c-span will have live coverage of u.s. history. tonight here on c-span 3 on american history tv prime time at 8:00 eastern, lectures in history. we start with sport and race in the 1980s, follow by ied 20th century white supremacist groups. that's tonight at 8:00 eastern. this week, "washington journal" will devote the entire program each day to key issues facing the new trump administration and congress. on wednesday morning, our issue is on the energy and climate impacted by the new congress and the incoming trump administration. thursday we'll talk about immigration and how president-elect trump and the new congress might change immigration policy. and on friday morning, we'll take a look at the future of the affordable care act and how the republican congress and the

trump administration will repeal a and replace the aca and the key players to watch in the months ahead. be sure to watch "washington journal" at 7:00 a.m. eastern. sunday, in-depth will feature a live discussion on the presidency of barack obama. we're taking your phone calls, tweets, e-mails and facebook questions during the program. our panel includes april ryan, white house correspondent for american urban radio networks and author of "the presidency in black and white, my up close view of three presidents and race in america." princeton university professor eddie glaude, author of "democracy in black, how race still enslaves the american soul" and associate editor of the "washington post," david maraniss author of "barack obama, the story." watch that sunday on noon on book tv on c-span 2. democratic pollster

frederick yang spoke about the use of political surveys and polling data during the 2016 election cycle at an event hosted by new york university law school. his remarks were part of a day-long conversation focusing on various components of the u.s. political system. this portion is about 45 minutes. [ applause ] >> good afternoon, everyone. it's -- there we go. it's great to be here today. i apologize for sitting down. it's been a long year. [ laughter ] it's been a long year. there are other parts of my body that need rest. but, no, thank you very much. it's -- it's an honor to be here and to help walk all of us through what happened on november 8 and what it means going forward. if i'm a little distracted, i apologize. the only other thing that would

be more important to me than talking about this is my daughter's middle school basketball game. they're playing right now. i am the -- as a pollster i'm the unofficial statistician for the team. [ laughter ] and when i told them i wasn't going to be there today because i was doing this, they said "oh, yeah, you're the guy who said hillary clinton would win. maybe we'll get someone else to do our satats from now on." [ laughter ] a couple things then i would urge all of you when the mood strikes if you have questions make a -- i look at this at a couple things. so i think number one, i come here not to praise polling per se but also not to condemn public polling. the national polls for the most part got the numbers almost right. at the end of the day mrs.

clinton will win the popular vote by two points. an aggregation of all the publicly released polls nationally, the last 10 before the november 8 election, had the average clinton margin of 3.4%. number two, those same polls had the average for johnson and stein at 7%. they ended up getting 4.2% in real life. then the third factor -- and, you know, that was part of life in polling is that the national polls of even the ones at the end had an average undecided of 5%. now, that is the one advantage that an actual election has over polls is when you go to the polling booth or when you fill out your ballot and home, you have two options.

voting for one of the candidates or not voting in that race. in polls, because the nature of polls we offer the undecided option, so whereas an election day, right, and the vote for president there was no undecided, there was 5% average undecided in the national pols,s if you take that plus the 3% or more that johnson and stein got on election day added to the volatility of the national polls and in particular if you take it one level down, obviously we don't elect presidents by the popular vote, they're elected by electoral college, if you fact or the battle ground polls in wisconsin, michigan and pennsylvania.

if i look at the three states or the campaign was basically won or the other side lost of wisconsin, michigan, pennsylvania, in addition to the volatili volatility, in real life, one stati statistic, in wisconsin, 10% of voters who were surveyed in the exit polls said they made up their minds on who to vote for president in the last couple days of the election. on saturday -- you all know the days of the week -- the second comey letter came out friday afternoon. in the state of wisconsin of the

10% that voted in the last couple days of the election, i would wage most of those people were after the second comey letter, trump was ahead of clinton by 27 points. the question is what happened with the polling. what happened with the polling is, a, the margin of error, the undecided, the fact that johnson stein got 7%, they got 4% in real life. i want to the say we would be having a slightly different conversation regardless of what party we're for if 50,000 or so votes had switched between wisconsin, michigan, and pennsylvania. mrs. clinton lost those three

states by roughly 106,000 votes total. so if 53,000 had changed hands, maybe we would be talking about how close the election was but an election that she would have been ahead. a couple other things about how to read what happened on election day. i will argue that analysts -- and i think analysts from both parties -- will spend time sifting through the results because i really believe that what happened in november 8 isn't something that was short term, didn't happen the last three or four days, didn't happen in 2016 arguably a lot of what happened or didn't happen november 8, 2016, were the result of long-term trends. we also knew part of the polling

team, the "wall street journal," our national surveys, with what we do with the republican polling firm show the wrong track was 70% range. that when asked do you want to elect a president who will make major changes even if you don't quite know what those changes might were b or would you like to elect someone who will make steady progress by 5-4 in our last poll, the electorate wanted major changes. we asked a question do you agree or disagree that the social and economic systems this country are biased against people like me toward the end we were getting 60%, 65% of americans saying basically the system doesn't represent me anymore. so through the same surveys that suggested that mrs. clinton had the advantage electorally in the

electorate, you could see the signs of discontent within the electorate. i think one of the things -- i'll speak for myself, not necessarily from republican colleagues -- i think one of the things we are trying to reckon with is that i do believe there are some things polls got right and i think one of the things polls got right is i do think donald trump was the most unpopular person to run for president as a major party nominee. i believe that's true. exit polls will show that a lot of trump voters voted for him not because they were voting for him but were voting against somebody. but that's the thing, how could someone with numbers and negatives -- and in our "wall street journal"/nbc news polling, his numbers were 59%, 60%, those are tremendous negatives.

the fact that he could win despite that is something that i think we're still trying to figure out. you want to give the trump campaign and donald trump their due. this was not just people voting against something. there was clearly something they might have been voting for but i think that is one of the things we're trying to figure out the other interesting thing about this election is there are some states where it's not clear that there was a so-called trump phenomenon the state of california, nevada where we picked up a u.s. senate seat and two congressional seats, my home state of maryland. in maryland in 2016 chris van hollen won that senate seat by 25 points. there was a -- there are areas in maryland where a lot of

blue-collar voters live, for example, baltimore county. baltimore county in the 2014 governor's race voted for the republican candidate for governor by 20 points. so i was thinking if there is a trump phenomenon nationally, you might see in the a place like baltimore county which voted for the republican candidate for governor by 20 points in 2014. well, a month ago baltimore county, that same place that voted for the republican candidate for governor by 20 points voted for hillary clinton over donald trump by 17 points. so as a -- as pundits, as analysts, as people who are interested in politics, you want to see uniformity or you want to see a trend, i do think that

it's one thing to look at the numbers nationally but you really do need to look at individual localities because, again, there is not a uniform, i believe, trend as to what happened in -- on november. one of the things i do think that is something to look for is what a lot of the analysts and pundits have noticed since november is the increased or higher turnout in small town rural america, the excerpts, in essence red america getting redder and i do think, again, bearing in mind what i said a second ago that we need to be careful about applying a uniform theory to the entire country but there are parts of the country where areas that romney and

mccain, other republicans did well, trump did even better and turnout in those areas were if not the same as 2012 maybe a little higher. and one of the areas that just comes to mind to me and i'll close by saying this really to me speaks to what happened to democrats in 2016 is elliot county, kentucky. elliot county, kentucky is in eastern kentucky, number one. elliot county, kentucky, is very democratic. there is party registration in kentucky. some states don't have party registration. for every one republican in elliot county kentucky, there are ten and a half democrats. third fact, elliot county kentucky had voted for every democratic candidate for president from 1868 to 2012. so every single election,

presidential election, elliot county kentucky voted for the democratic candidate for president. in 2008, barack obama defeated john mccain in elliot county, kentucky, 61% to 39%. in dwaefl, barack obama beated mitt romney. in 2016, donald trump defeated hillary clinton in elliot county, kentucky, by 26%. th now that's one of the things about numbers, you give these numbers and elliot county, kentucky, feels like montgomery county, maryland. there are 4800 registered voters in elliot county, kentucky, so it's a small sample size.

people ask me as a democratic strategist what happened in pennsylvania, what happened in michigan, what happened in wisconsin? and i would argue again, seriously, we're looking through all the results. i think the anecdote of elliott county, kentucky -- and i know this because i studied pennsylvania particularly -- was replicated in the elliott county kentuckys of pennsylvania, michigan, and wisconsin and 4800 votes by itself doesn't sound like a -- like a lot but if there are 30 counties like that it does make a difference and what i would argue again was a historically close election and i think one of the things, at least on our side of the isle, democrats will look at is not only the lower turnout in some of the urban areas of the country which obviously hurt democrats but also the issue of a place that voted for barack

obama by 33 points just eight years ago, what happened to make them turn around and vote for donald trump by 44 points one month ago? thank you very much. [ applause ] >> we have time for a few questions before the reception and i thought perhaps if you do -- if you'd like to put a question over, we have students here on the side who can take the questions and bring them to us. i'm going to start by asking you, if i could, fred, and i encourage anybody along the same line of questioning. you said, if i understood you correctly, that that's the analysis that has to take place. how could a flip like that occur? what are some of the -- not necessarily -- i don't want to hold you to your own theory but what are the competing theories about how a flip light that

might have occurred? >> well, i think now bob we're talking specifically about elliott county, kentucky? >> we're talking about elliott county or places like that which shows such a dramatic switch from what might have been expected, particularly by those kinds of margins, what might have driven the politics of that kind of electorate? >> well, elliott county, kentucky, is in eastern kentucky. it's not close to but it's in the region that borders west virginia so i think a lot of this was economic and i think obviously a lot of this was job loss over the last few decades, jobs that hadn't come back and, look, i think there is a famous saying from the 1992 campaign "it's the economy, stupid." i do believe that a part of what happened in the elliott county kentuckys of the world was the economy but that's not the only

thing. one of the interesting questions from the national exit polls is the exit pollsters asked the electorate, i'm here for issues, what was the most important issue to you and then they looked at how people voted who picked those issues. so the top issue in 2016 nationally was the economy. 52% of the americans said the economy was the most important issue in how i decided to vote. among those people who picked the economy, they voted for hillary clinton by 52 to 42. that's a good margin, but if the economy is a number one issue, you kind of had -- obviously since -- well, she did win the popular vote but obviously she needed to win the economy of more. we would have hoped the advantage on the economy would have been greater. they asked another set of questions.

which one of the following characteristics or approaches do you want the next president of the united states to have? the number-one answer, 39% plurality, so not a majority but a plurality, said they wanted someone who would bring change to washington. among those voters who said the top quality for the next president was bringing change to washington, they voted for donald trump by 83% to 14%. so there were competing variables out there. i do think issue wise it was about the economy and jobs and in particular, bob, job loss, but there was another strain out there that i was referencing at the beginning that what happened on november 8, i believe, wasn't just november 8, it was a culmination of things. every poll shows this, the historic dissatisfaction with washington, not just democrats, not just republicans, but both parties. the sense that the political and economic system wasn't working

for people like them and, look, if i said and i believe this is true donald trump was the most unpopular person to run for president, he also clearly was one of the most unique people to run for president and if there's a strain out there of voters, americans wanting dramatic change, what better way the express that than voting for someone who was as different from anybody else who ran for president regardless of how popular or unpopular he was. >> thank you. we're getting a lot of questions here so we'll be here until about 10:00 p.m. [ laughter ] i know that's not a problem for you so appreciate it. so without knowing which particular order to begin with, let's start with this. assuming the polls were more or less close, there was an impression that people received

through -- and this is a broad term, obviously -- the media that secretary clinton was on the road to a certain victory, by whatever margin one might imagine. is there an issue, a concern that you have and other pollsters would have about how polling data is communicated to the public? >> well, that's a great question and since i've been relieved of my duties as unofficial statistician to the middle school team, i have a lot of time to think about this. i think this is sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg? it is true, obviously, that if you're a political analyst, again, if either party, cable, broadcast, print, whatever, you look at a lot of different factors to help you basically understand what's going on and look ahead to what will happen

and polling plays a role in that. i think the ten national polls i looked at to come up with the number 7% average for johnson, stein. the 5% undecided. those 10 national polls i'm referring to, only one had trump ahead. okay? so so if you're a political analyst looking at the preponderance of national polls, of the last 10 polls released, nine of them show hillary clinton ahead, you're going to say hillary clinton is probably going to win then there's the one poll that had trump ahead but, again, i'm not saying rerun the election, i'm not saying let's do a do over but that poll that had trump ahead was actually wrong because mrs. clinton did win the popular vote

so i think that -- i think bob and everyone the one critique i would make of polling and 240ez who analyze polls is that when people see a number that's 44-40, to think that 44-40 means 44-40 and not taking into account the undecided, per percent are johnson/stein getting, the margin of error i think -- if you don't -- okay, so the other way i'm answering that question is what if we had no polls? so don't everyone clap, okay? but if we didn't have any po polling where would that leave us? and i think -- i'm not as old as

i look but i've been doing this for 30 years and it's amazing when i started out with peter and jeff 30 years ago. when there was a poll -- and remember, i'm the pollster -- i got excited because i'm like, oh, my gosh, there's a poll in illinois, let's look at it. in 2016 there were literally dozens of polls everyday and i do think not treating every poll the same i think will help -- what are the polls with the track record in the various states? did the polls do likely voters? how long were the polls in the field? again, i do believe that most -- i do believe the fact that there was volatility with voters even to the end is some of the reason why the polls quote/unquote

missed the election. most of the major polls stopped polling saturday/sunday of the election and i know that's -- look, that is late. i know people are thinking well, saturday/sunday, the election was tuesday. as we know, public opinion can move very quickly and i do think -- i don't think it's the only reason why but i do think the fact that the second comey letter came out on friday afternoon and then there was a saturday, sunday, monday, tuesday, i did think that had some impact in changing -- i bet if we polled tuesday morning we would have found a slightly different result. >> well, as it turns out that's the next question about the comey letter. the question here is how do you see the impact of that letter and then the question without gain saying, what about trump's

strength might account for the outcome and if i could just give a friendly amendment here, the second comey letter was exculpatory. so explain, then, how you see that potentially working against her over the last four decades if in fact that was the letter she would have wanted to see before the votes were cast? i think that there are going to be lots of theories about what happened and some of them may even be true. i think -- even in -- we did the nbc news/"wall street journal" poll. we had mrs. clinton ahead by four points if i'm recalling correctly as of -- we got out of the field saturday, it was sunday morning. it looked like she was -- the internals, the subgroups --

again, it was a national poll, not a poll of all 50 states, it looked like she didn't have it locked up. but it looked like she was headed to win. but even if that poll, she had dropped from a previous poll and the other thing in poll polls but what is not just the results now but previously? the trend for her was the race was narrowing but at that point it was more not that trump was gaining is but that some of her vote was going to johnson and stein or undecided. the second comey letter was exculpatory but i think, bob, in campaigns, especially if you are a candidate with strong head winds, 70% wrong direction, the

majority wanting a president who would make major changes, two-thirds or so saying the political system was biased against people like them, sort of conditions that would favor an insurgent candidate. she wasn't the incumbent per se but she was and trump for a lot of reasons, not just he was the out-of-power party, trump himself, he was the insurgent so you could see how those things, making life difficult for the clinton campaign and i would argue and, again this is something all of us will be thinking about and analyzing in the weeks to come, i do think that second comey letter sort of put the whole issue back on the public consciousness. and if you think about it, it's kind of like a courtroom. the last argument that voters heard from both sides was

e-mail. she didn't do anything wrong, but the e-mail once again and for trump -- i think -- and, again, this is something where people should check the record. i think one of the things i noticed was how someone had seemed to have taken away his twitter account in the last couple days of the election. i don't think he commented personally on the second comey letter and that instead the narrative for the trump campaign was he was going to go to michigan, he was going to wisconsin, he was going to pennsylvania and that was his closing argument. and i think that's one theory about what happened. i think there are a couple other theories in all of those -- could be equally true because again when you have an election like this that was a surprise, it's really not one thing you can point to, it's a combination of things. i know that's not a succinct 140

character answer but i happen to think that's the reality of what happened. >> okay, thank you. next question. this is about elliott county, kentucky, but i assume it's meant to explore the theme more broadly how would you estimate the potential role of sexism? first presidential nominee who is a woman, what did that figure into this enormous reversal of sentiment? >> i believe that at some level had to be a factor but you know i don't think the number one issue i think there were a whole lot of strengths and weaknesses that hillary clinton brought to the campaign.

if her gender had been reversed would she have -- what would have happened in elliott county, kentucky? again i think the result probably would have been the same. because o.k. so you change the gender but you -- you change the party? do you change her experience and resume? again, all the things that you could see in all the polls, even those that had her ahead, the head winds she was dealing with, the dissatisfaction with government, the unhappiness with the status quo, voters wanting change, i think okay genter might have been an issue but there were other factors that i think were equally if not more important. >> thank you. this question, the medium income of trump voters in the exit polls of 23 primaries is

$71,000. and rural non-college educated white voters only made up 17% of the electorate. how does that square with the narrative of why trump won? >> well, i think that those are broad numbers nationally and i think in some of these battleground states there were higher proportions of those groups plus, look, i think the numbers might have changed a little bit since i paid attention to this but in the state of wisconsin, which mrs. clinton lost by 11,000 votes there were roughly 30,000 haver votes in the city of milwaukee in 2016 than there was in 2012 so i think the proportion in wisconsin of that last group, bob, if it was 17% nationally i

think it was maybe 20%, 21% in wisconsin, you take that, you take the lower turnout in a strong democratic area like milwaukee and those -- all those small things add up to an 11,000 vote defeat. again, remember, when you have a situation like this in which 104,000 votes out of 12 or 14 million cast in pennsylvania, michigan, and wisconsin. i don't think it's just one thing you can point to, yeah, it's not like 100% of wisconsinites were rural non-college educated white voters but if they were one out of five, lower turnout in urban areas, that adds up again to a narrow defeat.

>> thank you. i have two questions here, they're not -- i suppose they're not entirely unrelated so i'll put them together since we don't want to hold you longer than i think is fair given how we're planning out the day do you think the general population shift to urban areas will in the future make it less likely for this kind of result to occur? and related to that is what about the apparent absence of of from the particular hoped for levels of participation among young people. >> that's -- look i think one of the disappointments as -- on the democratic side of things was how we were hoping and expecting more robust turnout, for example, with millennials, and it just didn't happen. and i guess the thing is we know they're out there. we know that they -- and we know

that when they vote they vote democratic, yeah, but one of the challenges of 2016 was they just didn't vote in the numbers that we had hoped for. is it a message issue for the democrats? was it a candidate issue for the democrats? was it organizational or logistic? i don't know. i think -- and, again, you know, we talk about a lot of the analysis on national terms because that's where most data is available but i think in california, which, again, if you look at all the california results, you would not know that donald trump had been elected president of the united states. you know, latino and young people turnout was fairly high. so look i think as evident by

the press, both parties but in particular the democratic party is going through a period of self-intro special election and analysis and i think one of the things is we know no, i think one of the things is we know we have the votes to win elections, especially national elections. what was a miscue in 2016 we can avoid in 2018 and especially 2020. >> thank you. question, the exit poll suggests 30% of latinos voted for trump. do you have confidence that number is within the ballpark. it seemed higher than predictions of how he would fare in that area of the electorate. >> i think we're not quite sure yet if the 30% number of latinos is quite right. you know, but look, i thought --

well, they are the growing demographic group in american politics. 30% would seem to be a high number to me especially given the things he said during the campaign. but look, i do know, for example, i was fortunate enough to work on katherine cortez masters campaign in nevada. i'm pretty sure since senator cortez won in nevada and hillary clinton won nevada, at least in nevada he didn't get 30% of latinos. he didn't do that well in california. maybe florida is a different issue. maybe texas is a different issue. 30% would seem high to me but we really have to look at this state by state. >> combining two more and one after that. thank you for hanging in there with us. the question is about whether,

in fact, the issue people have had with polling suggesting polling nationally was misleading, whether what we have is a problem with the numbers, i think you partly answered this question before. with the numbers or the way the numbers were read, i suppose your answer to that -- interpretation has a lot to do with it. >> i'd say, i think, again, the last 10 national polls had a clinton advantage plus 3.4%. a couple of days, she was ahead in the national popular vote by 1.8, 1.9%. that's not that far off. but look -- but there was a sense, i think, from the polls and the analysts that it was an election that mrs. clinton was very likely to win. look, if you're a normal human

being and you see nine out of ten polls saying she's ahead, you're going to draw the unobvious conclusion that she's probably going to win the election. look, i think that -- i also think the other sort of intangible, and i hate to keep going back to this, but a good pollster like a good candidate stays on message, i think one of the things as sort of -- look, i think -- i think if you hook all of us up to a lie detector test, we would have said, yes, we believe she's going to win but there are -- but it's going to be difficult. there are things where donald trump could win, the head winds she was facing. i think the big sticking point to sort of going over to the other side, which ultimately is where we are now that he could win was how unpopular he was.

and i think one of the things -- you know, i think one of the things we underestimated as analysts -- maybe i should say me and not we, not to condemn everybody else, we also said this, too, in analysis but obviously it's not as provocative as saying he was the most unpopular person to run for president, mrs. clinton was the second most unpopular person to run for president. i think at the end of the day the analysts probably -- well, obviously should have given that more weight. if really this is a flip of the coin to voters, were there other things in the polling that should have been looked at beyond 3.4% ahead, 2 points ahead, all those things, the right direction wrong track. the fact that a lot of americans still believed that they had

recovered from the recession. again, the strong majority who said the economic and political systems of this country were biased against them. i think maybe if we had paid more attention to those signs that were plainly in view but we were distracted by donald trump the most unusual person to run for president, the most unpopular, we could have maybe given a clearer view of what ultimately did happen. >> this is the last one, which is kind of a follow-up. this is, again, combining two. so in responding to the experience, whether it's in structuring turnout or trying to decide, for example, how to compensate for the number of voters who are harder to reach now, shift from land lines to cell phones, do you think not necessarily only as a result of this election but more generally there's going to be a move within the polling industry to find some way to adjust for those kinds of issues? >> first of all, i know this the last question. i feel like i need a couch to

lie down on. but look, the short answer is yes. obviously the polling industry goes through this. you know, as you'll recall in 2012, it was more that the republican polsters had quote, unquote, got the race wrong. if one side or the other gets it wrong, we're professionals. we don't like it, honestly, if anyone gets it wrong, because our job is to get it right, whether you're a democrat or republican pollster. we did do self-reflection after industry after that. it wasn't just a republican thing, it was polling industry. look, i think the -- i know some people might believe this, every pollster out there, whether democrat or republican, we want to try to get this right.

i think one of the challenges for industry is when -- a good poll tries to eliminate bias. a particular bias and who is selected to take the poll. it was a heck of a lot easier in the good old days of 10 or 20 years ago when the predominant communication device of the american public was a land line. it's obviously gotten a lot more complicated now, a lot more diverse. i think polling still has a role. it's important to know what people think. but i do think i'm not just -- we're not just starting on november 9th, we started two, four, six years ago. what is going to be the best -- also, let's not forget, folks, the most efficient and effective way to truly get a random sample

of people that ensures that an international poll has as much chance of being contacted if they live in anchorage, alaska, as in maryland. in really good days when my mentor and your friend peter hart was doing this, i won't embarrass peter and you by saying how long ago that was, a lot of the polls were done door to door, face-to-face. clearly if you're talking about trying to reach people, that's probably quote, unquote, the best way of conducting research because even if you don't have a land line, someone can get you, reach out to you. you've got to live somewhere. the issue with that is it takes -- when lie back at our old polls at the firm and it was considered state-of-the-art, a

typical statewide survey would take 30 days. if bob bauer is not home you have to schlep five blocks over and maybe they aren't home. obviously it's a time consuming process. number one, polling needs to be accurate. polling needs to be effective. polling needs to be efficient. a 30-day fuel period or 15 days or 20 days just isn't practical given where we are now in society. we have technology, sound like the $6 million man. we have the technology, we just need it figure out what this new polling world looks like. maybe a blend of new

technologies, maybe something else. we are all striving to figure out how to do our job better. >> on behalf of everybody here, you're one of the nation's premier polsters and we're grateful you could be with us today. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> president obama is meeting today with japanese prime minister shinzo abe in hawaii. together they are going lay a wreath at the world war ii memorial there. prime minister abe will be the first japanese leader to visit the memorial constructed on the waters above sunk be "uss arizona." c-span will have live coverage at 4:10 eastern. tonight here on c-span3 on american history tv prime time at 8:00 eastern, lectures in history. we start with sport and race in the 1980s followed by coroners in 19th century sous, u.s. refugee policy and 20th century white supremacist groups of

that's tonight on american history tv prime time at 8:00 easte eastern. >> this week on c-span prime time tonight at 8:00 eastern president barack obama and prime minister abe visit naval base at pearl harbor. prime minister abe first japanese leader to visit the site of the attack that launched u.s. involvement in world war ii. at 8:00 a review of house and senate hearings on 2016 topics including flint, michigan, water crisis and wells fargo unauthorized account scandal. >> seriously? you found out that one of your divisions had created 2 million fake accounts, had fired thousands of employees for improper behavior, and had cheated thousands of your own customers and you didn't even once consider firing her ahead of her retirement. >> thursday 8:00 p.m. eastern,

we remember political figures that passed away in 2016, including former first lady nancy reagan and supreme court justice antonin scalia. friday night at 8:00, our in memorandum program continues with shimon peres, muhammad ali, former senator and astronaut john glenn this week in prime time on c-span. join us on tuesday for live coverage of opening day of the new congress. watch the official swearing in of new and elected members of house and senate and election of the speaker of the house. our all day live coverage of the day's events from capitol hill begins at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span and c-span.org. or you can listen to it on free c-span radio app. new york's u.s. attorney recently spoke on corporate culture and governance and discussed insider trading prosecutions. his comments at the "wall street

journal's" ceo council meeting in washington, d.c., are about 20 minutes. [ applause ] >> good afternoon. thank you for joining us. >> thank you. >> so given that part of your job involves prosecuting companies and occasionally ceos, what are you doing talking to a room full of ceos? >> you know, over time, i have come to really love the sound of nervous laughter. [ laughter ] >> thank you. >> so you talk a lot about the importance of culture in companies and that's actually something you consider in charging decisions. why is it so important. it feels like a rather amorphous phase. >> people understand that in addition to being chief officer in manhattan and of my office,

more than a lawyer, i'm the ceo of my institution. we have 450 employees. i have to make decisions every day about how we allocate resources, who we promote, what our priorities are, more in line of being head of an institution rather than just being a lawyer. i think from my office, for an institution to succeed and do well, what it's prime mission is, which is not to make widgets but make sure justice is done, i have to care about culture a lot. no ceo worth his or her salt would think otherwise. for us it is actually required by justice department policy to take into account things like pervasiveness of criminal conduct at company before you decide to charge a company, take into account issues of recidivism, take into account what compliance policies are. all those things make up a culture of a case. turns out we bring a lot of cases, inside trader, accounting, pobzi schemes, public corruption. some companies have a lot of bad

apples and some have fewer. my armchair judgment has been after doing this seven years, there's something about the culture of thissome place that is keeps corruption and misconduct more in check than other places. the difference is not necessarily what people get paid. it has to do with something in the ether of the place and culture of the place and leadership that cares you have a culture of integrity in place. >> every company has compliance, rules, all sorts of best practices. what is a specific role of a ceo. what does ceo need to be telling to the organization. >> it's a cliche for everyone in the room to talk about the top. there is a reason some things are cliches, because they matter. i often say it's incredibly important given my line of work that cop appliance policy is important. you need to have a compliance department in the same way that the country has title 18,

basically criminal code, lots and lots of rules and regulations and you need them more or less depending on your perspective. as a country we need a charter and we call it the constitution, which is much shorter. it sets out fundamental principals on how the company should conduct itself. i think the company should have the same mind-set. you have compliance policy. in some cases they run 100 pages or longer. they are by a million lawyers. also need a charter for the place so people understand not just that you're supposed to follow these particular rules, the ftc or whoever cares about them but there is a general principle that has to come from the top. i'm very impressed when people tell me as they do at forums like this and others, a new employee comes bo a hedge fund or trading company, general council said, compliance policy. i wanted to ask does someone say to those people as they come in

particularly in the midst of prosecutions, does swab say, like the ceo, you should understand separate and apart from regulations we have like compliance policy, we don't lie, we don't chief, we don't steal. if you do, you're out. we don't care what your book of business is, those things make a difference. i asked once at a meeting where a company that you may have heard of was pleading for leniency. as part of the consideration -- again, there are many other considerations. we asked the question, could you give me an example, because person after person after person had been indicted and convicted at the company. i said, can you give me an example of one time the ceo of the company in an e-mail and a speech, in a talk, in a phone conference said, i care that people do their job honestly and with integrity and there was deafening silence. that's not dispositive but that tells you something. it was not a shock to me the

culture of that place was terrible. >> was that s.e.c. capital? >> could be. >> i wanted to ask the audience a question before i asked about the importance of general councils if we could call it up here. how worried are you about corruption within your company? very worried, somewhat concerned, not at all? you just mentioned general councils. what is the importance in a company? do you look for someone to be a truth to power presence? >> yeah. i think it depends on the nature of the industry, the nature of the company. generally speaking the general council is the conscious of the firm. if the conscious of the firm doesn't have juice or power or respect from the rank and file people at the company but more importantly from the ceo, it's not going to matter much. i'll give you another story about that same company whose initials you mention add moment ago. in the indictment against s.e.c. capital, we actually alleged that one of the things that went wrong was they were planning to hire a guy known to be --

suspecting of someone insider trading at the firm. that was vetted and known. the general council's office of the hedge fund opposed the hiring of the person. that was overruled. it's not shocking that shortly thereafter that person began to engage in insider trading at the company and was convicted and pled guilty. so i think you need -- i think people need to have good counsel generally speaking. i have a chief counsel in my office. it wouldn't matter if i had one or not if i didn't pay attention to her advice. so i think the person, i think it's true when the cfo are in positions of counselling on the law, not compliance, but other kinds of risk and competition and finances and everything else, i think you want to surround -- i think generally leadership involves surrounding your selves with people who can talk to you like a peer does and that's true especially of the

general counsel. >> what is your impression of the result under the circumstances from our polling question. 9% very worried, 60% very concerned, 30% not at all. are 30% in debl. >> the 9% that are very worried, if you could come see me afterwards, leave your number. i don't know who the not at all people are. it's interesting you would vote not at all even if you didn't think there was a problem. i think off people hedge. you can't always know. there are some companies, it's great. if that's what your view is, must mean reputationally you're doing something correct because it does turn out to be often the case in my experience when we investigate people at certain companies sometimes there's a lot of surprise and sometimes there's no surprise at all. in the instances where we charge somebody where there was no surprise at all, reputationally in the industry, galleon group,

for example, the case was finished so i can talk about it, there's not a lot of surprise there was a lot of bad conduct going on there. he got convict and spending more time in prison. more surprise when we arrested gupta who had a different kind of reputation. i'm assuming the people around him at the time would have answered the question, what do you think is the level of corruption or misconduct involving the head of mckenzie a lot of people might have said not at all and they would be rock. >> you've raised insider trading, you've raised criticism for overreaching on insider cases, also a sense of prosecuting some of them in the media. >> first the vast majority of insider trading cases we brought have resulted in convictions and convictions being upheld on appeal including the most high-profile including what i mentioned, s.e.c. capital, roger kbupt, a and any number of

others. matthew martoma, a small subset the appeals court in new york changed the law and got wrong. there's now a case pending before supreme court, ninth circuit supreme court, i was at the supreme court argument some weeks ago and i'll say there's cautious optimism the supreme court, which is no huge fan necessarily of impressive prosecution if you think of virginia, cautious optimism supreme court going to correct insider trading. >> so they will actually reverse it? >> cautious optimism that that will happen based on the question. >> the current supreme court. >> the current supreme court. >> that's the sense one got from -- i'm not prejudging, making a prediction, wagering money on it but there was clearly a deep sense of concern based on the questions you heard

from the lawyers at the supreme court argument that it didn't seem to be right or reasonable that you could be, for example, the ceo of a company. if you're not expecting any concrete financial gain in return, financial gain in remember, you could three days before releasing your earnings bequeath it as a quift on your son, daughter, college roommate knowing they are going to trade and make 10, 20, $30 million in the trade. that didn't seem to strike people as prudent. >> what about trying cases in the press. >> we don't do that. looks i think it's incredibly important in my job to talk about problems you see. obviously first responsibility is to make sure anybody you charge gets a free trial. i haven't spoken anywhere outside of the four corners of the complaint, indictment. when you have a spate of

problems, a gang problem in new york, i talk about it. when you have a prescription pill problem that is killing more people than traffic disebts and guns these days, more people oding from prescription bills and dying and cocaine and heroin combined, then you talk about that problem. when you have assemblymen and senators in my state going to prison -- it's also to deter, raise public awareness with public health or corruption problem. that i do. i talk about it. i get invited -- part of the reason presumably i get invited to speak to prestigious groups like this and wall street traders but also doctors and business students is because people have some interest in knowing what we think about prosecution, what the problems are, how the good people can solve those problems. i speak at every business school around. i've been doing it for a number

of years. i'm particularly proud of the fact i go to harvard business school and every february for five or six years running i speak to the entire first year class. i say we're going to talk about insider trading but more prodly ethics and how they should conduct themselves to avoid problems. i'm here. it's not just a scared straight program for white collar people, although it's a little bit that, and i'm not just directing my words to the ears of the two or three of you at harvard business school who statistically speaking are likely to commit serious securities fraud, although i know who you are, it's more to direct my words to the ears of the vast majority of people, perhaps everyone, who has integrity, honest, wants to do the right thing, wants to make money or change the world in some way in the correct way, in an upstanding way. the problem is getting to my basic point i like to make in

front of groups like this is the bad people in your organizations, other people tend to know about them. like i said, it wasn't a surprise when we started arresting people s.e.c. capital, people in the know. there wasn't a surprise what was dpoog on at "deepwater horizon," wasn't a surprise at the galleon group, wasn't a surprise what was going on at madoff. if you can just figure out a way going back to your culture question earlier, if leaders of an organization can figure out a way putting the right team together and develop the right culture, you can nab these problems much earlier than when the fbi gets involved. when the fbi gets involved, generally it's too late for you. >> for your favorite question about your future. there is a role for you, would you be interested in a position in the trump administration carrying on your current role. >> i was bog to put in for secretary of state but some guy last night beat me to it. >> but seriously, your interests, could they be aligned? >> i do my job.

i love my job. it's the best job i'll everv probably the best job i'll ever have. i serve at the pleasure of the president. that's true with president obama and will be true with president trump. if a president decides they want to replace me, i'll ride off into the sunset. the work -- separate and apart from me and whoever leads the office, we've been around since 1979. the office itself is an apolitical office. i don't serve -- i said this to my office last week. i don't get paid to serve the president, i get paid to serve the public, in the interest of justice, no matter who the president is. that's what we do in our office. as for kind of work we've been doing, which is very aggressive policing of a lot of things including albany and wall street, it seems to me that part of the election on both sides was about whether systems are rigged. i can tell you from cases we have brought there's a lot that's rigged on the street and

in politics and the people in my office in an apolitical way, democrat and republican, who work there, democrat and republican who get prosecuted, they spend day after day after day doing those kinds of cases. i would like to think that the level of aggressiveness in law enforcement will remain the same when you're talking about things like keeping the markets fair and keeping government honest. i don't see any -- i don't foresee any departure unless i'm missing something big. >> you think there could be dangers politicizing the role of prosecutions. >> everyone has to be careful about that. i'm not saying that will happen. i'm saying if the way we conduct ourselves in the office has always been apolitical and you go after the facts and go after whoever the targets are, no matter who they are, how much money they have, who they are connected to, i think we have a very, very strong i don't want to call it bipartisan or nonpartisan record of going after folks who violated oath of office. separate and apart from

financial institutions, we do a lot of big things but one of the big thing that gets attention is public corruption prosecutions. we simultaneously charged convicted senate majority leader who was republican and assembly speaker who was democrat. we're blind to what party they are from. >> nondenominational. can we have a couple of minutes for questions. anybody from the 9% from the chart want to speak up? right here. >> do we have to give our name and company for this segment? >> yes, you do. >> i know who you are. your last five years of tax returns. >> so preet, when you started, you talked about being ceo of your organization. i think that's absolutely right and the top that matters. it's also measurement that matters, what metric you measure. sometimes too much focus you get too much activity. sometimes too much sales you get activity you don't like. i was regulator for pressurery, oversaw irs, know how to measure people in government. a lot of times you're measured

on how many convictions you get, how much money and fines. your job bring to financial mark, not how many you prosecute, how many you get done. how do you balance that message to your self, not your people saying go and get as much as you can rather than bring trust and confidence and results not how many you convict and how much revenue you bring in. >> that's a good question. it's very, very difficult. you have to be careful about metrics. we talk about that all the time. i do in my office, maybe you do versions, state of the office presentation, hour long power point and talk about things. some of what i do is talk about the number of trials, how much the level of criminal fines has been and how many convictions we've had in particular areas but then i caution them. i say we're putting up metrics. no metric can measure how well we're doing when you're in the business of something these supposed to be pure and about doing justice. also you absolutely have this problem, any business book you

read or business leader you talk to, if you start having quotas of how we want people to perform, people are going to gain the system in a way to give you what you want. police commissioner talked about this all the time. ray kelly and bill bradley. if you start saying there have to be a certain number of arrests out of a precinct, they start manufacturing things. so i don't have a great answer to that other than to talk a lot about how we care about how we do things in the office, to not have overemphasis on numbers. i do say if in one year we had 100 public corruption prosecutions and the next year we had 30, well, then you've got to look at that and see what went wrong. one year 20, the next year 30 and look at general trends. we don't have profit loss numbers. the one thing i do like to say when people try to take away our budget and don't appreciate some parts of government that work really well.

my budget for that office, 450 employees is $50 million. adoption on the year between asset forfeiture and criminal penalties and losses avoided we bring in 50 to 60 to 80 times that, which is better than any hedge fund i've heard of. >> one more question. >> i have one. >> right here. >> mine is a -- >> my favorite. >> i want to know if you watch billions. >> that's a highly fictionalized show in many, many ways. but i think he's a great actor. >> so one last question for me. we've had waves of insider trading prosecutions. '80s, '90s. recently. are we getting better at corporate governance in general over the last 20, 30 years. a lot of concern been shown corporate governance laws been passed?

are we any better or not? >> that's a broad question. are we getting better generally? history tends to teach people get better at one thing and bad people figure out how to screw it up in another way. what i feel and understand anecdotally, some of what our cases have done and regulatory enforcement actions have done have not necessarily eradicated bad people from places but general counsels and good ceos of companies to look at their fellow folks in the same industry, banks or otherwise and say there but for the grace of god go i. what can i do to make sure this doesn't happen here. how do we have better screening and hiring, better early warning systems to see if people are engaging in bad activity and conduct. my sense of things is based on the interest in events that i go to and the kinds of things people say to me, the people have gotten better. for example we have this issue with expert networks when we first started bringing insider

trading cases. i think people's use of expert networks and what they meant has gotten better. that doesn't mean other people aren't figuring out ways to undermine the system and do bad things. i don't know if i can proclaim everything better over the last 30 years, i do think a lot of folks have done a better job of trying to get on the ball. >> thank you very much. [ applause ] president obama is meeting today with japanese prime minister shinzo abe in hawaii. together they are going to lay a wreath at the world war ii memorial there. prime minister abe will be the first japanese leader to visit the memorial constructed on the waters above the sunken "uss arizona." c-span will have live coverage at 4:10 eastern. tonight here on c-span3 on american history tv prime time at 8:00 eastern, lectures in history. we start with sport and race in the 1980s followed by coroners

in the 19th century south, u.s. refugee policy since world war ii and 20th century white supremacist groups. that's tonight on american history tv prime time at 8:00 eastern. >> warrant journal will devote the entire program each day to key issues facing new trump administration and congress. on wednesday morning our issue topic is energy and nmptal policy. we'll discuss how energy and climate issues might be impacted by new congress and incoming trump administration. thursday we'll talk about immigration and how president-elect trump and the new congress might change immigration policy. on friday morning, we'll take a look at the future of the affordable care act and how the republican congress and trump administration will repeal and replace aca and key players to watch in the months ahead. be sure to watch washington journal at 7:00 a.m. eastern.

>> the presidential inauguration of donald trump is friday january 20th. c-span will have live coverage of all the day's events and ceremonies. watch live on c-span and c-span.org and listen on the free c-span radio app. the heads of honeywell and blackstone also took part in the conference in washington, d.c. the two leaders talked about the division between wall street and main street and what the new administration will mean for business. this is about a half hour. we wanted to take a look at

what the political campaign and public opinion in general did to the reputation of big business, your companies. we've asked david cote and stephen schwarzman, both ceos, took a beating from the left and right campaign this season. so please join me in welcoming dave cote, steve schwarzman. dennis berman our finance editor is going to interview them. thank you. >> so great to have you guys with us. so what went wrong? you guys are like poll situations out here your selves what went wrong?

why is the reply taste of business so poor particularly as it relates to politics and the voting public? dave? >> in terms of what went wrong if the question is geared towards the view of business in general. >> i didnyes. >> i actually remember complaining about this long before the financial crisis and the election. i remember having the discussion with a couple of people, les was there, the guy who runs cbs. i said, geez, how come you guys can't make a movie where the ceo is the hero and like rescues somebody from a burning building. >> this group likes that. >> something where we're portrayed positively because we're a force for good the robbery the country lives as we will as it does, has the

standard of living it does is because of business. i think you need certain regulations to maintain a certain common denominator but at the end of the day we're the reason the country is productive, innovative and standard of living is so good. that message started getting lost long ago. i wouldn't be surprised if you track it back to my generation in the '60s when people started looking at business differently. >> baby boomers to blame? >> i don't know if it's baby boomers. it's like an evolution, started in the early 2000 with enron and world com and a series of iss s issues. then it got sort of quite and then you had the financial crisis. there were a lot of problems for the financial crisis, six or

seven factors. but the way the legend got told, it was only the banks. no one else contributed to anything. that kind of focus carried on. it became really good politics. it helped elect people, and it's continued, actually, to this y day. and so i think it was inculcated into popular culture. it was repeated. and it's a tough thing to run from. >> right. so if we view the results of last tuesday's election, somewhat clearly a referendum on politics in washington, but perhaps a referendum on business as well. the mood of the people who voted the way they did seems to be antiestablishment. people on stages, in washington hotels, wearing ties. the mood appears not to have changed, at least from the

populace's voice, would you agree with that, dave, or no? >> i don't know that i would look at it as an anti-business vote. most of the people that i talk to who did vote for donald trump would say that they just feel like things aren't working, and that things need to change, and it doesn't get a lot more specific than that other than things need to change. we don't know what, but we need to take a chance that things are going to change. i don't know that it was a lot more complicated than that. >> right. so if there's one concrete thing that you guys can do, you've been involved in washington, to your credit you've served a lot and been involved here. steve, you've been in business a long time. if there's one concrete thing you would recommend to people here about what they might do to change perceptions both in washington and beyond is what? >> i think things are going to change. i think they'll change a lot. and if you're a new president and you promised to create jobs,

the mechanism you're going to use to change those jobs is the business community. so the business community now becomes front and center. it's got to work. it's got to create jobs. and the new administration is going to do it with a lot of different policies. you're going to see very substantial changes in regulation. the financial community has been really constrained to extend credit. that was part of regulatory changes. it's gone so far everywhere in the developed world that growth has been reduced way below potential. europe, u.s., other democracies. and as a result, you have all these unhappy people. there are other factors as well. but without extending credit, shrinking financial institutions, economic growth

tends to correlate almost one-to-one with credit extension. we have shrunk credit ruthlessly. and that's going to be reversed. you're going to have a different tax regime with lower corporate taxes, lower individual taxes. you're going to have monies brought back in the trillions from abroad. you're going to have different tax regime abroad. there are going to be so many of these changes. i think what's going to happen, it's going to really force growth from a policy perspective. >> you're excited? >> i am. >> does it create real substantive growth, steve, or is it just the appearance of growth, that unless business leaders truly invest, may not sustain itself? >> well, i think you need the preconditions to grow. you've had almost no productivity in the united states over the last x years.

part of the reason, i think, is so much money has been diverted into regulatory uses, without any result from it from a productivity point of view. so i think productivity is going to go up. overall economic activity is going to go up. and i think the business community is going to look infinitely better at the end of a two- to four-year run than they have for quite a long time. >> clearly i would wager the sums spent on regulation, however big they may be, are far less than the sums spent on buybacks and dividends. it seems there has to be a change in the mindset of ceos in this room who are willing to say, i'm going to build a factory. i'm going to invest in other capital spending. they haven't been doing that. >> if i can support steve's point, though, i do think that

as we start to grow more, which i think is a possibility, that that perception of business we were talking about is a lot less concerning to people if you're growing 3% than if you're growing 1.7. i do think that happens. one of the interesting things that has surprised me with this election is, it feels like there's a real change in the animal spirits, if you will, of business people. and there's just a different feeling amongst business people when you talk to them, this whole change aspect, which i have to admit i did not forecast. and i've been quite encouraged to see it in this past week. and that, along with some of the changes that steve was talking about, that could create a very different dynamic. if we could end up growing more, people are going to feel better about it. >> if people believe it, it becomes so. >> it does happen. >> i think we have a poll question for people here, i

think we asked this very question. can we call that question up? maybe if we can't, we can do a show of hands. do we have the question, guys? no, we don't. okay. how about a raise of hands. how many people here feel animal spirits? >> yeah, i do too. >> that's about a third, 40%. how many of you are really willing to spend money in a way that you were not before because of the way you feel? >> we have to see change. >> but my point is they are the change, are they not? >> it's been a week. >> the stock market is up 6%. the stock market is up a lot. so i don't disagree with what you're saying but they have to be willing to spend. >> two weeks ago, had you done the same poll and seen how many hands raised, i think it would have been zero. >> does anyone here want to say what would be the thing that would make them actually spend? does anyone want to speak up here? hold that thought, maybe we'll get to you. do you feel there's a renewed,

almost moral obligation for u.s. companies to think about americans and american jobs and american success and productivity, perhaps in ways that they were not previously? >> i've always thought that was a slippery slope for any large company to start thinking that way. and i pride myself on being an american, and i'm very clear when i go around the world that i'm american and think that way. but as business people, you should always be thinking about productivity, how can you have the best products, how are you going to participate in every single market, how are you going to obey the law everywhere. and i don't think it's a good dynamic for the country or shareholders if you're always thinking about this is what has to happen in the u.s. first. i don't know that that's always the best way to run a company. >> steve? >> i think dave sketched it out right. our objective with companies is

to make them grow at least 50% faster than the s&p. and there are a lot of different ways, when you're doing that, to create jobs. some of them are here. some of them are abroad. you try and find the optimal mix. nothing stays the same in business. so where there was, you know, sort of very substantial offshoring, some of that works, then people find out, jeez, that's a little kludgy, we ought to domicile our people back here. there's an evolution going on. i think there may be some tax regimes to encourage people to have more jobs here. and that's part of the change that's going to occur. >> it seems that a lot of politicians believe that business peoples' job is to create jobs, which it actually is not. a businessperson's job is to create profits, of which jobs are -- >> fundamentally, if you're a

businessperson and you think your job is to grow quickly. >> exactly. jobs should be a by-product. >> if you grow your companies really fast, what happens is you hire more people. >> correct. >> we have 700,000 people who work at our companies. we're the fourth largest employer in the united states. you know, people think blackstone is just a financial company or something. we're quite substantial. and if we're driving all the time to grow fast, because that's when you sell an asset, you get more money for the faster growing the company is. and we keep hiring more and more people. that's good for america. >> do you think people in washington understand that distinction? a by-product and not a primary goal? >> no. no. you get the same thing when you hear a politician say that they're going to go to washington and create jobs. they're not going to create jobs. they can create an environment where jobs can be created.

but the only way they create jobs is if they hire more government folks. and that's not a good use of taxpayer money. >> right. so what's your perspective then about the way business can improve its image and reputation right now? going through all the things we just discussed, it still seems like you're in a way saying, well, it's washington's fault. clearly business has a renewed responsibility to advocate for itself in ways that it was not before. >> it gets a little difficult. what are you going to do, start taking out full page ads? >> we would love that, actually. we can get you a good deal. >> the unfortunate part is we're the only ones that read it. >> that's not true, approaching 3 million, i must say. but seriously. is there anything you can do to improve your reputation? >> i would say to the extent

that we can be helping the country grow, and advocating policies that help the country grow, that's probably the single biggest thing we can do. >> and pr is a waste of time? >> i don't think it falls on ready ears. >> we have a slightly different approach. we're huge members of many, many communities, as honeywell is. our people volunteer a lot of the time. we do all kinds of things for our communities. we have a very active foundation. we do a lot of stuff in sustainability, because it is profitable, actually, to do green type projects with our companies. and if you fight this fight one person at a time, one good act at a time, and if everyone did that, and if companies did what

preet bar atta was talking about, run a complete ethical environment and let everyone know about it, i think if you took a number of companies in america and everyone behaved like that, you would definitely change the attitudes towards business. >> what would you say to americans -- >> i'm sorry. i have to disagree just a bit. i think all the stuff you just talked about, my guess is if we asked everybody here, they do all the same things. but still this attitude is there. >> so what would you say then to americans who believe the system is rigged and business is a part of that rigged system? >> it's not. >> okay. >> i wish it was. my job would be a hell of a lot easier. so would yours. >> steve, china. you spent a lot of time there. you made a large investment in the schwarzman scholars program. given your experience over there, what have you learned

about business and government from your experience in china? >> china is a completely different system. you know, they don't exactly have rule of law. so it's little bit of an adventure, when you're there. one thing you learn is, you know, it's good to have an american-type framework, legally, ethically and so forth. however, chinese workers work really hard. sometimes they're difficult to get to do exactly what you want the first time or two. but these are very entrepreneurial people. and they work harder than people almost everywhere in the world, leave americans aside. they have real will to win.

and it's almost the whole country with the will to will. and that's how you get these extremely high growth rates. you can do it through debt policies and other things where, you know, one can argue that they've pushed the limits of some of the things that they can do. they're clever. they don't mind setbacks. it's not a problem. they set extremely ambitious goals. and they don't mind if they don't get there the way they originally tried. so that's in a way admirable. and it's what has made almost every analyst wrong about what would happen in china. >> is there any one aspect of the chinese way of doing business that you wish would be more integrated into the u.s.? >> yes. >> go on. >> well, partly it's this

endless will to win. and not stopping. and continual innovation. it's almost like everybody's an entrepreneur. >> has america gone soft, then, in comparison? >> has america gone soft? as compared to when? the 1880s? yes. so we've had a great run in america. and, you know, the number of people who really, you know, sort of approach things with the zealous perspective of some of the chinese is not as high as it might be. >> but the run isn't over here, right? there's so many things to be hopeful for about america. >> i didn't say the run was over. you were asking me to compare where we are, like a balance sheet, with where china is now. >> dave, you had some reaction to china? yeah, i always thought they did a great job of having a long

term strategy for the country, having some sense of how things were going to evolve and what they had to get done. and then they really get on with it. i mean, there's a lot of arguing that goes on behind closed doors, and we tend to think of it as a totalitarian system, which it's not exactly. it's something that we're not quite familiar with. they have their own elections, different than ours. but theirs are a hell of a lot more vicious, as dirty as we think ours was, theirs are a lot more vicious in the end result. and they really have a big argument about it but then they develop a strategy that they kind of stick with, and they have a focus on what it is they want to get done. whereas we just kind of argue from election to election. i'd like to see more focus on some of those longer term trends. the three that i always talk about that i wish our government would talk more about is, one, the economic rise of china. this century they're likely to become the number one economy in the world.

the changes in technology. look at what's going to happen on the digital side with the digital revolution which is likely to go on the entire century. and the biological changes that are coming. when you start thinking about crisper technology and can happen with dna. and the third one is the population is going to go from 7 billion to 10 billion people. in the next 35 years. how do you feed them and handle the pollution? i'd sure like to know that somebody within government is thinking about it, our government is thinking about it and doing something. in china, i do get a sense that people think about it and start talking about energy efficiency in a way that says how do we make sure that our people can breathe the air that we have, how can they actually use all the water that we have, the limited amount that we have. i don't feel like we really think that way. i think that we benefit from it. >> thoughts on that? >> i think dave's right.

they have long-term goals. for example, in education, when we announced the schwarzman scholars program, the president of china wrote a note as part of the announcement of the great hall of people, and he said he wanted two of their universities to be in the top ten in the world in 20 years. part of the reason he liked the scholar program is it fit in with chinese universities learning from some of the western approaches that we just take for granted. now, that's the kind of planning that we basically don't have for the most part. >> and then go and do something. >> can business fill that void and if so, how? >> i'm not sure how business fills that void. i've always felt like between government and business, people tend to want to look at them as the same but they're really not.

i've always looked at business you don't mind churn, you don't mind companies going bankrupt someday. it happens all the time. most companies over the course of 100 years are going to be not viable. but you get a significant part of productivity. you worry a lot less about sustainability. with government you need just the opposite. thank god we don't count on them for productivity because there wouldn't be a lot coming, but you need sustainability. the fact that the system has existed for 200 years and probably will for another 200 years is great. there's this symbiotic relationship where government needs to not just regulate business, which they like to do, but they also enable business. they need to focus on that enabling side, whether it's the infrastructure we talk about, the education system steve was talking about, what do we do with trade, which is going to be important, a patent system that understands digital age and how things can be different, there's a lot of stuff government needs to be doing to enable business

to be successful. >> you saw this firsthand, served on the simpson-bowles commission, which looked at the national debt. where do we stand now on the debt. i don't think it came up once in the presidential election. where do we stand came up several times in the election. both candidates did a great job swatting it away. nobody really wanted to hear about it. no, the problem has not gone away. my generation is still retiring. even if you have 4% gdp growth in 10 years, the problem is still there. a lot of it's going to come back to health care costs, medicare/medicaid. simple as that. that was the issue. it's still the issue. as my generation retires, we're going to swamp the system. >> doesn't some of this have to do with the 1% in committee quality, the growing gap, the ever-growing gap between the

t-suite and average workers' pay? decline of unions, decline of collective bargaining, ability of average workers to negotiate? isn't that also kind of contributing to disaffection among the public with big business? >> i think that's a convenient explanation. i think what's really going on is regular americans, middle class, lower income people, have not had a good environment to increase their income, at least since 2000. it was a statistic yesterday that said since 2000, 60% of americans have less real income

than in the last 16 years. this is appalling. it's not just about some people because the federal reserve lowered interest rates and popped up asset values. it's a more serious problem and you have to address this with a positive approach in policies to create economic expansion, not at the rate that we're doing. and you have to dramatically increase economic growth to help the people in the country. >> but these ceos are not willing to spend. some of them feel animated, but not enough to grab their checkbook. >> these things, they've got to start someplace. you start with changes of policy. you start with a much more neutral to positive approach towards business, towards innovation, towards growth. you set up the policies.

you create a different environment, and things start happening. that's the way you make change. part of it during the election, with the old election last week, is that those issues are going to be addressed. >> i agree with steve's point. i think it's less about, hey, somebody's doing well than it is somebody's doing well and i'm not doing as well as i did before. if everybody's doing well and at different paces, i don't think that's so bad. i thought bono -- i love his music, never cared for his politics, but he had a great line when he was asked to compare and contrast the u.s. and ireland. he said in the u.s., if you don't have any money and you're walking by a big house, you look up and say, some day i'm going to be that guy. he said in ireland, you walk by and say some day i'm going to get that guy. as long as people, we still have that attitude in the country

about i want to be that guy, that's what's really important. we can't lose that as part of what we do. >> comments, questions? thank you very much. >> thank you. president obama is meeting today with japanese prime minister shinzo abe in hawaii. together, they are going to lay a wreath at the world war ii memorial there. prime minister abe will be the first japanese leader to visit the memorial constructed on the waters above the sunken "uss arizona." c-span will have live coverage at 4:10 eastern. tonight, here on cspan3, on american history tv primetime at 8:00 eastern, lectures in history. we start with sport and race in the 1980s, followed by coroners in the 19th century south, u.s. refugee policy since world war ii, and 20th century white

supremacist groups. that's tonight on american history tv primetime at 8:00 eastern. tonight president barack obama and prime minister shinzo abe will visit the site of the attack that launched u.s. involvement in world war ii. wednesday night beginning at 8:00, a review of house and senate hearings from 2016 on topics including the flint, michigan, water crisis and the wells fargo unauthorized account scandal. >> seriously? you filled out one of your divisions created 2 million fake accounts, had fired thousands of employees for improper behavior, and had cheated thousands of your own customers, and you didn't even once consider firing her ahead of her retirement?

>> thursday we remember some political figures that passed away in 2016, former first lady nancy reagan, supreme court justice antonin scalia. this week in primetime on c-span.

the new york university law school hosted a discussion on the developments in technology and the use of social media to reach voters in past elections, including the 2016 election cycle. this 50-minute discussion was part of a conference focusing on various components of the u.s. political system. >> our moderator today is cam kerry, general counsel and acting secretary of the department of commerce where he led the internet policy task

force. he is now serving as senior counsel at sidley austin and is primarily in the privacy security and information area. you want to introduce your panelist? >> thank you, sally. thank you for sticking this out. we've been through the panels. do the parties make any difference? does money make any difference? does media make any difference? now does technology make any difference? or is technology to blame for all the sins we heard about earlier today? certainly, the role of technology in campaigns has transformed with the explosion of information communications technology, the explosion of

data. it's changing every kind of enterprise. campaigns are no exception. we have come a lock way from discussion, i remember in the early 2004 campaign when jim jordan, then campaign manager said, there are no votes on the internet. we are at that time watching the howard dean campaign take off powered by the internet. in 2000, campaigns had websites. that was about it. 2004 was, we were still in the era of e-mail and dial-up, but we saw particularly the explosion of e-mail, e-mail as a fund-raising tool.

in 2007 of course, along comes the iphone and things really begin to change. of course we recall that the obama campaign in 2008 harnessed that technology, harnessed social media and many other things, as well as data and analytics. things have built on that since. we have with us on our panel today some of the breakout stars of those earlier campaigns. i mentioned the dean campaign is really the first campaign to harness the power of the internet and technology. joe ropars ledge the d the digi component of that campaign and

found blue state digital and lead the obama campaign's digital effort in 2008, and the work on 2012 and numerous other campaigns. scott goodstephin followed a similar path. worked on the obama campaign's social and mobile campaign. excuse me? >> i worked for jeffrey. >> went off to found revolution messaging which helped develop the digital engine of the bernie sanders' campaign. on my left which have nate, the james b. mclachey professor at

stanford law school on the machine of democracy, fund raising, campaign finance, and has looked at the impact of digital technology on that. let me start there because nate, you just helped to organize a similar discussion of this year's campaign, particularly the role of digital technology out on the other coast in silicon valley in the heart of the beast. we heard that mentioned this morning. let me ask you -- i'll ask each of you to pick this up in succession.

how technology -- give us an overview how technology was used in the 2016 campaign, set a baseline for the discussion here, and what was new this year? 2004 was the year e-mail, what was 2016? and lastly, how is it that the campaign that was widely perceived as the much more digitally sophisticated campaign bringing in the expertise of obama 2008 and 2012 didn't prevail as technology and other things. let me start with you for that overview. then i'll ask you, scott and joe to start of look at that from your perspective and particularly what the technologies were that you worked with in this campaign and how you saw those having an

impact. >> let me thank everyone here who organized this. my some time employer, boss, camarade in arms bob bauer. i've been dubbed the demon spawn of bob, i wear that proudly. i see trevor morris here from columbia and dear friend, and so many people i worked with who are here. we had a conference at stamford on the digital campaign. when we planned this conference, i thought what the conference was going to be is how hillary clinton's campaign marginally improved on barack obama's campaign of 2008 or 2012. here are the new digital tools and here is how she won. needless to say, we had to change the topic. in part not just because of the

surprise victory of donald trump. who knew we had to talk about macedonian teenagers and russia and fake news and the like? that was not something that could be forecasted in the last eight months or year or more than that. there's a lot to say here. i don't want to take too much time so we can have a lot of discussion. first is digital tools are only tools. the fundamentals of a campaign and qualities of a candidate are not affected by those tools. secondly, there are things that trump did in this campaign which were innovative, unexpected and not well known that i think need to be talked about. the third is the larger question as to what even the digital campaign is in this environment given how many changes we've seen in news and the like. on that first point, it's just sort of an obvious point, but we need to stress it.

victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan, right? maybe it's the case we attributed too much to the digital tools of yesteryear that they were seen as so critical to obama's success and now they were saying the tools failed hillary clinton. the truth is, barack obama was an incredible candidate besides the digital tools and hillary clinton had certain flaws that were maybe apart from the digital campaign. donald trump maybe had strengths. in addition, all the fundamentals of the campaign, the types of models we political scientists use were different this time. we shouldn't overemphasize the use of digital tools being determinative of a campaign. secondly, donald trump's operation was not as -- i mean, people sort of looked at the two

operations in the summer and fall and looked like hillary clinton had a digital operation, donald trump didn't have one. to some stent, one of the things we learned, a few features. ben ginsburg mentioned this before. there are certain things donald trump did he did spend more money on facebook than hillary clinton did. he did spend according to the campaign half their money on digital and split it evenly between digital and tv. she spent more on tv. the amount of money spent on digital in this campaign is three to four times than in the previous campaigns. we are seeing this move in that direction. but the campaigns, the immediate yas bias and what they spent their money on was radically different. one example, donald trump bought almost zero local cable tv advertising, something you would have thought four years ago would have been something everybody would have been doing this time. and because his was more of a ramshackle impromptu or

improvised operation, he ended up outsourcing a lot of his campaign architecture to the platforms themselves. as opposed to putting it inhouse because hillary clinton had an operation that had been in development for so many years. so one of the reasons he ended up spending more money on facebook than hillary clinton did is because he used the people there to help him with the digital operation. what are some of the things he did that i think were different than in previous times? give you one example that has come out which is the way that he covered the third debate. it has never happened before that the campaign actually ran what was a quasi-television studio to cover the debate. the live stream of what we thought was trump tv, which was trump's own digital operation covering the third debate, actually brought in 9 million

viewers and it was more than the abc news live stream on facebook which was the official live stream. he also was able to raise $9 million from that one production, and it was totally different type of experience than we've seen before. similarly, the use of live video and sort of, even though it was sort of -- wasn't polished like when they had the live video with mike pence, spend video with mike pence for a day, if you can handle it. and their digital operation, when you look at what they did, it doesn't seem like it's so different in its basic strategy than what he would have expected from any other digital consultants. but there are certain things they did which were effective. one of the things mentioned

before i don't think people understand how they did use native advertising. they did put native advertising into places like politico and some other areas. the way that they were able to use certain other digital tools that had been used four years prior. i do think the big story is how you define the digital campaign in the age of trump. it's hard to figure out where the campaign ends and whatever is noncampaign begins. think about this problem. how do you describe a digital campaign when breitbart is putting out a story on trump or hillary clinton, and the campaign manager of trump's campaign is brbreitbart -- the editor of breitbart, then donald trump retweets a breitbart story? where is the media/nonmedia distinction there? it's been true for a long time

that those barriers have been breaking down. it's extremely difficult to figure out where those boundaries lie. the story is his ability to use the twitter feed. it's not just the power he has on twitter, it's the fact his twitter feed became the platform off which cnn and legacy media would end up putting up his tweets for a larger audience. that's always been the case, but those lines have been blurred. there was a lot more to discuss to figure out the line between foreign and domestic in an age where you have russian twitter bots being used in an election, let alone the stories about fake news sites and the like being put up. we don't really know the impact

of fake news on this election. it's going to be very hard to study that problem. by one study by amillamilia, ro 8.5% of tweets are done by bots on its entire platform. that's something we need to investigate. this is no you a worldwide phenomenon. looking how different countries regulate this. this is something we at stanford are looking at. i'll conclude with this, the phenomenon of a populist, internet-focused campaign is not unique to the united states. what we saw in italy last

saturday, what we've seen with the five star movement there the so-called pirate party in iceland, the second largest party in iceland, use of the internet by the prime minister of india. what we are seeing here is ability of parties and nontraditional politicians to go over the media and to run their campaigns through different means. >> thanks for having us. i appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation. i think the part i agree with most from nate there is the credit goes to the candidates. every campaign is a reflection, not just of the candidate as a person and their message and what they have to emphasize but their personality and