here of why is he different way he is

different. everyone for years has been saying what really need our citizen presidents who aren't politicians. well, we got one. one of the differences someone who is never been in public life for and suddenly at a high level runs for office is people who have been a public life for do have a structured set of values, aims, policies that evolve over time that is what they are spending their lifetimes working about in thinking about. this is the first president that doesn't fit into that mold in the century. we shouldn't be too surprised. however, it's the evidence would seem to indicate at weather here on the left or right path that he used is increasingly attempting path for non- politicians to go for the big one and we have an audience that has been dumbed down in many senses culturally in attention span and everything else so that celebrity hood has become a key

in a way it could not have been in past generations. >> i'm not sure i agree with that was said. personal, one of the goals of the thing is to keep others from dominating the news and in an environment that is this hostile is this what has been with no honeymoon starting off the night of the election the opponent didn't even come out and concede until the next day and that reflected that she may have been incapacitated but that reflected a general view within the party and this is the kind of environment that is extremely challenging. at the same time he has had a message and i disagree with that and it may not be your message but the make america great again slogan encompassed within it a message of renewal, form and renewal and it also encompassed a message of alarm at the

current state of affairs. both of which he has been effectively communicating as he went along. the fact that we are still in the process of a long legislative struggle both on healthcare reform, tax reform in other areas indicate how divided both his own party is in the country and we say republicans are controlling congress and not in a meaningful way, both parties have within them in the senate independence who are caucusing with their party obviously senator sanders and i think senator king are both examples on the democratic side and on the republican side senator michalski was not elected on the republican ticket and she was a write in candidate and senator mccain is clearly has used himself perhaps for personal reasons and for reasons of principle independent of his

own party now and both parties are facing that and the democratic independents stick pretty loyalty to the party and the republicans are more problematic. that is the character of the country and i wouldn't write off or even make the judgment on the legislative program just yet but we know the republicans are continuing working on healthcare and they may be working with some democrats and we know the saying is true in tax reform. we have a very challenging environment and much more closely divided than people think the president sometimes has been brilliant at bringing mobilizing and other times has stumbled and the one thing i would say about the tweet and the other issue to get back to that is that it is emblematic of the new age which is fairly

unfiltered and i've been dealing in my business which is communication in business with the new age for a decade and a half now and for all that time we've been telling people that there is authenticity is a big issue but what does authenticity bring with it you don't have remarks as filtered as they were and it is true in business in its true in government and politics. sometimes he really missed and other times he hits home runs but that is the nature of the new age and if you're going to use the new social media and if it is scrubbed to shine people and you will be effective and you've got to find a way to be authentic, immediate and not blow yourself up. >> i think it is fair to note

that mrs. clinton's hesitancy to conclude on election night could been reflective of more simpler explanations like wanting to make sure the results were in. i do want to come back to the question at hand and to what extent is this -- we have seen the soundbite and we have seen the rapidity of medications and the noise talks about and jeff, you've written about the net notion that the president has abandoned the bully pulpit even if he hasn't shut up and are presidential speeches as we move forward into the information age will you be obsolete? >> boy, i sure hope not. >> artificial intelligence. >> i can't do anything more unrewarding than being one of donald trump's speechwriters. all the things you learn about

what it takes to write a good speech and how the process of writing and vetting and getting up and getting the speech is completely gone out the window and do i think there's a future for it course. i have to believe that people want more than just angry parents and they want coherence and they want to be inspired and they want to think the future will be better for them and i'm running in the district that trump won the 66% of the vote so i'm an optimist. [laughter] but i grew up among people like that and i was an enlisted man in the navy and i know the challenges that people face and i'm going door to door and i'm giving speeches and i've put

them up on the internet and i've gotten good responses and i think this is not normal. [laughter] >> is this normal? >> i am an optimist. every friday i am on the canadian tv explaining to the canadians what happened and in washington. [laughter] and it's a joy. >> is it like south park? [laughter] >> as a result of that assignment i actually watch a lot of donald trump speeches and got to know some of's speechwriters so i respectfully disagree with bob. they are actually very hard-working and midcareer professionals and they are not 22 -year-olds and many of them have come from the leadership from capitol hill or governor's offices and if you listen to, for example, his speech to the un he had a great descendents of

democratic capitalism in it and he said the public of venezuela is not that it was socialism implement it indirectly but it was implemented a 100% correctly and that's why it's such a disaster. however, in that same speech the president then, i believe, i don't think the speechwriters did this put in the reference to rocket man and he rolled it out there and the press went for the shiny object just as he thought they would and no one covered the defensive of capitalism. the speech last week which i had to sit live and listen to it with the canadians and then immediately comment on it had a great discussion on religious liberty and why that's important in this country is of his speeches are actually advancing an agenda and they have a coherent populist reform message that is to parks points making

america great again rather than just standing with her and i think that is why he continues to be so popular outside of the cost of this country. there is more to it, i think, then the press is reporting. >> it will not surprise either that were doing that we are respectfully disagreeing with one another but hope for doing it respectably. [inaudible conversations] >> i would rate the success of donald trump speeches by your ability -- this is a student group of people. your ability to turn to the person next to you and how that person what his position is on tax form except that we should have it and i would ask you to articulate someone at home what his position is on healthcare

except that obamacare is a disaster and apparently we learned yesterday it's no longer exists. he doesn't have a clearly articulated position on issues that are supposedly at the center of his form agenda. his ability to articulate those has not yet been established and his level of understanding of those issues has not been established in the open press availability that he does and everyone is saying that he changes position from one day to the other and that he makes statements of facts that are sometimes purposeful and other times born of an ignorance of basic facts or policy details and even coming out of the white house. i don't doubt that speechwriters are working hard and i don't doubt that certain passages of certain speeches including that one articulate an idea. there is an effort being made but that effort is being consistently undercut by a

president who is not able to string together a coherent or consistent thought within the given 20 minutes block or from day-to-day. again, i judge that not for my little bubble in northwest washington dc but by the inability of anyone pays close attention to this to actually see what the president is our dream. there is a basic form impulse. yes, he thanks the system and the establishment are feeling. we understand that. he wants to make america great again and we understand the impulse toward some notion that he has yet to articulate. we still don't know what he stands for. never mind what the republic party with all its diversity opinion stands for and what does this one man who is been elected to this office believe on any of the central issues of the day. that has yet to be established and what we see in his speeches is this weirdly split personality where the speeches

that require something formal that is written and tele- prompt and it feels like a hostage video like bringing it under dress it was uncomfortable and he seems to want to get out of there and it's unclear whether he believes he is saying but he often then contradicts it and he middle of the crisis he helped create over charlottesville in the middle of that when he took back what he previously said he did it in an extraordinarily inert statement delivered from a teleprompter that just conveyed to the audience this is not me talking and i am reading and we will get through this together. the next day he said what he thanks again which is that he was right the first time and so those are the two modes. there is free associating trump and there is by the book but up, i don't really mean it trump and you know, it is clear where the real trump is but that trump is not a consistent thinker.

we are waiting for it but we are not seeing it i think this is more than a growing pains and more than interparty division but a lack of clear thinking. >> aram, you wanted to jump in. >> he doesn't have a theme. he is a program. he also landed in a situation where there more antagonistic to each other and more divided within themselves ever before. trump is as much a symptom as he is a problem if you're talking about the status and the other problem were dealing with today. in fact, he reflects the condition that existed before he got there and we have had policy long presidents and he didn't like giving speeches but people should know already and understand that in the senior bush was the same way. my job is to do the right source of things and i shouldn't have to explain that to people but you have to make the sale first.

trump doesn't deliver serious speeches from time to time on major issues. if the audience can't remember them specifically it is not so much because of what he did or did not say in that speech but because he was simultaneously driving the headlines with other things. it wasn't that his speech was deficient for they had it done their job or even that the speech of record didn't matter. it will what mattered was the constituency and when he speaks to the un it matters what the message was to the constituent companies of the united nations than the tv audience. >> to follow up on that a lot of what you see trump doing is a reflection also, not just on the division in the country but also his assessment of where the media is in the media is not interested in serious policy.

he did serious policy speeches and if you had to pick between him and clinton in terms of what got policy messages through to the public, not to throw 10000 policy pages but serious policy messages to the public, he won hands down. that is what drove's campaign. it wasn't that he was such a nice guy. we know that. that is another thing you're supposed to laugh at. [laughter] thank you. but he does have a sense of the quality or the way the media goes to things he will give them that thing that they go to. >> i don't want to mitigate the 2016 campaign but democrats -- [laughter] >> i'm sorry, i don't have much of a poker face. there is a lot to unpack there. let me touch on a couple of things. so, if trumps policy message got out it was because and there has

now been studies to show this that the media was excessively of litigating and relitigating this faux scandal of senate untrained secretary clinton's e-mails and not in her detailed policy problems and this make america great, one-liner, that he called policy and build a wall. et cetera. that was salacious and in his ring and everything jumped on it but that wasn't a coherent policy platform and if trump is a symptom of everything it seems to me that he is a symptom of this in greater party that has an internal war about the donors in the base and people who elected donald trump who claimed he would cut taxes for the middle class were not voting for paul ryan's agenda.

the people in the entire time for supporting this and frankly, the republicans in congress for eight years were saying they would repeal obamacare and had seven years to do it and couldn't come up with policy and basically didn't think they would end up in this position and now they have to do something and it's make america america great is anything other than a slogan at least from a policy perspective, based on executive action and based on the fight he is having legislatively it just seems to be to raise the presidency of barack obama and i just wonder if his base who has at least in the campaign gave him a chance and were willing to say he will shake things up and let me see what happens and i don't know if they will be and maybe they will but as forgiving as a racing the obama agenda actually make their lives worse. if you take away their healthcare and you just can't taxes on millionaires i don't know but it seems like at some point they will be a reckoning with what this will look like and there's much more to unpack.

there. >> i think at the dawn of the age of globalism for the last half-century we have been embarked on this great experiment of globalization and let's lower barriers and increased trade and let's farm out some of the economic activities to either of the other countries and i think there is the failure of that has been that we haven't spent enough time to the people who do not benefit and i'm running in a district that is 57% rural and it has been rural america has been in decline for decades now and no more agricultural employment and small manufacturing went away 20 or 30 years ago and long-distance commuting is about the only way for people to make a living if they live in a rural county in my part of florida and we have

to begin grappling with that and i think that in a sense trump was good at diagnosing the problem in recognizing it and we democrats did not. the solution are not coming through and it's just let's get to angry all over again in angrier and angrier and were doing great and let's just get people angry. so, just that is where, i think of writing as a form of problem solving. you get a problem and you have to write a speech. that is the problem. so what is the issue you take the issue apart and put it back together in a coherent form and you come up with some solution that makes sense and when you read through it it is logical and rational and compelling. >> i wanted to get back to the

top of the speechwriting. we have microphones in either i'll and if you want to start lining up we will open it up to questions but as speechwriters and professional speechwriters in 140 words or less what advice would you give a trump or his speechwriters when we start with arm and work our way down? >> think, trump is a man of impulse and his great strengths in that direction and his instincts and ability to spot the vulnerabilities of the opponents are always there but sometimes you have to think a step beyond that. i think he's reflect more and use his skills to even better affect that he has so far. >> my advice is your job. [laughter] before it is too late and you will have a nice little eight month entry on your resume and that will be good and then you can get a good job in the

private sector like i did and listen, my career has been in corporate speechwriting so there's been nothing to gain by staying with them and. >> clark. >> that is clear in place. >> clark, any speechwriting advice? >> scott adams, the cartoonist who does billboards says he's the best brand or we have ever seen and there is a lot to be said about his communications ability. he wouldn't be in the presidency having spent about two thirds of what his opponent spent or less and getting the kind of hits he got in the media and we all know that it seems to be much more serious than what happened with mrs. clinton but maybe they just fought to a draw on that.

without having substantial communication skills and having got a message across his presidency will rise or fall, in my judgment, on how he deals with korea and how he deals and whether he can come up with an economic strategy including healthcare reform and tax form that gets us over 3% growth. if you can do that, he will be reelected and he'll have a successful presidency. if he can't, he will. so, my advice to him, that is desperate what you say it is to focus on the doughnut and not the whole. that is your donut. >> i completely agree with clark on 3% growth would solve a lot of problems in this country. my advice to speechwriters would be more humor. i'm going to see president bush friday night and every time i see him he says mary kate, dod

does for me and i always ask around for i had down to see him and everyone i asked lately has said do you have any jokes for me and no one has any jokes right now. we need more humor and political rhetoric and inner city right now and i would vote to get a ghost writing joke writer on retainer at the white house. >> jeff, i know bob stole yours but what was your other piece of advice? >> hiding think this is a problem speechwriting consultant, that speechwriters consult. i remember that at the end of the clinton administration when a few of us started this writers who moved to a corner of our shop to the private sector when the first corporate clients i had brought me and it said that, our ceo is bob dole and we want you to turn them into bill clinton. and i said, you know, with all due respect, i did turned bill

clinton into bill clinton. he elevated us by his ability and he challenged us to help him raise his game. speechwriters can do that. there is a lot i think we believe that speechwriters can do but i don't think any amount of creative or depth or thoughtful work by the speechwriters is going to solve the set of fundamental problems that could lead some of us on this panel and see it in the presidency, even the purely rhetorical piece of the presidency. he's got to figure out what he believes and he's got to figure out exactly what he thanks he is going to do with his time in office. you can write it anyway you want to write it but he's got to believe it and he's got to own it and he's got to go out and articulate it he's got to do it consistently, as we have been saying. that discipline, as far as i think any of us can see, has been lacking in this presidency. as i said before, these are more

than growing pains but basic deficiencies. i don't question his ability to get attention. i don't question his ability to grab the nation by its throat and i don't question his ability as he demonstrated in 2016 to articulate some very basic yearnings that a lot of good americans are feeling, as well as a lot of bad americans are feeling. he gives voice to those as well. ... >> it's too important not to repea. i would tell speech writers to quit. [laughter] and it's because not only are, you know, you need to be able to

sort of look your kids in the eye and, you know, talk to your grandchildren one day and tell them what you did during this time and you're working for somebody who's corrupt and, you know, flawed in all of the ways. but he lies. and as a speech writer, truth is actually really important. and i know we've come, we're mow sort of in a space where people are questioning whether trump has changed rhetoric, has he changed the way presidents communicate. and, gosh, i hope not in that sense, you know? again, not every president does this, not every president has to. you know, we have an office of fact checking, basically. i think you guys all probably did, right? your speeches went through rigorous fact checking, and there was a truth. and when your principal is advantageous as this one, it is incredibly hard to do your job well. so in addition to all the other reasons i would them them to -- tell them to quit, i would say this is going to make your job impossible. do something else. >> all right. let's go to questions.

>> [inaudible] i currently write for president clinton, and so i'm really excited to see, jeff, you're here, all of you. thank you so much. my colleagues and i are still in mourning that we're not going to join your club of being white house speech writers. but my question for you is, bob, you mentioned that speech writing is problem solving. or solving a puzzle. how in the voice of a former president when you're supposed to show restraint and respect for the person occupying the office do you respond in this age of trump? do you have any advice for anyone who, for a former president, someone maybe in the public sector who has to respond to these issues and has to show restraint but also respond thoughtfully? thank you. >> well, i think that, first off, i'll just say what i said before. this is not normal. this is -- and it's not

sustainable. you, as far as -- i look at the policy prescriptions for the problems we have today, and the impact on the rural people of north florida that i care so much about, and it's going to make things far worse. dismantling health care. i mean, the rural health care system is on its last legs right now. to get -- we have, the "wall street journal" did an article about maternity, maternal deserts. and that's most of rural america. there are no ob/gyns within, you know, 50, 100 miles of a lot of expectant mothers. so it's not, you know, just keep, keep trying to think logically and constructively, and i think my colleagues here have been very good about things like that. you know?

but this is, this just isn't going to last. >> i would just add very briefly, nice to meet you. finish our first client coming out of the white house was president clinton, and is we worked with him for the first four years of his post-presidency and then occasionally afterwards. i was very much a part of that transition that he made to the post-presidency and understanding what the limits really were on his voice and his freedom of that maneuver and how he could be most helpful to, in advancing the ideas and the policies and the programs that had been such a part of his presidency. one of the things that really struck me at that time and still strikes me about bill clinton in his post-presidency, and i think this is true very much of the bushes in their post-presidency and president carter. president reagan didn't get quite the post-presidency that the others have had because of the onset of alzheimer's.

the restraint they have shown, the respect they have shown for one another in the office. i think one of really the most heartening stories in modern politics has been the genuine friendship that bill clinton and both bushes have developed. it's real. there's a real fondness there. and they were, you know, president bush would have been president another four years, the first president bush, if it hadn't been for bill clinton. he didn't have to be accepting of bill clinton in the years afterwards. and that's a very special thing. and i think with the restraint that we've seen from president obama during these first months of his post-presidency is very much in keeping with that set of values. at the same time, i really do believe that we're in different territory now and that what is jeopardized is not simply a program that you passed or a surplus that you developed in the federal budget. but something each more fundamental than that -- even more fundamental than that.

i think that president clinton, presidents on the other side of the aisle, president obama, they are going to be tested in the years forward as to how restrained they can be outside the context of the campaign. and, you know, i think president george w. bush has very subtly and i think appropriately indicated his displeasure with both the campaign and the presidency that we have seen so far. i think he's been awfully restrained about it, and you can only imagine what he actually really thinks. >> anyone else want to jump in and tackle -- >> just a quick -- the most important political speech writing that will be done between now and a year from november will be the speeches being written for candidates on both sides who are running in the midterm elections. because to the extent that the issues, whether i agree with your interpretation or whether i take mine, to the extent that those elections clarify things and the composition of the legislature shapes up in a more

orderly way, that will determine, a, what will stop things you might not like about clinton -- or about trump or accelerate real programs where he'll have to deliver. and if he delivers, he may deliver things some of us like, he may deliver things some of us don't, but it won't just be rhetoric anymore. the important speech writing is going to be done in the midterms around the country not anything for the president or past presidents. >> hi. my name's dan, i'm a speech writer from canada, so just sort of -- >> do you listen every friday? >> yes, thank you. by the way. [laughter] >> my went viewer. [laughter] >> i want to take up the point you made about truth at the end of the sort of panel discussion without sort of throwing stones at anybody in particular. we're starting to see a little bit of the same thing in qanta. you're also seeing it in europe with the rise of the, sort of

the right, the polarization of the body politic has got to a point where, you know, it used to be that you'd have more or less common agreement on what the facts were and then different ideas about what solutions to those problems were. now the disagreement that's sort of about what the facts are. and it's very hard from a rhetorical standpoint to try and build an argument when you're talking to half of the body politic about this issue, and the other half is saying that's not even the situation, that's not reality for us. so what advice do you have just in terms for speech writers about trying to discover come that barrier and talk to the country as a whole? >> i want to, i'm a historian by training, so, you know, one of the things you learn in history is nothing ever happens for the first time. and i reject utterly this idea that we're more divided than we've ever been. you ever heard of the civil war? [laughter] i mean, you know, this is -- >> in my defense, we didn't have one of those. [laughter] [applause] >> when i got engaged to my wife

12 years ago, i said, honey, let's honeymoon in toronto. i really said that. and she said, are you nuts? [laughter] so, but it's, you know, we're, of course we're divide. we've always been divided. we're going the keep being divided. you know, what's going to make a difference is the level of civility we practice. and that's what i think is, in this case, has been very destructive. >> if i could just jump in on that, i've been -- you ought to take a read or a listen to the lincoln/douglass debates. which were high minded and all, but they said a lot of nasty things about one another in a civil way, and they had lots of disagreements about basic facts like where one -- whether one had endorsed his own party's platform or where -- things like that. so some of this is to be expected in a period where the

country's very divided. it basically hasn't made up its mind for a while on what direction it wants to go. and we've had very able men, all of us here represented very able men who have debated on both sides of this. the country is still not quite sure where it wants to go, and i think we've got to -- [inaudible conversations] >> we'll take you live now inside the capitol where president trump has been meeting with senate republicans about tax reform. [inaudible conversations]

>> well, a brief appearance there from president trump. he was scheduled this afternoon, by the way, to meet with democratic leaders from the house and senate at the white house this afternoon. that meeting was canceled by the lawmakers, and president trump tweeted out that he saw no deal possible on tax reform and immigration legislation. the democrats, democratic leader pelosi and chuck schumer, senator schumer, responded they would meet with the republican congressional leaders instead to which the republicans responded there's going to be a meeting at the white house if democrats want to reach an agreement on these issues, they will be here. we expect to hear from senate republican leaders, possibly from senator schumer and others, and we'll bring those comments live when they happen here on c-span2. til then, we'll take you back to the discussion with presidential speech writers. >> and a new national newspapers was an aberration. >> i think it is, obviously, much more difficult, but i think there, again, there are opportunities.

and i think about the time that president obama, who was governing and, obviously, a pretty divided time and had many people who did not like him but was overall a pretty popular president. but, you know, this was an entire network dedicated to his, you know, taking him down. he was operating in a pretty fractured environment. and yet when you think about the speeches that now we look back on and sort of were universally lauded like selma, i think what he did really well there was, again, kind of tell the story of who we are really honestly, who we've been and who we could be. and there was sort of, you know, honest reckoning of all that has passed and yet kind of a hopeful sort of note. and i know that there are those who sort of mock president obama's message of hope, but i think that's really what people wanted. and in a way, that's actually what trump was sort of offering a sliver of the country, right in a kind of hope, that america could be whatever they imagined it was once. and making a promise about that. but i think that if you can help

your speaker sort of tell a universal truth in a really honest way that you actually can break through. mrs. obama did this beautifully pretty consistently, you know? she just, she would always -- as my friend sarah horowitz, her speech writer, would say say something, say something true. and i think by doing that and being that authentic speaker, she was able to breakthrough to audiences who may not have always necessarily given her a chance and speak to the entire country as first lady. so i think there are opportunities, it's just harder. >> the fragmentation isn't just the media and news sources. we have had for about two generations now a politics that started on the left but now you see it on the right of fragmentation. of identity politics. of going after this group and that group and dividing and then building up little coalitions but not common ground. you know, politics of color, politics of gender, politics of

region, etc., etc., etc. of age bracket. and what has finally happened is that after all the other minorities were identified, what is no longer a majority but the sort of average white american has become the biggest minority group. and they've begun to respond to the same messages that all of the grievanced minorities used to respond to. identity politics. and it is a logical if not necessarily fortunate progression. but it's part and parcel of something that some of the same people who are decrying it now set into motion. >> i guess i would say that this, just to return to a point that was made earlier from the perspective of history, there are some aspects of this that are not at all new. and the idea of appealing to the grievances of white people is not a new strategy in

international politics. it was important to the victory of richard nixon in 1968, the so-called southern strategy, going and speaking in the code of states' rights and so forth. appealing to the same whites who had grown disaffected with the democratic party's embrace of african-americans and civil rights and so forth. and the same voters that wallace in 1968 had stoked and stirred up who emerged from rallies of george wallace chanting white power were appealed to in a more sort of deft and subtle and ultimately politically important way. it's the same? that ronald -- same signal that ronald reagan made a campaign appearance in 1980, i believe, in mississippi and understanding the signal that it sent to speak to that community in the language of states' rights. so i don't think that even as the demographics in the nation have shifted that the

resentments of white people in the south and other parts of the country who have hated elites and intellectuals for a long time, who have hated the coasts for a long time, that these are new phenomenon. so in that sense, when we're seeing from this president is not new. but i think that what you saw with president nixon, what you saw with president reagan is that on assuming the presidency there was an understanding that a, as sarah just said, they had been elected -- they hadn't been elected by all the people, but they were, in fact, president of all the people and that the role of the president was to be, to the extent that any one of these men in a divided country can, to be president of all the people. we have not seen as consistently a divisive performance in the oval office as we're seeing right now. and that, i think, is what is new about this very old appeal. >> jeff, if i may say with all due respect, if this were the

nixon period and you were reading the press, you wouldn't have that kind of interpretation about what richard nixon was doing. but what i would also say is that the cast you've put on those attitudes is the very reason the democratic party has been in decline, because it shows a contempt. it is the wrong interpretation for what wide swaths of people who voted for trump and voted for all the people you mentioned had in their minds. i see some shaking of the head in the audience. but i will say that these people are responding to real problems in their lives, and they are not related to gender, they are not related to ethnicity, they are related to an economy that is stagnating, that because of the heavy load of regulation and taxes it's a place in the world that has been slipping because of passivity in the administration, of the priest

administration. there are a -- previous administration. there are a lot of real problems that they have been responding to. and turning up your nose at them and casting them as you just did is not a way to talk to them. >> let me -- >> [inaudible conversations] >> let me just be clear -- >> [inaudible] >> i would agree with that. we saw that last year. let me be clear where my contempt is directed. bill clinton would not have been elected twice, would not have won back a number of the southern states that had been considered to be permanently lost to the democratic party, would not have won back a good measure of who were called reagan democrats if we collectively had turned up our nose at the economic concerns of working class white americans in any region of the country. so these are speeches that i know how to write because these are policies that were directed to benefit people who have been economically distressed with some success and is with a lot of failure by every administration represented here. where my contempt is directed is

not at the aspirations of people of any color or any region of this country who are economically distressed. my contempt is saved for openly-racist appeals, for scapegoating of those concerns and appointing of those concerns at elites, at intellectuals, at black people, at immigrants, at muslims, at any other group. i think that's -- i'm not going to get painted into msnbc's corner on this. i think it is, it is a mythology of the republican party that there is a contempt on any side for these voters who are so -- >> jeff, you are -- >> very, very quickly. i'd like to go back to the awed audience. >> let me just say this, you are right about president clinton, the messages that came through loud and clear this last time were in the word deplorable but

in a lot of other ways were exactly the kind of messages -- whatever was intended -- that i just described. and you can turn up your nose at them, but that's not the way to talk to people. >> i just want to say that, obviously, i agree with jeff. i think, again, secretary clinton's comment was taken out of context. i disagree with her having said that. she was directing it at exactly the kind of people jeff just talked about, not the entire, you know, electorate that voted for trump. but again, he was not held to the same standard. and so he could say deplorable things about any number of people, and he was given a pass. and i think the other point i wanted to make really quickly is that we're going to have a really difficult time coming to any kind of politics that means something to people, that unifies people, that advances a policy agenda if we continue to talk about bringing up the concerns, the legitimate policy concerns of women, minorities and call them identity politics.

as long as we do that, we're really not going to get out of this. >> let me -- >> i am an expert -- >> very quickly. i want to get back to -- >> i grew up in the deep south in the 1950s, and identity politics was alive and well. and it was, it enshrined a system of racial segregation and racial superiority of white people that was every bit as cruel and oppressive as south african apartheid. that lesson has stayed with me. that was identity politics. [applause] >> one more, last question. >> i'm in heaven here. i'm a political junkie -- [laughter] historian, you know? communications adviser, canadian. whew. [laughter] >> your other viewer. >> oh, thank you. [laughter] >> and i actuallied had just a quick question -- actually had just a quick question and a

comment. i'm surprised when you mentioned optimist you didn't mention trump's speech writers being optimist, because i think the definition of insanity is the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. has trump irreparably damaged communications? from my perspective, i think he has. he's taken us, you know, with all due respect, he has taken us to a place we've never gone before. i don't see that we've ever had this mud-slinging, this, you know, name-calling, this out and out bullying. i don't want see that having been done -- i don't see that having been done before. granted, we didn't have social media, we didn't have the open access we have now, and things were not preserved for posterity, but is it all downhill from here? >> an uplifting closing question. >> right. [laughter] and on that happy note. >> is -- nothing is forever.

this name-calling is not new to american politics. the things that were said about thomas jefferson -- unfortunately, many of them true -- were disgusting in a way that nothing we've read today in the discourse. what is happening though is the political discourse is getting more and more like the social discourse and what you see on television in sitcoms. and, you know, when abraham lincoln wrote a speech, he could appeal to people of every education level and draw on the beauty of language from documents like the king james bible, the language. i'm not talking about three rolling here -- theology here. today, to sort of hit the universal language you would have to write in a tone that was half seinfeld and half homer -- >> simpson. >> -- simpson, yes. he is deplorable. but anyway, there's been a debasing of the popular culture,

politics has been a lagging indicator of what's been happening all around us. and you can see it in social stats, you know, behavioral and down the line. and this is not a political issue on one party or the other. it is something that is happening to america. it is a more fragmented, disoriented period of questions of what true values are, what traditional values are there, where do we go from here. it's not the first time this has happened this history. and in the long term we're all footnotes. >> can i end on -- >> please. >> -- a little lighter, more positive note? [laughter] so i'm involved with the miller center down at uva, and the miller center launched the first year project to advise whoever won the election. this was founded when we had 17 people running on each side, basically. and so i was tasked with researching the changing nature of political communications. and so i thought i would share with you that the 2016 election

cycle really did break new ground in terms of the number of people who got their political news from youtube, which is shocking to me. i feel like how do you watch political news on youtube. what is snapchat. it was all new to me, i learned all about it. and the number of people who now regularly listen to podcasts equal withs the number of people on twitter -- equals the number of people on twitter. so what those two things tell me is that despite all the cultural debasement, the name calling, all the craziness that we're seeing, that says to me that there is a hunger out there on the part of voters for content, that they are educating themselves. they are not just sticking their heads in the sand and saying you people are all crazy. there's a tremendous yearning that i've seen. i made a film, a documentary about president bush. i take it around the country to young people. tremendous hunger for stories about american greatness, about bipartisanship, about what can