democratic senator jim webb. he speaks about the economy, foreign policy and the relationship between congress and the president. mr. webb is a former navy secretary. he is considered a possible 2016 presidential candidate. this is from the national press club live coverage here on c-span3. a former international bureau chief with the associated press and the 107th president of the national press club. the national press club is the world's leading professional organization for journalists committed to our profession's future through our programming with events such as this while fostering a free press worldwide. for more information about the national press club, please visit our website at press.org. on behalf of our members worldwide, i would like to welcome our speaker. those of you attending today's event also. our head table includes guests of our speaker as well as

working journalists who are club members. if you hear applause in our audience, i note that members of the general public are attending. so it's not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalism objectivity. i would like to welcome our c-span and public radio audiences. follow the action on twitter. after our speech concludes, we will have a question and answer period. i will ask as many questions as time permits. it's time to introduce our head table guests. stand briefly as your name is anounlsed. john doeman from your right. reporter for wnew. jill lawrence, syndicated columnist. eleanor clift, washington correspondent. james r. webb.

mark shields. hong lee webb, wife of the speaker. jerry zeremski, chairman of the npc speaker's committee and former president of the national press club. angela king, white house correspondent for bloomberg news and former president of the national press club. amy webb. rachel smoker. john failes, known throughout the country at sergeant shaft. mike deigel. a round of applause for our head table. [ applause ] here is what we know about jim webb, our speaker today. he is a former one term democratic senator from

virginia, a decorated marine who served inso vietnam, secretary the navy, an award winning journalist, filmmaker and the author of ten books. what we don't know is whether he will be a candidate for the democratic nomination for president. there have been some hints. webb visited iowa last month and is planning a attribute to new hampshire. while not everyone who goes to iowa and new hampshire becomes a presidential contender, no one who hopes to be in the race ignores those early primary states. two weeks ago, he tweeted a link to a "new york times" article with the headline, populous could derail clinton train. as he told a labor audience in iowa, i am comfortable to say i'm the only senator elected with a union card three tattoos and two purple hearts.

[ applause ] while in the senate, webb served on the foreign relations, armed services, veteran affairs and the joint economic committees. his legislation, the post 9/11 gi bill is the most significant veteran's legislation since world war ii. [ applause ] as chairman of the foreign relation committee's asia pacific subcommittee, webb called for the u.s. to re-engage in he east asia. in 2009 he went to burma, the first american leader to visit that country in ten years. though the trip was criticized by some, subsequently, relations between the two countries were resumed. webb graduated from the navial academy in 1968. when he returned from vietnam, he got a lot of grief from georgetown. webb was a staffer on the house veterans affairs committee

before being appointed as assistant secretary of defense and then secretary of the navy. in addition to his public service, webb has had a varied career as a journalist. he wrote the original story and was executive producer of the film "rules of engagement." his books include a history of the scotch irish culture and i heard my country calling, a memoir of his early life published this year. webb has been to the national press club on several previous occasions and where he happy to welcome him back to the national press club. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. i appreciate all of you coming today to be with us.

i have noticed -- i should point out here at the outset that jerry has enough questions, i think, to last for about an hour and a half after i'm done. i hope you will be kind in the questions that he chooses once i am done. first let me say how proud i am that three of my family members are with me today up here at the head table. my oldest daughter amy, who as a small child used to ride on the lap of some of my disabled friends from vietnam as they did wheelies in their wheelchairs and races in the hospital. she found her calling at a young age and works with disabled american veterans.

[ applause ] my son jim, who left penn state during the height of the iraq war and enlisted as an infantry rifleman and fought in some of the worst fighting of the war in a place which is now becoming familiar to us. and my wife who in many ways represents what the american dream is all about. her entire family, extended family escaped from vietnam on a fishing boat. her father was a fisherman when the communists took over south vietnam. they were rescued by the united states navy at sea. she spent time in two different refugee camps. neither of her parents spoke a word of english. through all that, she ended up as a graduate of cornell law school. that, folks is --

[ applause ] that represents the best of what our country is all about. i have said for many years that the truest legacy of my time in public service will always come from the contributions of those who served either under my command in the marine corps or on my staff. our country has heard and will continue to hear from these talented men and women wherever they go and however they choose to serve. and a good number of them have made the trek over here to join us today. we did great things during those six years. they continue to show us that they are all stars in a multitude of endeavors. i would be pleased if they would stand or wave and be recognized right now. [ applause ] there have been a lot of things going on in the last couple of days. i'm sure i'm going to get questions about them. what i would really like to talk about today in my opening

remarks is what's going on in our country. and what we can do to make things better. let me begin by stealing a quote from gor vidal. he was one of the most brilliant minds of the post world war ii era. you never know when you have happy he wrote. you only know when you were happy. the same holds true i think for the times in which we live. we seldom know when we are living through a period of true historic challenge. we only know after it's over that we did. the internal workings of national policy are not a part of most american's lives. he wake up every morning. you go to work. maybe you try to find a job. you take care of your family. you pay your taxes. you turn on the tv and watch common tate e comm come men taters. sometimes you agree with both of

them. sometimes you agree with neither of them. bad things happen in the world. that will never change. at the same time, i think it has been rare in our history when our economy crashes at the same time we're at war as has been the case in the past five or six years. here in america, our multicultural society lives in a state of constant disagreement. this is frustrating. it's also creative. but the discussions during recent years have taken on a different tone. the very character of america is being called into question. who are we as a people? what is it that unites us rather than divides us? where is our common ground when the centrifugal forces of social cohesion are spinning so out of control that the people at the very top exist in a distant outer orbit completely separated

in their homes, schools and associations from those of us who are even in the middle and completely disconnected from those who exist paycheck to paycheck or those at the bottom who are often scorned as undeserving takers who simply want a free ride. now think about that. how can we say we're fellow americans when tens of millions of people are being quietly written off, not only by our most wealthy but even by many of our political leaders as hopeless? who will never be fully employed. who would be or should be avoided on the street, feared rather than encouraged to enter the american mainstream. we live indisputably in the greatest country on earth. the premise of the american dream is that all of us have an

equal opportunity to succeed. if you are 10 and black and living in east baltimore and going togo ing to the bathroom in a bucket because the landlord won't fix the plumbing and your school is a place of intimidation and violence and the only people on the street who seem to be making money are the ones who are selling drugs, no matter how hard you work, you do not have the same picture of the american dream as a kid your age who is being groomed for prep school and then to go off to the ivy league. or if you are a kid growing up in the appalachian mountains of clay county kentucky, by most accounts the poorest county in america, which happens to be 98% white, surrounded by poverty, drug abuse and joblessness, when you leave your home in order to succeed, and when you do, you are welcomed with a cynical unbelieving stares and whispers

of american that don't understand you and that can exclude you from education with the false promise that if you are white you are by definition have some kind of social advant think about your government? if you are a man or woman who did time in prison as have so many millions of americans in today's society, you paid the price for your mistake, which could be as simple as a drug addiction or a moment of absolute but culpable stupidity and you want to re-enter the community you left behind when you were knocked up, neglected, possibly abused and marked for the rest of your life on every employment application that you ever fill out, how do you do that? when there are no clear programs of transition that can prepare

you for the structured demands of the work force or society itself, which is going to fear you because you spent time in prison. what do you do now? do we as a government have an obligation to provide a struck tur th tur that can assist you so the rest of your life is not wasted? or have you become another throw away like the kids in east baltimore or clay county kentucky? let's say you are 30 years old without a high school diploma. maybe you hit a rebellious streak when you were 17. you got a dead-end job or got pregnant and became a single mom. now you are looking at the rest of your life. you feel hopeless. the big debate between the two political parties seems to be whether you should get a higher minimum wage, whether the government should start universal programs to put kids into school from

prekindergarten. what do you need more than a minimum wage? even if your kids attend pre-k, what happens when they come home? is your life over at 30? would it change if we had a second chance program where you could finish school and show your kids your own diploma and tell them to stay in school and study and be an example and aspire to a real job that pays more than minimum wage? what would it take to turn those things around, or is it impossible? or should we just decide that it's something beyond the role of government? this societal dislocation has been happening at a time when america's place on the international stage has become increasingly unclear, both in terms of our position as the economic beacon of the global community and our vital role as the military garn tore of

international stability. for more than two decades since the end of the cold war, our country has been adrift in its foreign policy. the greatest military power on earth has locked a clearly defined set of principals that would communicate our national security objectives to our allies, to our potential adversaries and most importantly to our own people. over that same period our deb e debatdebat debates over domestic policies have been more polarized, driving our people further and further apart rather than bringing them together. in many cases, deliberately exaggerating divisions based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation and geography. not surprisingly, the american people have grown ever more cynical about their national leadership in both parties and

increasingly more pessimistic about the future. so make no mistake, how we redo dissolve these two formidable questions is going to determine what america looks like ten, 20 or 30 years from now. in the not too distant future, depending how we resolve this we will look back and judge ourselves. did we have the courage to face the hard issues to make the difficult decisions, to prove we were worthy of the sacrifices of the ep generation that went before us? or did we fail? watching passively as the greatest nation on earth descended slowly into mediocrity because it burned itself out through bad choices, petty deba debates, trivial party politics and the inability of our leaders to come to grips with these sorts of challenges and to work together to actually solve them. so we have reached an

unavoidable and historic crossroads. the way we choose to address the conditions that now so deeply divide us over the next few years will define who we really are as a people and what our future will look like. what are the responsibilities of our government? provide for the common defense, promote general welfare, maintain order and public safety for all, whether you are in east baltimore or north arlington. erect standards of fairness when it comes to the opportunity to succeed. don't pick favorites based on several access to the corridors of power. despite any of the barriers that have too often divided us, i'm naive enough to believe that those of us who love our country can come together to rebuild our infrastructure and to repair the torn fabric of our national

spirit. true fairness is not an impossible dream, nor is the notion that we can return to a time when we can look at a fellow citizen and feel a moment of comradery rather than a feeling of mistrust, dislike or fear. we need the energy and the talent of every american trained and put to use in ways that will make them more productive, their neighborhoods more vibrant and our country stronger. more than that, every one of us should view this as a duty, as a citizen if nothing else and participate in the national discussion. let me mention a few areas where i believe we can make a difference. first, we must develop a clear statement of national security and foreign policy. an understandable statement of our national security interest is the basis of any great nation's foreign policy, clearly understood principals and the

determination to stand by them are essential to stability and also to public support. our allies will be able to adjust to our clarity, our adversaries will know we are serious. we do not have that now. our foreign policy has become a tangled mess in many cases of what can only be called situational ethics. what does the united states stand for in the global arena? under what conditions should we risk our national treasurer, our credibility and more importantly the lives of our military people? here sis a quick bottom line. tell me what our national interest is, how we're going to defend it and how we will know we have accomplished our mission. unless you can do that, you don't have a strategy. once the cold war ended, strategically we lost our way. we have yet to regain it.

in the area of international relations, it's not a healthy thing when the world's dominant military and economic policy has a policy based on vagueness. so we ended up and continue to be trapped in the never ending ever changing entanglements of the middle east, beginning with the pandora's box that was opened with the invasion of iraq and continuing through the still fermenting nightmare of the arab spring, particularly our inadvisable actions in libya. i was one who warned before the invasion of iraq that our entanglement would destabilize the region, empower iran and weaken our influence in other places. let me quote from an article i wrote in the "washington post" on september 4, 2002. five months before we invaded iraq. america's best military leaders

know they are accountable to history. the greatest military victory of our time bringing an expansioni expansionist soviet union in from the cold was accomplished not by an invasion but through deck ai decades of maneuvering. with respect to the situation in iraq, our military leaders know two realities that seem to have been lost in the narrow debate about hussein himself. the first is that wars have unintended consequences. the second is that a long-term occupation of iraq would beyond doubt require an adjustment of force levels elsewhere and could diminish american influence in other parts of the world. then later, in japan, american occupation forces became 50,000 friends. in iraq, they would quickly become 50,000 terrorist targets.

so what should our governing principals be? first, if a president wishes to conduct offensive military operations, he or she should be able to explain clearly the threat, the specific objections of the operations and the end result. second, we should honor all our treaty commitments. we are not obligated to join a treaty partner if they elect to use force outside boundaries of our commitment as in libya, for example. third, we will maintain superiority in our strategic systems. this includes not only nuclear weapons but also such areas as technology, space and cyber warfare. fourth, we will preserve and exercise the right of self-defense as guaranteed under int international law and the u.n. charter. fifth, we have important allies around the world, especially in

asia and the middle east. who we will continue to support in many ways. this will not cease. in fact, as we clarify other commitments, these relationships will be strengthened. with respect to the war against terrorism, we should act vigorously against terrorist organizations if they are international in nature and are a direct threat to our national security. this includes the right to conduct military operations in foreign countries if that country is unwilling or unable to address the threat. we have this right through international law and specifically through article 51 of the united nations charter. but there's an important caveat to how our country should fight international terrorism. having ignored this principal has caused us a lot of trouble since 9/11. can do no better than quote from

an article i wrote the day after 9/11. do not occupy territory. t similarly, it would be militarily and politically dangerous for our mill tear require to operate from bases permanent or semipermanent or to declare we are defending specific pieces of terrain in the regions where the terrorist armies live and train. finally, with respect to national security, a warning spurned by the actions of this administration in libya. there is no such thing as the right of any president to unilaterally decide to use force in combat operations based on the vague concept of humanitarian intervention. if a treaty doesn't obligate us, if american forces are not under attack or under threat of imminent attack, if no americans are at risk, the president

should come to the congress. second point for consideration as we look into the future is we need to give our people some hope on issues of economic fairness and social justice. working people have struggling following the collapse of the economy while those at the top have continued to separate themselves from the rest of our society. if you look at the stock market since march of 2009, when this recession bottomed out, it has moved from 6,443 to more than 17,000 as of today. the stock market has almost tripled as we have come out of this recession. at the same time study after study shows that real income levels among working people have suffered a steady decline since january of 2009. not only for our workers.

according to the wall street journal, loans to small business who traditionally have been the backbone of the american success story have decreased by 18% since 2008. overall business loans have increased by 9%. the growth in our economy has been increasingly reflected in capital gains rather than in the salaries of our working people. in many cases, corporate headquarters, financial sectors are here while the workers are overseas. many of our younger workers in this country right now are subject to complicated hiring arrangements that in many cases don't pay healthcare or retirement. corporate success is measured by the increase in the value of a stock, corporate leaders are paying accordingly. when i graduated from the naval academy, the co made 20 times the worker's pay. it's not a global phenomenon. in germany, which has the

highest balance of trade in the world, the average ceo makes 11 times what a worker makes. many of our brightest economic analysts, high along them ralph gamori who is here today, point out that this disparity came about not because of globalization but because executive compensation became linked with value of a stock rather than the company's actual earnings. investors will not complain. they invest in stocks. our workers, the most productive work force in the world, are the ones who have been left behind. i would agree that we cannot tax ourselves into prosperity. but we do need to reconfigure the tax code so that taxes fall in a fair way. third, we should rebuild our national infrastructure. the technology revolution has pushed a lot of louer skilled

people into unemployment. yet, every wrf around us we see roads that need to be widened or repaired, bridges that are beginning to crumble. others that need to be build. traffic jams from clogged highways, schools that need to be built, expanded or repaired. inner city neighborhoods with cracked sidewalks, broken windows and people on the street. roosevelt mobilized a nation whose unemployment rate was at 25%. the civilian conservation corps planted trees and cleared land. we built roads. we put people to work. we cleaned things up. eisenhower, his vision brought us the interstate highway system and the jobs that it took to build it. there are people who need jobs. there's work to be done. along the way, i believe it's possible to meld such a program with another one featuring adult education for those who did lose their way when they were 17 and

now know how important it is as a worker and as a parent to get that diploma, earn some money and be a role model to your kid. fourth, we need to reform our criminal justice system. this is not a political issue. it is a leadership issue. it has dramatic manifestations throughout our society. the united states has the highest incarceration rate in the world. since i doubt we are the most evil people in the world, many now agree that maybe we're doing something wrong. millions of our citizens are either in prison or under the supervision of the criminal justice system. during ply time in the senate, we worked to examine every component of the this process from point of apprehension to length of sentencing to the elements of life in prison, including prison administration and to the challenge of re-entering society and hopefully living productive lives.

when one applies for a job, the sigma of having been in prison is like a tattoo on your forehead. in many cases, prison life creates scars that can only be remediated through structured reentry programs. many of them are non-violent offenders who went to prison due to drug use or dependence. those who wonder whether we can or should put such programs in place, my answer is this. do you want to see these former offenders back on the street coming after your money or your life? or do you want them in a job making money and having a life? finally, let's find a way to return to good govern answer. it will take time but it's possible to rebalance the relationship between the executive and legislative branchs and to carefully manage the federal government which is surely the most complex

bureaucracy in the world. a lot of people running for president and a lot of people covering those who are running for president seem to skip past the realities of governing into the circus of the political debate. the federal bureaucracy is huge. i have seen many people come to public service from highly successful careers in the business world only to be devoured and humiliated by the demands of moving policy through the bureaucracy and then the congress. the very administration of our government needs to be fixed. with the right leadership and the right sense of priorities, it can be. i spent four years as a marine, four as a committee counsel in the congress. six years as a member of the united states senate. i am well aware and appreciate that there are a lot highly

talented dedicated people in our federal work force. i know they would be among the first to agree that we would benefit by taking a deep breath and basically auditing the entire federal government in order to rejustify the functioning of every program and every office. [ applause ] the way to solve these challenges and others is the way that other such challenges have always been solved in the past. find good leaders. tell them where the country needs to go. free them up to use their own creative energies. trust their integrity. supervise, hold them accountable just as they should hold our own people accountable -- their own people accountable and just as the american people should hold every national leader accountable. have the courage of your convictions. have the humility to listen to others. remember the greatness of our country and the sacrifices that have gone before us and never forget that history should and

will judge all of us if we ever let the american dream die. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you. [ applause ] we will now go into our q and a session. as i said, we will try to make it rapid fire to get as much as we can in this next few minutes. sir, are you considering pursuing the democratic nomination for president? would you consider running as a independent? >> i would say we have had a lot of discussions among people that i respect and trust about the future of the country. and we are going to continue having these discussions over

the next four or five months. i am seriously looking at the possibility of running for president. but we want to, you know, see if there's a support base from people who would support the programs that we're interested in pursuing with the leadership. so the answer is, i'm a democrat. i have strong reasons for being a democrat. basically, if you want true fairness in this society, you want to give a voice in the corridors of power to the people who would not have it, i believe that will come from the democratic party. we're taking a hard look. we will get back to you in a few months. [ applause ] >> what trait is most important in a person wanting to become our president? and what is your best trait?

[ laughter ] >> how many questions do you have on that stack before you pulled that one out? i think trust an integrity and vision and loyalty. you cannot run or lead unless you have that and unless you have that in the people who are with you, too. it's one thing i used to tell my staff when i was in the senate was that i met every day with weinberger when he was secretary of defense. you will never see one word that was ever said in that meeting when the door is closed. i owe that to him and to good governance. the issues of character override even ishz sues of intelligence.

i would rather have someone loyal and trusted than someone who is smart and couldn't be trusted. [ applause ] >> hillary clinton, of course, is widely seen as the democratic front runner for president in 2016. what do you see as her strengths and weaknesses? >> well, i've had the pleasure of working with hillary in the senate. she has a broader forum to answer that question than i do. >> a follow-up regarding mrs. clinton. hillary was secretary of state for four years. how responsible is she for the tangled mess of u.s. foreign policy that you cited in your remarks? >> again, i think that's a question that really should be directed at secretary clinton. i'm not here to undermine her. i'm here just to explain where

my concerns are as someone who has been involved in the military and in foreign policy all of my life. it wasn't a political comment when i made it. we need to be much clearer in terms of our national goals and our objectives around the world. [ applause ] >> as someone who didn't really embrace the task of being a politician while serving in the senate, why are you considering a run for president when that job demands so much politicking to be effective? >> you know, i think a lot of people misunderstand the approach that we took during my time in the senate and how much i valued being a part of the united states senate. i look at these positions more as opportunities to lead rather

than to conduct politics, per se. i was raised on the notion of what it takes to be a leader. and i think if you look at what we were able to do during our six-year period in the senate, it's pretty remarkable. we did it by bringing strong, dedicated people into the staff, trusting them, giving them what the marine corps would be called mission-oriented orders and approaching issues such as criminal justice that a lot of other people in the country were afraid to touch and bringing them to a place where we bring these issues out of the shadows and into the public debate. so it's a very tough thing to run for office. but it's also the way that the american people get to know you and to make their own decision about whether they want to trust you.

that's the process of a democracy. >> related question. what's appealing about the job of president when partisanship and unwillingness in congress to compromise and work together makes getting little things done so hard? >> i think with the right leadership, we can get a lot of things done in this country. and we have seen this over and over again. i'm going to give you a bipartisan historical response to that. this country was completely in the doldrums when roosevelt took over. people had a feeling of hopelessness, that things couldn't be done. he came in with vision and leadership. put programs into place all over the country. things started to change. by the way, many of us lived

through the carter administration. and if you recall, in 1979 and 1980, there were a lot of people saying, nothing can get done. everything is so paralyzed. the people were writing that the presidency was now too big for any one person to handle. and ronald reagan came in. he was a leader. some of my democratic friends don't like it when i say that. ronald reagan was once a democrat. he was still a leader. he brought strong people around him. he had a vision where he wanted to take the country and things started moving again. leadership in this world requires that you sit down and talk to people and give them a clear vision of where you want to go and listen to them. i think we did this probably most clearly when we got the g.i. bill through the united

states congress. i wrote this bill with legislative counsel before i was sworn into the senate. we introductioned it on my first day. we worked extremely hard across the aisle. we got two republican key sponsors, two democrat sponsors, two world war ii veterans, two vietnam veterans. in 16 months, we got a bill through a paralyzed congress that now more than a million of the veterans post 9/11 veterans have been able to use and change their lives. [ applause ] y >> you have opposed u.s. military intervention in iraq and libya. tell us why you reaction to owe because -- to the president starting air strikes and respond to the remarks the president made three

hours ago. >> i would start -- mark shields will remember this. i will start with a comment given to me when i was in beirut reporting more than 30 years ago. i was at a marine outpost that started taking fire from an outpost because there was a lebanese army position located with the marines and then some unknown militia started joining in just because it was beirut and then syrians came up and were firing 25 millimeter into it. a young marine turned around and said, sir, never get involved in a five-sided argument. during the hearings when i was still in the senate and they were considering doing something in syria, that was one of the

points that i would raise, that if you think lebanon was bad, syria is lebanon on steroids. look at the situation that we now are in. isis, whatever -- however you want to define that. we need to be very careful to define what the membership of these entities really is, because in that part of the world people tend to drift in and out of organizations, depending on who they think is getting something done. we have isis who supposedly is anti assad and wants to create up there and we are going to arm and train another syrian opposition whose mission up until a couple of weeks ago was to help take out assad, now they are going to fight isis. we have a quiet agreement with the syrian government as this time, one would assume from what i'm hearing, the same government that the president a couple of years ago said must go.

we have a tacit participation by iran on some level. you know, the country that many in the region believe we should be most concerned about. it just shows you, that is this region. it has been this region for 2,000 years. and what i have been saying since i was secretary of the navy, not just before the iraq war, is that the united states can assert its national security interests in that part of the world but we should never become an occupying force in that part of the world. so when i look at what the president -- the strikes that the president ordered, i would say this. if he is ordering these strikes based on the notions of international terrorism, to borrow from remrasarks that he

made. and the national security interests of the united states are directly threatens and he is conducting limited strikes, i would say that is legal. that is legal. the question of judgment will remain to be seen. i will stop right there. folks, this is a very, very complicated part of the world. we have to deal with our national security in a way that is -- make sure that we do not get entangled on the ground again. >> the president's advisers are saying that attacking i'al qaed is not an expansion because congress authorized war against them over a decade ago. do you agree with that? >> i had not heard them say that. i would expect them to say that t. goes to the portion of my

remarks where i said that even without the congressional authorization they are mentioning, we have the right of self-defense under international law and under the united nations charter if there is an international terrorist organization that directly threatens our national security interests. so in that context, these types of limited raids are really no different than what we have been doing in places like yemen. >> do you think that the obama administration is handling -- how do you think the obama administration is handling the situation in the ukraine and how would you deal with putin if you were president? >> i do believe this administration has been taking the right approach with respect to the situation in ukraine. first, this is -- the issue of

the russian involvement in ukraine involves larger players in historic europe, countries like germany, which have an impact on the actions of the russians. second, it's possible -- always possible for the russians to have overplayed their hand. we saw this actually with the soviets in afghanistan in 1979 where they went in, they overplayed their hand and over time they had to adjust their policies. i believe the policy of sanction and working with our european partners is the best way to go. what we can be thankful for right now, by the way, is that ukraine did not become a member of nato as many people were advocating during the time i was in the senate, because if they were members of nato, we would be obligated to come to their

defense militarily in some of these situations. we need to preserve our options and to work with our european partners. >> going domestically for a few questions. does it bother you that all of big financial firms and banks found responsible for the 2008 great recession have only had to pay fines? are we monitizing fines? >> let me say this. i will give you a historical marker here. when we will to vote on whether to provide $700 billion under what was called the tarp program to appropriate $700 billion to a lot a lot of companies who had, i think, abused our economic

system, i called a lot of people trying to get their thoughts on which way i should vote. and one of the pieces of advice that i appreciated most came from an named martin bigs who was with morgan stanley for years. he helped me when i was bringing companies into vietnam many years ago. very, very smart macro economic thinker. someone who made a lot of money in the financial sector. i said which way do you think i should vote on this? it's a three-page hand-written memorandum that says give them 2k4r $700 billion because of mistakes they made. he said, number one, you have to do this. he said if we don't staunch the bleeding within weeks the economic systems and the world economy will have a cataclysmic

freefall. number two, he said we need to reregulate, get back to proper regulation of the financial sector. he said it as a hedge fund guy. he said number three you ought to find a way to punish the people who created this situation, whose negligence and activities created this situation. so with that in mind, we worked from our office to pass a windfall profits tax. not -- you know, i'm not big on long-term taxes like that. after reading an article by martin wolf in the financial times actually, a conservative economic newspaper, where he was recommending because these companies got bailed out through the money of the average working people in this country.

they ought to pay back in. so we put together a refined piece of legislation. if we were one of 13 companies that got more than a certain amount of the very top amount from the t.a.r.p. program, and you're an executive, you get your full compensation. and $400,000 of bonus on regular taxation. anything above that bonus, you split 50/50 with the people who bailed you out. i thought that was reasonable. the most interesting thing about it was when we got to the senate floor the democrats wanted to vote, not the republicans. nobody wanted to touch it. as a result we didn't get a vote on it. >> one more question before we go to questions about veterans. do you believe that obamacare is a step forward toward creating economic fairness.

why or why not? >> the whole issue of obamacare was the most difficult issue that we faced during my time in the senate. whether to eventually vote in favor of it or not. first i would say i believe the administration made an error, a strategic error of calling for that legislation they did which was the beginning of their administration. it was an issue that had been very popular during the election cycle, but you will remember two months before the election, the economy crashed. to bring something this vast and potentially costly as your flagship piece of legislation at

a time when the economy was still suffering was not a strategically smart thing to do, frankly. there were a lot of pieces in the legislation i didn't like. i voted with the republicans 18 times on different amendments trying to bring the legislation to a place i was more comfortable with. in the end i did vote for it. in my mind when i did, say it was 50.1% what you like and 49.9% what you don't. my mother grew up in east arkans arkansas. some pretty difficult surroundings. she was one of eight children. three of her siblings died in childhood -- not childbirth, childhood. as did her father when she was

10. there wasn't medical care in east arkansas at the time. if you go back to that period in the 1930s. do we create social security? any program where the government was going to take a greater responsibility for the individuals to go back and look at it, they are all screaming. this is socialism. how are you going to have social security for these people? 1960s, medicare comes along. that's socialism. so that really pushed me over. i think to vote in favor of it. i don't regret voting in favor of it. but there is a lot in this program that could be tightened and adjusted. i would hope that's where the congress can can come together after this election. it's not going to go away. let's tighten it up and make it

better. >> we have veteran this is the audience including yourself. i would like to ask a general one and have you respond before we conclude. many veterans are struggling to find work. is there more we can do to ensure men and women who serve are better prepared to enterer the civilian work force? >> what i would like to see is a better understanding among potential employers about the value that a veteran can bring to the work place. we have had discussions over the years on this issue. i was council in the house veterans community when i finished law school. if you're in the military today and you're an officer able to not only have a college degree but in many cases have an advanced degree and you've got a

skill set that people in the civilian world can understand, you don't have a terribly difficult time selling yourself. if you're enlisted, particularly noncareer enlisted. the citizen soldiers, people i designed this g.i. bill for. you would interrupt your life. go out and pull a pump or two in iraq, afghanistan. you come back and some of the best leaders in the environment are the ones in the combat arms. they come in and have a ddt 14. doesn't have a degree or computer school. it says i was a squad leader. we need to have a better understanding among potential employers what that means. i had to get things done every day. i had to lead people, motivate them, work across ethnic and other lines. i learned how to lead and get

things done. the more people understand that then the easier it becomes to resolve the issues that you mentioned. >> we are almost out of time. before asking the last question, we have a couple of housekeeping matters to take care of. first of all, i would like to remind you about our upcoming events and speakerers on october 15. debra rudier, the new president of the john f. kennedy for the performing art wills outline her plans for the center's future. october 20, thomas perez secretary of the u.s. department of labor. october 21 bob bolsby, commissioner of the big 12 conference. next i would like to present our guests with the traditional national press club bug. i trust you have a set at home and you can add to it. our final question, sir. two of our greatest presidents,

teddy roosevelt and fdr had backgrounds at the department of the navy. do you sense a trend developing there? [ laughter ] [ applause ] >> unfortunately we're not cousins. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you all. we are adjourned. members of congress weighing in today on u.s. air strikes against isis in syria. from house speaker john boehner, god speed to the men and women of the armed forces leading the fight against isil terrorists. nearly 2,000 on the ground in

iraq. south carolina republican jeff duncan tweeted, after the president's comments this morning an example of why i have concerns with the president's strategy. did you hear how he grouped together assad and isis? radically different issues. congressman bradley burn from alabama tweets i believe isil must be defeated. i 'm pleased allies joined the u.s. in launching air strikes. we are asking for your thoughts as well on u.s. and allied air strikes in syria. you can leave your comments on our facebook page or send a tweet with the hashtag cspan chat. next, public opinion on war and the arguments both pro and anti war advocates to win public support for conflicts in korea and vietnam and more recently afghanistan and iraq. also the influence of politicians and how casualties and confidence for success factor into public opinion. the cato institute hosted the event.

>> good afternoon, everybody. welcome to the cato institute. my name is justin logan. i'm the director of foreign policy studies here at cato. and it's my pleasure to welcome you here to our event on public opinion and war in addition to the people who are here with us physically, we would like to welcome those online, cato.org as well as via c-span. we always worry planning these events that a topic that seems important and pressing a few months ahead of special sometimes won't deliver.. but unfortunately, i guess, the question of public support for war is quite salient, given the present news. . so today we want to discuss a lot of the academic research on when and why the american public supports war. there is a lot of literature and a lot of disagreement on the subject.

so be totally honest, we were able to piggyback on the american science association political meeting since many of the scholars who wafrt this panel. when it comes to the question of public support for war. i also go ahead and introduce the panelists in the order in which they'll speak and then turn over the podium to the first speaker who's john muellor. he's a senior fellow at cato as well as a member of the political science department and the mershon center at the ohio state university. he needs very little introduction, but i'll venture one nonetheless. in addition to his seminole work, war presidents and public opinion, he's more recently made himself into an expert on both terrorism and nuclear weapons authoring most recently

terrorist security and money, balancing the risks, benefits and costs of homeland security, coauthored where, how politicians in the terrorism center with nature security threats and the atomic object sessions, nuclear harm weapons from from to doubt. securities studies swb the american political science review, foreign affairs, we're very pleased that john is here. his ph.d. is from the university of chicago. he studies political behavior, public opinion about foreign policy, correcting factual miser perceptions held but how would it works. the coauthor of any american costs, american conflicts, he has a b.a. from colby college. his ph.d. is from duke university. our third speaker today is adam luwinsky.

as well as serving as the director of m.i.t.'s political research lab. for our purposes today he authored "in time of war" understanding american public opinion from world war ii to iraq. he similarly has published a very impressive array of journals, the american political of journal science, public opinion quarterly and a inspect of ourselves. he received his ph.d. from the university of michigan in 2000 and authored "in time offer war." understanding american public opinion from world war ii to iraq. he similarly has published in an impressive array of journals, the american journal of politics science, politics, political behavior, public opinion quarterly and others. he received grants from the national science foundation and was a fellow at the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences. the final speaker today is perhaps cato's newest minted

scholar and associate professor at george mason university -- trevor thrawl. he works in the department of public and international affairs and is the director of the biodefense. he is the coeditor of american foreign policy and the politics of fear, threat inflation since 9/11. and another edited volume entitled why did the united states invade iraq, question mark? prior to arriving at mason trevor was with the university of michigan dearborn. he received his ph.d. from m.i.t. so you can see -- normally on these panels right there, we have a lot of university of chicago, m.i.t., conspiracy. today it seems like we have a michigan/m. i felt t. overlap with john bringing up the chicago end of the deal. so i think with that introduction, speakers, i'll go ahead and turn things over to

john mueller to speak at the podium. >> thank you very much. i'd like to be here, like to change the order of things i was talking about because i didn't realize i was going to be going first. i have three points i'd like to put on the table essentially that fit into this. the first one is probably the most light ranging, sort of sets the overall -- the united states has brought four wars, long ground wars since world war ii. and it's possible to fairley well compare the degree to which these wars have been supported. because the same poll question, do you think it was a mistake to have gotten involved in this

conflict has been asking each of the four wars. and the patterns for the four wars are there. iraq, vietnam and korea are down below. the main thing that basically happens on this is that there has been a decline overall. and part of the decline happens earlier rather than later. in other words, there's a fairley steep drop-off early on typically and then sort of gradual erosion or just a stabling reachness of stability. the -- i should say there's a couple of things. these are years, as you can see, since the war began. but the key thing is the question of cost. the argument is that as it has -- casualties accrue, the important dwindles. sometimes that stays put. as soon as they see the body bags coming back, they stopped supporting thor war. which led to the military idea

that if they can't see the body bags they won't stop supporting the war. so we had a thing about not letting body bags get off at delaware and so forth. taking the metaphor and making it into something that approached reality for people. at any rate, my position has been as the war wears on, casual uh tis accrue and people make something like a cost benefit analysis. how much is it costing and gradually drop off. the other speakers don't necessarily agree with that way of explaining it. one issue, though, i want to say before moving on is that this is by time, it isn't by casualties. and a good question would be how will does it go prior to a casualty increase?

and comparing the war in vietnam and the war in iraq. in the case of these two wars, there's a considerable difference. both lines go below 50% of approval. there were about 2,000 americans that had died and went down below 50% approval for vietnam. it was more like 20,000 or 18,000 americans that had died. my interpretation is people simply aren't going to pay as much time for the stakes in iraq as they were for the cold war. now, when we talk about casualties, everybody basically agrees, people don't know what the casualties are. if you ask how many men have been killed, you get all kinds of weird answers. however, casualties basic obviously good measure of the intensity, the kuk lafb casualties of the board both in terms of human losses and economically. however, there is some indication, one question which

fortuitously was asked before this most recent war, before the iraq war in 2002. the question is -- you don't have to read the whole thing. the basic idea is george bush might decide to send troops to iraq. do you approve of that? as you can see, 54% when they were asked do you favor war said they would favor going to war. then the next question was suppose some americans are killed. suddenly the percentages favoring war dropped down to 49%. then they are asked what if a hundred are killed? it dropped again, but only by three percentage points and further down as it went along. so it does seem to be -- even though i have certainly been saying from the beginning that people don't understand numbers very well, when you put it this way, maybe they do. particularly, would you still favor a war if 5,000 were killed? as it happened, that question

was asked when 4,000 or 5,000 are killedle. and when in the first section it's 5,000 were killed, about 32% said they would still favor the war. in actuality when 4,000 or so american fatalities took place, it was 33. so maybe these numbers hold up better than i previously thought. this is much clearer. it's only one war, the war in iraq. i don't want to spend too much time on it, but there's a decline and sort of bumps and wiggles and stabilization of sorts. one of the things peculiar and one of the things i've been interested in more lately is the unpredictability of american public opinion. and this gives you a bit of a consideration. and, you know, why do people do certain things and after

tracking sort of explained it. but it's extremely difficult to predict in the future. will they buy a hula hoop? who knows. it turns out they did. will they buy the edsel? no. will they buy new clothes? no. >> as you can see, there's ups and downs at various places and they seem to be associated with things which variably, you related to war. though then it bounced back to writ was more or less previously. after the london bombing, there's a spike upwards and that was the terrorist attack in london caused support or seemed to have caused support for the united states efforts in iraq to go up. but it did not go up with the madrid terror attacks took place a year earlier. katrina caused support for the war to go down, it seems. and the argument was basically why do we have a bunch of soldiers in iraq when they should be helping with that hurricane.

basely, one of the strangest things was, there was a spike -- on 9/11. it was not something you would overall predict. okay. the -- so that is the basic outline of the things we are going to be talking about. the expectations are going to vary as you will see. my position basically is i'm basically right about the way it happens, the mechanism. it's extremely unlikely you can get support to go back up. the reason for that, if i'm right, is that americans -- you can make a calculation. the war has cost too much. is it worth this? if the war then proceeds to go better, you're still don't think the war is a good idea. you already said it wasn't worth the cost. basically, you reach a point where you see it wasn't worth it. it's basically like buying a car and paying four times more than it's worth. you may later come to like the

car, but you still think you made a bad deal. that would be the approach. now, one possibility -- and we'll have this discussion coming up -- is the issue of how many of what happens with -- what happens if the war does go well? somewhat to my surprise, that actually happened. in 2008, there's a period of the surge and the surge basically causes people to think the war was going better. 16% thought it was making things better, no impact went down, significant progress went up by ten percentage points over that period of time the united states is winning the war went up by 16 percentage points. at the same time, however, the support for war didn't change much at all. has the war been worth it, 36 to 36. war was the right decision, surge 42 down to 39 and should we stay as long as it takes from

26 to 26. also approving bush's handling of the war, you would think if people say the war is going better, bush is in charge of the war so he should get more points for having aed good war comparatively. that didn't go up either. okay. that's my first point. let me go back to -- there's no way to skip past this stuff except going the hard way around. the issue here is basically having to deal with trying to sell ideas to try to go to war. and the evidence seems to be pretty good that it's really hard to do so. it's hard to move public opinion. overall it seems to me the way i look at basically marketing of ideas, people come up with ideas and they try to sell them to the public. and the public buys them or doesn't.

most of the time they don't buy it, like the new edsel. 90% of new products fail. 90% in high tech i understand. consequently people are putting things out there, putting them on the shelf. we should bomb syria, we shouldn't. buy the argument, accept the argument. if they do accept the argument. let me give you a couple of illustrations of sort of how this may be happening. it's possible two things are paired precisely. the run-up to the war, the first gulf war that george bush the first did in 1990, war was 1991, and beginning -- this is a trend line. there are a whole bunch of trend lines that follow the same basic pattern. do you think we should go to

war, essentially. beginning in the middle of this about 1998, november 1990, the bush administration started to sell going to war. and as you can see basically nothing much happened. it stayed pretty much the same as it had been before. the same thing happened for george bush the second's war in 2002 and into 2003. the question has been asked for a long time, would you favor invading iraq with u.s. ground troops in an attempt to remove saddam hussein from power. before 9/11, the position was basically -- was about 51%. it went up very high with 9/11 then came down and basically stayed pretty much the same the rest of the way through. no what's interesting about this is that there was a huge partisan division.

these are -- i'm sorry -- and what happened in the first gulf war was that there was an intense partisan leadership split on whether support should be used -- whether we should go to war and for the second one the democratic party basically folded and accepted going to war. the vote was 52 to 47 in the senate to go to the first war in 1991 and 77 to 23 in the second one indicating basically that the democrats were now on the same side. nonetheless, the partisan differences were much bigger in the first war -- in the second war even though the democratic leadership was saying we want to go to war. okay. let me turn finally to the end thing here, past all the stuff i did before. going too far. there we go.

i want to conclude with this point. basically the situation we're in now, it seems to me we're basically in the war in iraq, we're in a situation now of debacle. everything the united states has fought for, died for, spent for, trillions of dollars, 5,000 or 6,000 lives, has gone down the tubes in the last year. and so the question is basically, you know, what's the likely reaction to that to be. it seems to me a useful comparison is with a previous debacle which took place with iran -- i mean with vietnam in 1975. 1975 the communists took over south vietnam, completely obliterating the efforts of 55,000 dead americans and the huge amount of money, et cetera, they spent on that war. everything went down the tubes.

virtually overnight. in 55 days. and so the question, what was the public reaction to that, and i think there's some lessons that could have at least be potentially drawn, the other people may want to comment on this, from that lesson. it seems basically there are three lessons. first of all, the americans accept the debacle with grandeur weather grace. basically what they said -- they shrugged it off. so what. in order, there wasn't a huge amount of recrimination, who lost vietnam, till mccarthy didn't rise again or anything else. they went on to other things. secondly, they wanted to continue the cold war, continued to support the basic idea of communism and keeping a defense budget going, and the big change was they no longer wanted to use one tactic. vietnam demonstrated that was an idea. part of that is they were willing to say essentially that i don't care if communism advances, i do care if communism

advances, i want to stop it from advancing but i'm not willing to use ground war to stop it. and if you have to use ground war, i prefer to let it advance. and indeed communism did advance in several countries after the fall of vietnam. i think those three lessons probably hold today as well. it seems to be very likely that the american public will be able to accept this debackle with a fair amount of good grace and go on to other things, shrug it off. i think that's most likely. and the other two things i also hold, one is they're going to continue to support the war on terror compared to the cold war, in other words, still want to do it and there's been very little change in opinion about the war on terror since 2001 as far as i'm able to see, but they're not willing to use ground war to stop the advance of communism. let me just conclude with two

final cross tabulations from a poll at the same poll. this question was as a result of the recent violence in iraq, do you think the threat of terrorism against the united states will increase, decrease, or stay the same. 44% of people, this is just a couple months ago, said it will increase. so that's bad thing. on the same poll, a question, would you use ground force to stop it? only 19% said they would. so consequently it seems to me that the same thing will happen even people are not willing to use ground war to stop the advance of terrorism. they're still opposed to it just as they were opposed to communism and the advance of communism, but not change their strategy but they have changed their tactic. their willingness to use ground war as a technique for stopping it. let me end on that. thanks for your attention. [ applause ]

>> great. i'm just going to turn on the clock here so i can keep track of how long i am. thanks very much for inviting me to this. this is great. i lived in d.c. in the mid '90s and this was always one of my favorite buildings architecturally from the outside. this is my first time inside cato so it's fun to see the inside. so in my portion of the talk today, i'm going to try and make three main points. the first is the view that with my co-authors, chris and peter, the importance of perceptions of success in shaping public support for willingness to use military force. the second is to rebut some of the criticisms that have been

made of our work, particularly some i think adam is going to make following me. third to try to make the case in a modest way that citizens engage in some form of cost/benefits approach when thinking about decisions of using force. and so the goals for today is to really try and maximize some of the difference in our different perspectives. friends who sort of study things related to this area say don't you all mostly more or less agree? sure, maybe at some level, but it will make a much better panel if we say we disagree a lot more. and also i think it's important to try and push each other to make the work as good as it possibly is. this is obviously very substantively important topic under what conditions will the public support military force,

and it's important we understand and it's important we push each other really hard to try and make the work as good as it can. the half-life for any social research is probably fairly short anyway. so it's worth discussing it sort of with as much friendly engagement as we can. so it's hard to understate the importance of john mueller's work in shaping this whole research agenda and what people look at. and the importance of casualties in shaping public opinion about war. i think sadly sort of inside the beltway policy community has misinterpreted some of his work. largely the public will immediately oppose war once the

body bags start coming home. i'm not exactly sure that's what his work says, but that became the conventional view and oftentimes was attached to him. there are several real difficulties in studying how casualties affect public opinion. the main way that we study public opinion obviously is through surveys. and when we want to measure how the public is -- how they might be sensitive to casualties, one of the problems is that any given survey is typically conducted over a very short window -- two, three, four days -- so that everybody who is called or interviewed for that survey in some capacity basically experiences the same number of casualties that the war has seen at that point. there aren't dramatic, dramatic changes in casualty numbers that change from the first day of a survey to the third, fourth, or fifth day of a survey.

so that leaves us unfortunately with several different ways to measure how sensitive public is to casualties. one, we can try and use aggregate data so that we can take overall poll results, support for a particular mission, a variety of different questions that we could use, and we could try and see how support may decrease over time as casualties increase. one problem with that is that that's perfectly correlated with time. casualties unfortunately can't go down and time can't go backwards. so we're stuck with always observing increasing casualties at the same time we're observing increases in the amount of time

of the conflict. another approach is to ask people a variety of questions in a given survey, and this is what my co-authors and i do among other things, and then we use a question very similar to the one that john presented from the "l.a. times" in 2002 in which how does the public respond to -- if you tell them, would you still support it if there were this many casualties? and so that's problematic because people may not be able to experience those casualties. they may not know under what conditions those casualties were experienced. one of the main criticisms that adam will make is that if we use this as our measure of war support and measuring sensitivity to casualties, that it's very possible that that measure of measuring -- the ability to measure sensitivity to casualties is going to be indigenous to overall war support so it's a different measure. the third approach is to use experiments, similar to this approach, and give people

similarly worded questions about scenarios in which the united states might use force or other countries might use force and change the number of casualties involved and see how that changes support. but those end up having to be hypothetical missions and so we aren't necessarily tied into real-world scenarios like what should the united states do in iraq right at this moment and how would the public respond. so we have a substantively important problem with a very difficult measurement problem. so the work i've done with chris and peter, and i keep mentioning them in the hopes that some of the hate mail that we will generate will go to them and not just to me, peter was on a different panel that was televised by c-span this morning. and he showed me the death

threat e-mail he's received since then. so, chris and peter, if you want to send a death threat, send it to them, not me. so the -- one of the really important themes of our work is the importance of success. we we argue that people are much more likely to support missions that will be successful. and that a consequence of this is that people are willing to tolerate even extremely large numbers of casualties for a successful mission. and are unwilling to tolerate even small numbers of casualties for missions that they think will not be successful. and so one of the things i think is particularly important about this is that the extent to which people pay attention to wars and conflicts that embedded in this is an assumption or that people are able to have some sense of

what's going on about the world or how the progress of a war is proceeding. this is i think another major point of difference between my work and i think in particular adam's work. in addition, we think this is perfectly consistent with an overall costs and benefits approach. one way to think about it is you have costs of war, you have benefits of war, and that we should probably discount the potential benefits of war by the probability of success. and so if the prospect of success is really, really low, then whatever benefits that there may be from winning a war have to be discounted by that low probability of success. and so some other work that i've done with other co-authors uses a famous in political science

framework trying to measure the costs and benefits approach and we find that it works. so now to address some of the common critiques of our work. first is that our emphasis on the importance of perceptions of success is misguided because it relies on people being able to have unmediated knowledge of battlefield events, what's actually going on in the war. i think to a large extent this is a strong man argument. there's nothing that we write that says that knowledge of the situation on the ground and conflict has to be unmediated or that it even necessarily has to be accurate. people can believe that a war will be successful and support

it even when evidence on the ground may suggest that it won't be and vice versa. another common critique is that success or perceptions of success are indoginous to support. people who already support a war think it will be successful, people who oppose a war think it will be unsuccessful. this is a perfectly reasonable critique of some of our cross-sectional work, but we and others have shown in survey experiments where we systematically vary the likelihood of success in a mission, that we tell

participants in our experiments that missions are likely to be more successful or less successful, and that those have very predictable effects in the extent to which people support the use of force. and another common critique of our work is that what if casualties are simply the metric of success that people look at, that they measure a war based on how many casualties there are? and if there are lots of casualties the war is inherently unsuccessful and if there are few casualties then the war is inherently successful? in the work that we've done, we find that there is little evidence that this is the primary metric that people look to towards success. it doesn't mean that it is never used, but it's at a minimum not the primary metric that people use. so our core argument is that

people are more willing to support missions when they think they're going to be successful and that successful missions, people will tolerate even large numbers of casualties, and so unsuccessful missions, people will be opposed even when there are really small numbers of casualties. and so one of the other sort of competing theories out there, again, from adam, is that elite cues are really important in understanding public support. that the public responds to what elites tell them and that these fall largely on partisan or group identification lines. and i think that there are a few important arias where this theory could be pushed further and could be refined. that's the friendly way of saying that i think that it's wrong. as i know adam will come up with a friendly way to say that he thinks that i am wrong. maybe not so friendly. we are friend when we are not doing something like the this. so one isn't a terribly strong

theory of which cues people attend to or why. there are a number of cues out there that people could attend to. it doesn't sufficiently separate the persuasive arguments that elites make in terms of supporting or opposing war versus just who says it. it unfortunately doesn't explain democratic support for the iraq war before the iraq war very well in that there is majority opposition to the iraq war among democrats prior to the iraq war

in 2002 and 2003, yet all leading democrats were they are for it or at least tacitly not against it. i think the most troubling aspect or the area that i would like to see pushed the most is that it doesn't tell us that much about elite-level decisionmaking. so one of the nice things about theory of perceptions of success is that it also might give us some insight into how political elites and military planners think about war. it seems to me not unreasonable to think that those in the military would be resistant to missions that they think are -- and political leaders to missions they think are going to be unsuccessful and more supportive of missions they think are going to be successful, whereas an elite cue theory doesn't give us any potential insight into the main reasons why elites are supporting or opposing particular missions and the use of force. and i have exceeded my allotted time already by about three minutes, and that felt super fast.

all right. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> great. thank you. great. it's great being here. i've been on different panels through the years with both john and jason, so we have these kinds of back and forth. but it's really nice, as jason said, we are generally friendly, and so this is good. before i begin, i think we're on c-span so if my kids are watching i want to say hi and get your hands off each other. excellent. good. so let's start with a story, and this actually gets to something jason concluded with. we have two party, party a and party b. we won't call them what they are, but the party a is the party of the president, the president who at this moment is

considering intervention in a foreign country, and party a is the opposition to the president, i'm sorry, making particular arguments. again, we're talking about the quality of the arguments here that jason was say, not just who's saying it but what they're saying. americans are going to be killed. they're going to come home in body bags and be killed in a war that congress has not declared. second senator says i'm afraid we might be starting something here we can't get out of. i'm afraid we might be here for years and years and years. by party b, the party of the president, expresses support for the president's position, saying we should have an intervention. i know some of my colleagues believe strongly that the administration has not articulated forcefully, consistently, and clearly, the missions and goals of this use of force, we cannot let these kinds of atrocities and humanitarian disasters continue if we have in our power to stop them. i believe it's our duty to act. and as a scholar of public opinion, i'm very interested in how does the mass public respond to these kinds of contrary arguments. we can see generally the public falls behind their particular

leaders. question asked at the same time of this debate, considering everything, do you think the u.s. did the right thing in getting involved in the military conflict? do you think it was a mistake? party a, 46% says it's the right thing. party b, party of the president, 66% say it's the right thing. so this sounds very much like the rhetoric, the kinds of arguments that were marshalled before the iraq war and the reaction as john showed us this partisan split after the iraq war. but this isn't the iraq war. this is the spring of 1999, and we're talking about kosovo, right so, the party of opposition of republicans, party b, the party supporting the president noted hawk paul wellstone. we have these kinds of arguments here marshalled in the iraq war and also marshalled in support of the kosovo intervention but by the different parties.

so this gets at what jason was saying, yes, we need to consider in theory the kinds of arguments people are making, but the argument i'm making in my book is if we just look at who says it, not what they say or how they say it, just who is taking the position, who's supporting the war, who's opposing us, that can get us to explaining the majority of support for war. so in my book, the central argument i'm making is that what we learned in about 65, 75 years of study of american public opinion can and should be applied to foreign policy a well. not just about domestic politics. opinion about war is just like opinion about domestic politics. now, there's room for dramatic events, where i'm not saying that events don't matter at all. think about pearl harbor and 9/11. these can change opinion. but contrary to the conventional wisdom, public opinion during times of crisis is shaped by some of the same attachments we see in the domestic stage. i want to spend most of my time talking about -- i brought if some slides.

i'm happy to talk to you afterward to have a back and forth. but i just want to spend the rest of my time making the argument i make in my book here. and so it's a pretty simple one, right, that public opinion is primarily structured by the ebb and flow of partisan and group-based political conflict. in my book i talk about world war ii, the role of ethnic attachments there, but i'm going to focus here on partisan attachments, democrats and republicans. and i argue that citizens understand war not for a cost-benefit analysis, so here is where i do differ from john and jason, but through opinion ingredients where the kinds of things that go through people's heads that are more close to home. partisanship and attachments to particular political leaders are the driving force of public opinion about war. so opinion about war is not willy-nilly. there was a time in american politics where we talked about sort of a plastic mood of public opinion shifting to fro. we're not saying that. there is a structure but it's a simple one that follows partisan

conflict. i call this my elite cue theory. so citizens take cues from partisan elites, from political leaders. i'd say that information matters, right so, people need to know where leaders stand in order to take cues from them, right so, that if you want to know -- let's say you're a republican, you want to take cues from party leadership, you need to have some attention to politics. you need to be paying some attention to know who stands where on which issue. i'm going to get to that in a minute. and that these cues i think can be negative or positive. so something john and jason brought up is basically how can we explain democratic opposition to the iraq war when democratic politicians are largely silent? in the book i argue that polarization, right, this difference between the parties, can occur even in the absence of vocal opposition if cue givers take strong and distinct positions. so think about it in the case of the iraq war, george bush. so i live now in cambridge, massachusetts.

i grew up on the upper west side of manhattan. i can tell you from experience talking to my friends george bush was a very strong cue giver in those cases. if people -- if george bush liked something according to many of the people i grew up with, it had to be wrong. so you don't need to have democrats saying this is a bad war. you just have to have people especially in the wake of -- think about george bush in the 2000 election that it's something that basically for majority of democrats, anything that george bush was for they were against. one of my favorite things, there's a great book by gary jacobson looking at polarization in american politics. and there's a question that says is george bush a uniter or

divider? that was asked right after the 2000 election. it's often quoted because 50% said he was a uniter, 50% says a divider. if you look among democrats, about 80% said he was a divider, among republicans, 80% said he was a uniter. so where you stand depends on where you sit. i think that's a driving force here. we can see this in public opinion. so john told you about the split in partisan public opinion. and this is through the end of 2008, which is when i stopped writing the book, and i haven't updated it since then. but it's more of the same. there's no happy ending where everyone comes together. you can see throughout the iraq war you had huge partisan gaps, you know, that support ebbs and flows, but that partisan gap remains strong. so this is kind of one thing.

here's a very simple way to show the impact of partisanship. i just want to show it a little more subtly. remember i said that information matters, right, how much attention people pay to politics matters. so what i do in my book and what others have done before me, most notably john zeller, is to look at what happens if we compare republicans who pay a lot of attention to politics to democrat who is pay a lot of attention to politics. these are the people who should be most divided. if you don't pay attention to politics, you're not really sure, even though you call yourself a democrat, maybe you don't know where the democrats stand, if you're republican, you don't know where the republicans stand, we should see smaller gaps. so john zeller really did the seminal piece of public opinion work in the last 25 years. this is a very high-tech graph. you can see here. kind of draw you to this bottom here. this is the first iraq war. this is the percent who say congress should approve military action against iraq. this is right before the war starts. you can see among the people at the lowest level of political awareness on the far left, these are people who don't pay any attention to politics, no differences between republicans and democrats.

but if we look at the highly informed, the people who pay the most attention, we see large splits, right. so i want you to kind of take this visual frame here, divergence versus here, this middle graph, which is right before in october when democrats -- you might -- i remember, probably not everyone in this room remembers -- before the 1990 election there was a delicate dance where democrats didn't want to say they were opposed to the war in advance of the 1990 my term election. so here you can see convergence, right. there are still differences between republicans and democrats, but the more attention you pay to politics, the more likely you are to support war. so kind of visually convergence, divergence. if we look at the iraq war, so this is one of many graphs i have in the book, i'm going to spare you the whole span, is we see divergence. now, in the book i talk not just about iraq but i spend a lot of time talking about world war ii because there was a lot of

polling done during world war ii that was largely unexamined for many years. actually, when i was doing the research for my book, the only person who mentioned these polls, actually john's book had a nice section talking about these old polls, but you'd think that in all the vast literature on public opinion and more, people would have looked at world war ii, which, you know, i wasn't around for that, but i'm told it was an important war. but luckily for me they didn't. so i was able to write this book. with a colleague at berkeley, we resuscitated a lot of these opinion polls that hadn't been looked at for many years. i just want to show you a couple things that again sort of support this theory about elite cues, convergence and divergence. let me show you one thing here, show you that even before the war -- so there's this notion that before u.s. entry, before pearl harbor, the public was strongly opposed to war. so when asked should we declare

war, a lot of people said no. but if you ask the question that was relevant at the time, do you think we should help england or stay out of the war? what's more important? you could see steadily increasing support for this position. this is especially true among democrats, as i show in the book. and so looking at this, looking at this convergence versus divergence, we would expect before entry in world war ii that democrats who paid more attention to politics, people who supported fdr, would be more likely to endorse his position. people who opposed fdr would be less likely. i'm going to skip ahead here. this is just to show that, indeed, if you look at politicians in congress we're talking about it, you saw a divergence, before world war ii -- i'm sorry, before pearl harbor, between democrats and republicans and then after pearl harbor, there's a convergence in how political elites were talking about that. again we see this reflected in the public. so here's a number of questions that were asked various measures of support for intervention. november of 1939 do you approve of changes to the neutrality law? you can see supporters of fdr, the blue line, the more attention you pay to politics, the more likely you are to support this position.

among republicans, less likely. people who opposed fdr. same thing in this question, is it more important to help england or stay out of the war? republicans are flat. supporters of fdr are increasing supporters of fdr are increasing in support. we see this through mid-1940. they are more informed and more engaged. the more likely you are to support that position. this changed after pearl harbor. we have mean levels of support, we can see this in the convergence of opinion. one inning thing about world war ii is the kinds of support questions that john mentioned. was it a mistake to get involved? the closest they came is in 20

years, do you think other people will think it's a mistake ta enter the war. in part it's a sign of the high level of support there was for world war ii. basically pollsters were not asking the questions today. they didn't think there would be differences. there were questions that indirectly got at the u.s. position of unconditional surrender. a bunch of times they asked would you support making peace with the german army. sometimes this was asked would you support making peace with hitler. more popular than making peace with hitler. this pattern where we get the same messages we can see. after and they are talking about

that. we don't see this more generally. was it more important to work with business or take care of people? it's one or the other. maybe we don't want to get in right. it's a great big happy family where we need to be -- we see where you have divergent rhetoric. let me also say in conclusion, it was raised by jason. by john as well. what do i not deal with. it's about 320 pages which my

publisher said was too long as is. there things i don't deal with. the important thing, what determines the flow? it's something that we would say it's kpojinous to the system. it's just given. the question is how do they decide on their positions. what i say is it's not where i can make arguments perhaps arguments have been made about that. these apply to their job. as a scholar of public opinion, i know that most people most of the time don't pay attention to colleges. people are ignorant. it's their job to make these decisions. there is a work done by scott

gardner among others. the position that senators took on the war. there is something there. this is not good enough. there is important normative questions that this leaves aside. the thing about domestic and international politics, they have a book where they argued that democracies have been entering war. only they become involved. the mechanism is really important. it's sensitivity. if the mechanism is through elites, they are the ones making

the decisions. they interpret the need and it's elite manipulation. it's the domestic politics that matter the most. if individual citizens do the cost benefit analysis, if individual citizens are thes looking at casualties, democracy is a good rap. if leaders choose policies that lead to bad results where the costs outweigh the benefits. if they are making the calculations, it's a much more fuzzy world where it could be that the public is the that is misled here. i think that the stakes really are important.

they said there is potential there for future work. that can bring it on. i'm looking forward to more discussions about that. >> welcome, everybody. a good discussion already. how many are you have written out this proand conlist? maybe it's a decision whether to take a new job or ask your girlfriend to the prom, which house to buy, that sort of thing. the idea behind this is it's supposed to structure your thinking and make sure you considered all the possibilities and the consequences with the information at your disposal. if you are like me, you write down this list of pros and cons

and you stare at it for a while and realize that is reason is not to think of pros and cons. maybe you don't have a good reason for option a. you never bother making the lists and you know what you think. the reasons is you were crazy in love with a girl or it's time to move to the big city, it's not time to make a proconlist. with the foreign policy opinions. the first problem people face with the war is forming opinions

is beyond that all these reasons are difficult to compare. a lot of apples and oranges on the west. the information you need to assess them is pretty complicated and often missing or sketchy. given that brain power and the time it would take you to consider this list in all its glory, it's staggering. people get paid to do that full time. people might be willing to spend that time about who to marry, but not about the war in iraq. the approach is the problem coming up with the product about the war and more or less consistent with the model. you weigh the pros and cons and about a 50% chance. you come up with an opinion. my coauthoring.

i don't think that people would use this for the model to come up with opinions. they rely on one good reason to support the foreign policies. the adoption of one good reason. i hope that seems good, but there is a good dhans it sounds extreme. at the risk of working against my own cause, let me give you three reasons why we think reason is all you need. the first and most fundamental to suspect what people seize on one good reason is i think it

was mentioned briefly, they are always looking to cut corners. if you read daniel's excellent book thinking fast and slow, huh an excellent summary of a long line of research. in short, the search for and the maintenance of a single good reason is an awful lot easier to your brain. >> the second reason to suspect is that one resonates more powerfully with the affect of psychology and more complex logical inputs. you probably heard the quote attributed to stalin it's a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics. research has shown to the images of children in need for example to statistical appeals. people are willing to sayll