it seemed that the overall prevailing message was, anybody but bush. can that really work this time on the other foot? >> it almost worked that time. for the democrats. and, of course, it did work in 2008. one of the problems that all presidents have is, and this was really the formula for obama's problems, and i -- is that the reason a presidential candidate is elected is often very complicated and has less to do with people loving him and what he wants to do than he thinks. and this was -- this is always the case. in 2008 when obama was elected, it was anybody but bush, remember all that. that was partly true because the -- remember bush had an unpopular war. he had lost the sort of resonance with the public that he'd had right after 9/11.

he seemed aloof. then he had the economic problems the republicans had been in for a long time. one of the reasons we have simple partisanships, one party says, things are really terrible, if you elect us, we'll create utopia. so that eventually happens. eight years later, or 16 years later, people say, you know, we don't have utopia, we've got all these problems. the other party comes along, if you elect us, we'll do it. part of that's natural. and candidates on the day before election realize all those things. remember, barack obama ran as sort of a centrist with not much of a message other than hope and change and get rid of these people and change it all. and then that works right until the votes are counted. and then whoever you are, when you wake up the next morning, you are convinced they elected you because you are wonderful. and they really want you to do everything that you really wanted to do, even if you didn't

talk about it. you remember famously bill clinton and his wife decided to reform the health care system in the '90s because they had a mandate. and then somebody went and looked and found out there had been one sentence about health care in one speech that was never carried. so he had woken up and decided, i know what this election was about, it was about health care. obama did the same thing this time, but he began to think that he really was what his aides told him he was, which is he could do anything and the public really wanted it and then discovered that isn't really the change they wanted. the change they wanted was to fire the people that were there and get new people. so when the next one comes around, part of it is anybody but. but in this case, obama represents more than simply a president that some people are tired of, or a president that is not up to the job, as a lot of people feel.

but he's a president with a very different vision of the future than the republicans have, or i think than the majority of the american people have. so when you say anybody but obama, it isn't anybody. that's a pre-nomination slogan. when you get to the actual general election, it's this guy who believes in this sort of vision of the future and that guy who believes in a different one. and in the case of bush and kerry, it came that way, too, but people said, this guy's not up to this job and he doesn't want to take us where we want to go. and so they re-elected bush. but it's a closely divided country. so if your message is, i am just not him, that's enough to get you to 48%. and then you better have something to get you that other 3%, and that's what -- it's not enough to just say, i don't like him. you've got to have your own things as well.

>> questions? i'm going to ask one before we get back to the cadets. and that is, what do you think the key takeaway should be from buckley that applies to today? i mean, the -- i mean, the libertarians are not exactly considered as conservatives by many. >> they are by me. >> by many. >> buckley considered himself a libertarian. ronald reagan considered himself a libertarian. >> does a lot of our political leaders today, don't consider ron paul a conservative? >> that doesn't mean libertarianism -- >> okay. >> i actually think -- and we always have this. i had -- this was after the last election when ron paul was also a candidate. you've got people in the party establishment.

they may be conservatives, denigrating him. and one fellow whose name i won't use was at a meeting, and he said, you know, i went to this county party meeting, and it was really frightening, because there were 300 people were there, and 200 of them were ron paul people. and we've got to keep them out. i said, wait a minute, the job of the party leader is not to keep people out, it's to bring people in. the reality is, though, a party is like a club. and every time there has been a wave of new people come into a party, there is an attempt to keep them out. and when the -- when pat robertson ran and brought in the evangelicals into the republican party, the national committeemen from michigan, this was an earlier day, famously said going to a robertson affair was like the bar scene in "star wars," that these were all weird people. many of those people socialized

into the party, and are now party leaders. when goldwater came along, similar things were said about his people. these shopkeepers and people that, you know, are being allowed into the parties, southerners. i was asked when i was in the white house in 1972, we ran a campaign in the nixon administration called operation switch, which was designed to get democratic office holders to switch parties, primarily in the south. and i remember a republican congressman coming to me and screaming at the top of his lungs that this was a terrible, terrible idea. we don't want those people in our party because one, they're tacky, and secondly, he said -- he finally -- he said, if they come in, they're going to be running against us in primaries. eight years later he got beat in the primary by a former democrat. but the fact is, we might like their votes, but we don't want them in the meetings. that's true no matter what the group is. now it's the ron paul people. these people are weird, these people are strange. my position to them was, yeah,

and ron paul has gotten almost 50% of the 30-and-under vote in every single primary he's run in. and if you want to kick that away, feel free. but a party builder's job is not to kick people out, it's to bring people in. so, yes, you're going to get that, yes, you're going to hear it. and are they going to come in and not mature? did the -- did the robertson people come in and, you know, force everybody to go to church or whatever it was they -- you know what i mean? it doesn't work that way. what happens is that they come in, they bring energy. those who were -- if ron paul was gone, a third of them go home, a third of them stay. you know what i mean? that's the way it works. and if you're going to build a movement, what you try to do is you've got people who agree with you on lots of things and you try to get them to agree with you on the other things and make

them part of the family. that's what the party has to do with these people. >> i see that our time is up. david, you're one of the chief spokesmen for conservative principles and politics and you're also -- you've been central to the buckley legacy. >> i've just been around. >> we thank you so much for being here today and hope you'll come back often. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, gentlemen. next week on lectures in history, city college of new york history professor judith stein discusses the united states in the 1970s. join us each saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern and sundays at 1:00 p.m. for classroom lectures from across the country on different topics and eras of american history. lectures in history are also vaebl as podcasts. visit our website at c-span.org/history/podcasts.

or download them from itunes. up next university of missouri history professor jeffrey pasley, discusses his work as an author, teacher, and political speechwriter. books including "the tyranny of printers" and "beyond the founders." this 12-minute program took place at the organization of american historians meeting in milwaukee. >> american history tv is at the annual meeting of the organization of american historians. meeting in milwaukee. we're talking with jeffrey pasley from the university of missouri. i want to talk a bit about the history of campaign newspapers. >> thank you. >> and your history blog called public occurrences which is on the commonplace site. what can you tell us about your blog? >> well, what i can tell you about the blog is that it started out as a column on there.

i mean, that commonplace has been around for, like, ten years and happened to start actually right when i had just finished my first book and then during the 2000 election crisis, and i was just in kind of a mode where i had a few things -- i had a i had a few things -- i felt like i had a few things to say politically. and i guess i also had the sort of unique position of, i mean, in some ways it doesn't sound that exciting, but it's like, having been kind of a journalist before, you know, i had a sort of journalism period before i went to grad school, so, like, knowing politics, and doing the other republic -- i started seeing these early republic analogies to things. >> what kind of things are you writing about lately? >> lately, i've actually got some helpers who have been doing a bit more of it. i think the last thing i wrote personally about was actually a

statue of rush limbaugh that they put in the missouri state capitol. >> you had a posting on there about a book that you co-wrote -- >> yep. the other editor was just standing over here. >> i wanted to ask, you wrote that it was meant to showcase ways of thinking about the political history of the early american republic that were different from the warmed over artfully scuffed up but deeply conservative great man approach which had become so prevalent during the era of not so great political leadership and worse political journalism. can you elaborate? >> that was -- i don't know if you remember around 2000, david mccullough's book was out. and joseph ellis' books were riding up the best seller charts. it was just a number of younger

political -- we're not younger now, that was like seven years ago. we're getting older all the time. but it was a bunch of younger political historians who just weren't as interested in having it be simply about what adams said to jefferson and how washington felt about hamilton. you know, those kind of personal interactions. >> do you think that history still does a lot more of that than it should? >> i think the founder history, history of the founders tends that way because that's what publishers like to publish, you know, publishers like, you know, they want to do things that are about people that readers have heard of, right? and so, in fact, every time you publish anything in this area, you generally get, well, can you have more -- i was just told recently, just finishing this book about the election of 1796, the first contested one, and, you know, they like it, but can we have a little more washington and adams? even though -- >> these are your editors saying -- >> yeah, even though washington and adams actually, they're

against parties and actually completely non-involved. you know, really not involved in the actual election campaigns. adams was literally back on his farm feeding cows. you know. so it's partly a matter of the accuracy of it. you know, in the sense that, like, we felt that, like, that when you're actually talking about politics in this period that it's more than just the high level -- it's more than just the famous names talking to each other. there's all kinds of things going on in a more popular level that you sort of never hear about. >> you teach at the university of missouri. >> i do. >> what's the focus in most of your courses? >> i do everything really between the civil war and colonial. so i've got the regular period courses, and actually i have a history of conspiracy theory course. >> where does the conspiracy start? what's the most recent

conspiracy that you -- >> you know, whenever -- i only teach it every couple years. you know, whatever the most recent thing is. there's always something. when i was doing it a lot a few years ago, what the students were always into terribly was the moon landing. that fox news moon landing show just had every kid convinced there must be something there. >> you mentioned a minute ago that -- >> the mayans are the new one. >> you've come to this from a journalism background, but you also were a speechwriter, correct? for al gore's campaign in 1988. >> yeah. >> how did you get there, from that background, as a speechwriter, journalist to teaching? >> fleeing washington. >> why? >> because i -- i guess the word i felt was, the speechwriter thing particularly, it's like you had to campaign to do your job. you know, it's like -- even if it was like -- when they hire speechwriters, it tends to be,

you're smart, you can write speeches. >> how old were you when you were writing for gore? >> 22. no, 23, 24. >> did you finish undergraduate? >> i finished undergraduate. i was an intern. i was writing a lot for "the new republic" back in '88-'89. then i had this choice, i could either go into journalism, i could either go into real journalism which meant, like, i had a new job -- i'm from missouri, and kansas. i had a job lined up with "the kansas city star" that i in the end decided not to go back. i wasn't ready to go back to kansas city that quickly. >> let's go back into history for a minute. you wrote a book "the tyranny of printers." the early history of partisan newspapers. >> right. >> tell us about a bit more about that. what does that cover? >> that covers -- that actually kind of came out of being on a political staff then coming into grad school and needing a first topic to write about and reading

about the political history of the rise of political parties in the 1790s. and just kept noticing how for how much the press was involved and how differently it's involved that, you know, there was so many struggles over what a certain newspaper was going to say, over whether a newspaper -- then, of course, there's the aliens additions act, which was news to me at the time that it was basically about shutting down this opposition press. the press was such an issue for the federalists that they were willing to sort of have peacetime repression. >> from your perspective as a journalist and a historian, a writer, has the press gotten better, worse, or stayed the same since the 1790s in terms of coverage of presidential and other elections? >> well, it's -- it's -- i don't think you'd necessarily say better or worse. i mean, what i -- what i do

think, and i'm not a particular fan of fox news, but fox news is a kind of a return to what it was like back in the early republic. you know, where you had a sort of atlas. they did report news and did provide information, but it was always with this point of view. you know, there was no sort of ability -- there's no sort of attempt that never occurred to them to try to pretend that they weren't involved. right? it was -- so it was a press that was directly involved to the point of -- they financed a lot of their newspapers through printing contracts. they would get -- the friendly office holders would steer them. there's no government printing office. so they get it by printing contracts. it literally means if they don't win the election, they might lose their newspaper, right? it's like they had a dog in the hunt. >> doesn't that sort of indicate, then, we have a rich history of a partisan press in this country? >> we do, yes.

actually it's more of a history of the press than people -- than even you would learn in journalism school. i mean, because, in some ways, i don't know what's going to happen in the future. but in some ways, the modern objective press is only really the late -- very late 19th, 20th century. if fox news is the indicator of the coming world, then it might go back. >> where does that concept begin in your view? where did the concept begin of an independent press covering elections or whatever it may be? >> it starts in the 1830s with the so-called penny press. where they basically are able to have a business model essentially where the newspapers can pay for themselves. you know, they can have -- they can print enough copies and in turn sell them directly to readers. the old ones were done mostly by subscription. then a lot of the actual sort of funding of them tended to come from these other sources.

so that's when it begins, but they're not objective either. like, those are actually the more sensationalist papers where, you know, they take positions, too, and take actually more extreme political positions. so it's really -- it's after the civil war, and then especially after the turn of the century. you know, william randolph hearst. one of the things people -- one of the unknown incidents, the mckinley assassination, right? >> that year was what year? >> i was afraid you were going to ask me that. it's out of my period. 1901, i think? please edit that. mckinley's assassinated and it's blamed on -- in a lot of the media it's blamed on the hearst press. william randolph hearst's papers tended to be democratic and tended to be rabble-roused about

rich and poor. >> the other papers were blaming -- >> yes. the more stayed papers -- at that time the hearst papers were ultra sensationalistic and there were more sober papers like "the new york times" and basically discredits -- it's one of the t basically just kind of discredits -- it's one of the things that seriously discredits old-style super partisan journalism when, you know, the president got killed because they -- the way they whipped up the people. >> from your perspective, what are some of the myths or misunderstandings about a political culture in the u.s. between the revolution and the civil war? >> well, i think the main -- i mean, as you -- you bring up "beyond the founders" i think the main thing -- myth people -- especially the average reader is that it was, you know, intellectuals and whigs writing great essays to each other.

right? that it was debating political philosophy. and i mean the thing is there's a different political culture and also one where a lot of the things that we think of -- a lot of the kind of stuff we think of going on in politics now was occurring but actually almost to a more extreme degree. you know? it is things like not just newspapers were politicized by banks politicized. the parties then were the democratic republicans and the federalists so there were democratic republican and federalist banks. and say somebody started a new bank so the other side could get loans. you know? i mean, and so there's a number of other, you know, politics would have been something would have been going on in the streets a lot. you know? to the point where there would be sort of street events all the time, drinking in the streets. where you had to devote in many

cases you would have had to make sure -- you would have had to be the sort of person who could either way it out loud whom you're voting for because a lot of places had voting or the person who would push passed the six toughs hired to stand by the poll to make sure that you -- the other people -- the other side voted less than was possible. >> jeffrey pasley, thank you for being with us on american tv history. >> thank you. all weekend, american weekend tv is joining our partner mediacom in jefferson city to learn more about the history. to learn about the vehicles and the 2012 tour, visit c-span.org/localcontent. we now continue with our look atever son city. this is american history tv on c-span3. well, the thing that excited me about being here today is the

fact that it's june the 4th, and the lewis and clark core of discovery passed through here just beyond those trees that you see over there on june the 4th in 1804. that's 208 years ago. they were on their way to the pacific ocean, and, as i say, they passed here and continued on up the missouri river. they followed the river up to the eastern slope of the rocky mountains. it was pre-louisiana purchase. thomas jefferson had wanted to send an expedition of 12 men out into what was then, they thought, spanish territory. and congress said yes, all right, they would fund them to the extent of $2,500.

lewis had been jefferson's secretary. jefferson had known him for years. they were relatively close neighbors in virginia. so he knew lewis, he knew his capabilities and he knew he was the man who could pull this off, getting to the pacific ocean. clark had been lewis' immediate superior when they were in the army together on the frontier in ohio and illinois. he and clark formed a great friendship in the service so when lewis knew that this was coming and he had been selected to lead it, he said, there's only one fellow i want to go with me as a co-captain, would be william clark. meriweather lewis was a smart guy. unfortunately, he was a shy man and he didn't interact well with people. he was an outdoorsman.

he spent his early years on the frontier which was in now western virginia, and he was looking for things that were unfamiliar to him. he was looking for the indians. he was looking for plants, animals, birds, fish, whatever. and he carried that over with him on to the expedition. on the other hand, clark was a people person. he related well to the men, and they to him. so, really, between the two of them they had the mental horses to keep this expedition under control and on the way. they knew what to expect for much of their trip. once they got as far as st. louis, once they got past st. louis and st. charles, things changed because there were no places that they could look forward to for a warm meal around the fireplace and bed to

sleep in. they were out in unexplored territory as far as the western europeans were concerned. in the afternoon of june 4, the keelboat which was the larger of the three craft that they were using on the expedition, sailed too close to the bank and the mast hit a limb of a sycamore tree and broke. so that meant they couldn't sail any longer. they now had to row and pull the boat up to where they spent the night, which was about eight or nine miles north of where we are right now. and they named it mast creek, now called grays creek. we focus on the personalities, the achievements or accomplishments and some little-known facts about the expedition, primarily for those five people in the monument. let's talk about york.

he's on the extreme left of the monument. he's seated. he's a black man, and the indians had never seen a black man. and in one location they spat on the back of york's hand and tried to rub it off because black was the color that the indians dobbed on their body to indicate proficiency in hunting, warfare or tribal affairs. so when they couldn't rub the black off him and then found out he was black all over, they said, this is a very important man to this group of men, and they called him big medicine. on the extreme right is george druyar. he was a half-breed. his father was a french canadian, his mother shoshone. he lived in the area of cape girardeau, which is maybe 75 miles south of st. louis. he lived there.

he was hired to be an interpreter. he spoke four or five indian languages, including sign language, which was critical when they got out beyond north dakota because he knew none of those languages. the dog is a newfoundland. that's where he came from, but lewis bought him in pittsburgh. he paid $20 for him, which in 1804 was a lot of money. lewis had a very difficult time in st. louis after the expedition. he was, as i said, a shy man. he liked to be out exploring on his own. paperwork and governmental affairs were an anathema to that poor man. he couldn't handle it.

there's a book recently written about three years ago, and tom denici thinks that he had malaria. now, there's five types of malaria, which i never knew, but his -- he was subject to two of them, one in the brain and one in his abdomen. and he was in excruciating pain whenever they would kick up, particularly the ones in the abdomen. and he was using opium and alcohol to temper his feelings. he had been called back to washington by thomas jefferson because he had not written the journals as he had promised to do, translating them into a written form and printing them. he ended up on the natchez trace, which is the path that runs between natchez and nashville and that night he showed very peculiar symptom