election? a dozen? 30 is close. it may be 29.6 or something. the average norm for a first term president is that they lose right at 30 seats. first midterm election. that is the norm. that is what we faced in the midterm election. if we're going to be that, and we will, we will only do it by being better organized, working harder, by putting the movement on the field to help the candidates. we have 35 senate seats and 36 governorships. 2010 will be a busy year. you will want my frequent flyer miles from 2010. i will have a lot of them. we will be working hard to make sure we continue to put the good folks in place to help the president succeed. just like the young democrats

were the great bull work in 2008, we will expected to be the will work in the governors' races in 2009 and again in 2010. let me say a word about the opposition. i am a big believer that both parties have to be strong. i lived in honduras. it was a military dictatorship. i have been thinking about that lately with the coup against the president. when i lived there, it was a military dictatorship. no one could vote for anything. that was a shock for me coming from the united states where we take for granted. i am a big believer in the two- party system. i want the republican party to be strong. i want us to be strong. it works better if we are both strong. i am a proud democrat. i have been my whole life. as i look at the republican party right now, the thing i do not like is that i think they

have adopted the view that it they just vote no to everything that is a strategy. that is not a strategy. that is going awol in terms of leadership responsibilities. when the recovery bill was up, no houseboats and three votes in the senate. when the budget vote was up, no republican votes in either house. the climate change bill in the house had eight republican votes. they were courageous. the leaders were telling them not to vote. they did because we need a better energy future. as we are trying to do the heavy lifting of governing and finding solutions, they are standing up and saying no. that is not a strategy. that is not leadership. it is backing away from the table and leading the dialogue. at the dnc, we have not hesitated to call them out.

we're not doing that for name- calling. we are doing it because if we hold the mirror up to them, i know there are members of congress who are republican who do not like that. they ran to get things done and get things to happen. they ran to serve their constituency. i hope if we hold that mirror up again and again, there will be some who will say "that is not me. i want to work in a bipartisan way to make things happen." i think we saw that in the climate change bill vote. the leadership was pressuring the members to vote no. eight broke and voted yes with the president and the democratic congress. we will keep doing that. most of what we do at the dnc is not about the other side. we are not the loyal opposition. we are the presidential party. we are the political arm of the white house. you will see the overwhelmingly

positive about what we're doing. we will joust and also with the other guys, but we're mostly about the positive. that is what we do. it is great to be with you. i'm going to go on the road to talk to democrats in three states. i am going to san francisco, seattle, and portland between now and sunday. it is amazing that they can get near around as much as they can. i'm going to go out there and do it with enthusiasm. i will conclude by saying this. as i go to talk to people and ask them to canvass or donate, i am struck by this. most of you and the people i talk to do more in 2008 than you have ever done for anybody in politics. you did more in 2008 than you ever thought he would do in politics. you worked. you volunteered. he donated. maybe you are a little bit tired. a lot of the donors are

fatigued. the economy is not good. that makes a hard for them to give more. this is a challenging time. it is challenging to ask people to keep donating and giving. i am struck by this. it is undeniably clear that what we have done is created and distort -- created an historic moment. what is unclear is how long it will last. we know that we have created moment. all the nations of the world know this was a transformative election. but you never know how long a moment will last. something can change politically, economically, or another way. the prospects we have to get things done could get tougher. we do not know when that will happen. that means that even if we are tired and worked hard in 2008, had anxieties about the economy,

this is the moment we have created. it is one thing to say that we are part of the historic election. it is much better to say i was part of that and in part of the transformative presidency. that is the opportunity we have created for ourselves. that is the opportunity to drive us forward. we need to do as much as we can, for as many as we can, for as long as we can in this moment we have created. that is what makes this so exciting. thank you for having me here today. thank you for letting me talk a little bit. it is great to be with you. [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] >> the house democratic whip gave his thoughts on the rest of the harvard professor at his home in massachusetts. >> we can be no more or less than what our experiences allow us to be. i think the police officer in this was responding to a call. the question to me was, if this

was a neighbor calling, what was the role of the neighbor in all of this? did the police officer take into account that the neighbor may have overreacted? there are so many variables in all of this. i think nobody is inditing the police department -- in directing -- indicting the police department. the record seems to be admirable. i have watched him on tv. he seemed to me to be a good guy. i think i am a pretty good guy, but there have been times when i overreacted. that is just human nature. >> you can see the entire interview on "newsmakers" on sunday on c-span. >> on sunday, susan jacoby on

a variety of hearings on c-span. >> this week, more of our interviews from the recently held digital media conference in northern virginia. we begin this week with a discussion of how one website is taking a different approach to delivering news. >> y another online news site? >> daily news is about developing media and technology together. this is one way that we showcase the technology. we're also about taking the technology allows for understanding users and their interests and personalizing content. it improves the targeting of advertising. we're taking back and licensing it to a large number of news sites. we believe most news sites will

need to be personalized in the future to meet the needs of the readers. they need this kind of technology to improve the quality of what they do come to strengthen their engagement with their readers online, and develop strong on-line digital businesses. >> when you go to the web site, how can you personalize what you want to receive? >> to some extent, the web site is in transition. we are about to launch a new version. if you went today, the way we personalize is that you go into a process where you pick the categories, topics, people. you can use keywords and different sources. that developed a profile of what you say you are interested in. you can receive that in a variety of ways. we will e-mail it to you. in the e-mail, we can send you a pdf attachment that you can print out. we have automated printing

software that you can set up. every morning, when you get up, there is a personalized news letter waiting for you. that gives people great control and power over what they are getting. it also takes a fair amount of investment to personalize the content. the transition is moving the site in a direction where more of the personalization can be done without the user having to take a lot of action. we are tracking everything a user needs on our site. we understand what the content and stories are about. the people, the companies, the topics, medical conditions, industry terms. we have a deep knowledge of the stories that each user reads. we create for each user a picture of what they are interested in. we're calling it their digital news affinity or dna.

weekend and personalize it to reflect the categories and subject matter they are most interested in. -- we can then personalize it to reflect the categories and said it matter they are most interested in. we're blending the news with the things you are most interested in. online, you're trying to drive the news through a smaller window. when you get to a small window to find the news of interest, it has to be closer to your interests. we still want to know the big stories when there is a train crash or a major disaster in the world. you still want that news. you also want things of interest to you. one person may be more sports or business oriented. to take a lot of that space and real-estate and put things i am not interested in, that is very much a waste. >> have different from yahoo or

drudgereport is this? >> that is what the editors controlling the page provide to you. the editors of the huffington post or "new york times" are making decisions about what is on the page. they are controlling that. if i am interested in that, that is great. if i go to a website, but the stories they have chosen to feature are not of interest to me and the things that i'm interested in are buried deep inside, i will not find that. our technology is about bringing out from the wealth of information the pieces of information that might be of more interest to a given user. we bring that to a point where it is more visible to the user then if it is buried deep in the web site. >> what your background in news? >> i hate to say have been doing

this in 30 years in some form. i started working for a newspaper when i was 16 years old. it was a weekly that still had hot metal. most people may not know what i'm talking about. i started just after my 16th birthday. the editor asked if i could drive. he gave me the keys to his car and told me to pick up the results of the golf tournament and write it up. he forgot to ask me if i had a license. i could drive it did not have a license. i drove out and got the results. after college, i got into digital about 17 years ago when i went to work for dow jones in their electronic publishing area. about six years into that, we started formulating ideas on what "the wall street journal" could look like in an online