house counterterrorism adviser john brennan. he speaks to the house of foreign relations. and then an update on the nasa mars rover curiosity. and later, president obama traveling to colorado for a couple of campaign stops. watch one of them here on c-span at 3:15 eastern. >> political parties are holding their platform parties in advance of the summer conventions with democrats voting this weekend. mid-month, republican start their platform process at their tampa convention site. coverage of the party conventions begins monday august 27 with live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the republican national convention in tampa, and the democratic national convention from charlotte, n.c., started to pemba third. -- starting september 3.

>> four years ago, senator john mccain's campaign was helping him decide who is vice presidential candidate would be in the 2008 presidential race. one of his advisers was fred davis, who produced the mccain campaign ads. he also advised jon huntsman in their presidential campaigns. -- jon huntsman and dan quayle in their presidential campaigns. he spoke recently comparing the 2012 presidential elections. this is just over one hour.

>> behave yourself tonight. thank you so much for coming tonight. this is a beautiful than you. enjoy yourselves, but behave yourselves also. there are a lot of valuables in the area. pretty excited about the night. before i introduce our guest, i want to talk about gen next. i am a ceo at gen next. our purpose is in our name, gen next. we are trying hard to create opportunities for future generations and facing challenges. we do not want to kick the can down the road for things that we could have solved. we want to get as much as we can

out of the way as possible. and in doing that, we tried to attract and leveraged talent. we have relied unsuccessful, busy people, having them learn about and get engaged in economic issues, security, education. tonight is no different. you are inundated with political ads or mail, or you wrote or you just pay taxes, so you know the political process matters because you are affected by it every day, with you know it or like it or not. a very influential actor, so to speak, in the political process is with us tonight, fred davis. he is a very bold oklahomans. at 19 years old, he got involved in a pr firm and within the through -- few years, the firm grew to 50 people. he then later got into a senate

race which then changed his life. he was the creative director for the republican national convention. he was the chief media strategist for john mccain's presidential race. he has worked with the lowe's corp., arco -- [inaudible] maybe he worked for the opposition? i do not know. in terms of the messaging -- and you hear this word, the message that campaigns have. he is the architect of how they communicate with you and motivate you to vote for them or against their opponent, care about a certain issue. it was just very fascinating. you are affected by him more than you would realize. hopefully, we will pull the wool over your eyes a little bit tonight, talk about that issue.

before he gets into that content, not to mention, he is sort of a behind-the-scenes celebrity, but he is now starting to move out. there was a game called "game change" where he was prominently featured, which later turned into an hbo movie. he has a character in it. there is an actor that looks a lot different than him, played him in the movie. after tonight, you can watch it and check out fred davis in the movie. it is a great opportunity to engage someone like him who is playing at the highest levels of political power and influence, getting messages to you. their opportunity to engage and have a dialogue with someone like him. keep an open mind, in a choir, enjoy the experience. this is why when -- this is why

we do what we do at gen next. afterwards, i will come up to moderate questions. thank you. i will pass it onto fred davis. >> thank you, michael. [applause] it is good to be back. there were several of you that came out to hear me speak at geisha house. what i thought i would do is talk briefly and let you ask any questions you want. what is happening right now in the presidential race happened exactly as it was happening now four years ago. right now i'm not involved in the race, but i was up to my eyeballs four years ago. i thought it would be interesting to talk for just a minute about what we were doing four years ago, how it relates to this race, and then we will talk about anything you want.

two days from now, there is a team of five or six people, and we met once a month in phoenix. the greatest thing in politics is being here and not in washington. you do not have to get beat up every day. you just pick up the phone. i was the only one here. had they would all fly in chartered planes to phoenix early in the morning. we would need from 10:00 until 6:00, the ritz-carlton or the four seasons, a nice hotel, in this board room, and we would plan the next month. then they would go back and i would catch the 8:00 flight. at 6:00 when we finished our planning, senator mccain would

come in often with his wife and the secret service, and he would bring in tacos from his favorite stand, and we would present what we had. this particular time, four years ago, two nights from now, was a particularly grueling day. this was on a sunday. barack obama, this guy that had come from nowhere to be a very prominent, likely top challenger, was in europe right now. where is romney? he was on what we call the rainbow tour. he was speaking to 200,000 people in germany, doing all of these things, and his momentum was so high, our group, beating our heads against the wall in phoenix thought, we have to break this momentum. how do we do it? steve schmidt, he was sitting next to me.

if you know him, he has a voice like this. he said, we are running against the greatest celebrity in the world. no one knows anything about him. what are the going to do? somewhere in that day we determine the paris hilton approach. he is a great celebrity, but is he ready to lead the country? i am a republican. now i would say the answer is no, but at the time, nobody knew. it was less for me to explain to john mccain -- left for me to explain to john mccain, this proud gentlemen, that his future was being compared to paris hilton. it was a long story about what happened at the beginning of the meeting. i will not bore you with that. it is in the book. he was aghast, but he said, go for it. our group determined, at this

time four years ago, there were w are things that would affect what happened in the presidential race and who won. no. 1 was what we did in august. what we did was the entire paris hilton strategy. question his ability to lead but it knowledge, to a great extent, and even expand his flamboyance as a fabulous actor and celebrity. second was how we did the republican convention. i do not remember our budget. let's say $20 million. $70 million. they were in mile high stadium. we were in a much smaller facility in st. paul- minneapolis. things looked really bleak. the third was the vice- presidential choice, the fourth was debate performance.

we covered all four of those. we talked to the center about that. he approved, bought on paris hilton. john mccain thought that we should do a small convention, not because of the budget, but because the times were so tough in america and people were hurting, particularly in minneapolis, where the convention would be, and he did not want a big, garish thing. we decided a small convention. we talked about vice- presidential choices. sarah palin was not chosen at that meeting. what was discussed was that john needed to do something maverick. that was needed. you can tell people you are a matter call you want, but until the rubber hits the road -- we talked about various players and sarah palin's name was one that came up. my recollection is that he did

not know who that was when it came up. the fourth was debate performance. we did not really touch on that much. we made those choices, we told john we did that, and he left. you could build a case, because of the legacy at the time of george w. bush, which was troubled, and john being a republican, that this was an impossible race to win. yet, july 27, those four things -- we won august -- paris hilton worked, and our ads worked. paris did not hurt matters when she respond with your own ad. -- her own ad. we won august.

everyone about coming out of the convention. they had to get rid of parts of their set because it was so grandiose. our said was designed by a company here in hollywood. since i am here, i went over to their studio and they had a fabulous performance set up. no, the first time i saw it was washington, d.c. it looked like a presidential set. rick davis approved this. we are writing notes back and forth as we are seeing this and he wrote down, this looks like every set i have ever seen. i responded, i will take care of it. let's empty the room. i went over to the sky that was so proud of this model that he had billed, and away goes the columns, and all we ended up with was a black stayed with a simple podium, and at the time, the world's largest tv screen. we won that.

sarah palin, for better or worse, at the time, was named vice president. that was a huge run. i was expecting a ticker-tape parade, and he came back after being behind. we won the convention. we won the vice presidential choice. we were ahead by two or three points. not a shocking amount, but that had to surprise them. from that point on, it was kind of an impossible record. how does that relate to what is happening now? but from a foot to the people. you have one guy in office. think of him as john mccain. john was not president but he had the legacy of george of the bush, which right now is spectacular, i think. at the time, a bit of a burden. we helped on the bush campaign,

so i was very perturbed on how that was portrayed. nonetheless, he has the problem that obama has now, a troubled economy. the outsider, mitt romney, is in europe, like they are. several people have asked me tonight, when will mitt romney make his vice-presidential choice? he did not ask me. it will not be while he is in europe. obviously, it will be before the convention. it is like a giant chess game. and it changes every minute. you are having to think of little things. my belief is he probably knows to the vice-presidential choice is. there are probably three or four people that know. that was the case in our world. i did not know that he had chosen sarah palin until the work order came to our shop to design the lapel pin 2 at her name. i called for davis -- anything that you did not mention?

the guy doing my job in their convention is doing a great job. russ is doing that. it is an honorable job, but i was miserable. i would never do it again. i thought we were going to die in that process. people are vying behind-the- scenes for the big speaking role at the convention. there are little groups of volunteers. i grew up in tulsa, oklahoma. there was a big theater group there. the same people who had been in the costume department were there all their lives. they would simply work their way up to a better and better role until they were the head of the

costume department. conventions are like that. there is somebody who was born into the who gets the limo committee. probably two or 300 ads that have -- 200 or 300 and that we have not seen that were produced. all of these people are fighting and scratching over that. i do not know if you saw the article today in bloomberg. it was talking about the difference between a super pac and a campaign. they left out half the story. what i said was, it is much more enjoyable, in a way, to do the superpac, because you do not have 50 people approving everything that you write, every ad, a picture, the lighting on everything. it is not hectic, crazed.

you simply get to do your job. last year, i was doing jon race.an's presidential we decided that we were not going to give him the money to give him a shot. we needed a super pac. i left to form this superpac at the end of july. it was like going from -- you remember what school was like? everything is crazy busy, and the first day of summer is there and you have been looking forward to it but you have nothing to do? you are chomping at the bit for something to do. that is what happens when you go from the campaign world to the superpac world. there were three board members and an attorney. we would talk for about five minutes, 15 minutes every day. that was a really long call, 15

minutes. we would make the decisions we needed to make, we would approve things, the campaign could not approve anything legally, the candidate for the candidate's wife could not see the ads. it was almost like the giant let down. on the one hand, it was controlled and easier and nicer, but the part that was left out of the story, you miss the adrenaline, you miss that crazy excitement that kevin will be getting. it is a trade-off between those two things. what is different this year which was not then, is we did not have superpacs four years ago appeared that has made an incredible difference in the funding of mitt romney, in particular. and who is one in the most? the obama campaign. but what happened four years ago? they have tripled the money that we had. i give them no rope to wind,

because we were ahead -- all of us were really proud that we were ahead for such a long time with such limited resources. that is i will talk about there, and then we can get into any subject you want. that is what is happening with the creepage of campaigns. >> any questions? >> between 2008 and now you make some similarities, but as a spectator in 2008, it seemed that a lot of the decisions were based on personality. this time around, it seems less

of personality, and hopefully, more about the issues. we are still in a rough spot in the economy, which started in 2008. do you see that focus being maintained on issues or do you see the campaign becoming more of a personality? >> think of the two players. which one wanted to be above personality and which one wants it to be about issue? so you will see a battle. i will be a fascinating battle between barack obama trying to shed this black cloud of hal despair. he was one of the most incredible speakers i have seen. one was last time you have heard him speak? it is kind of like he lost the ability. there was an at a couple of days ago where he is sitting -- i think it is called a choice.

my inside scoop tells me that that was shot last sunday. he was presented a script. he scratched through every word of it. i think it is really well done. it is simple, direct contrast between how he sees your choice in america and how mitt romney sees your choice. teamed --y's remember i am a republican, so i have to be careful reading they tried to develop a more aw shucks, every man personality for mitt romney. he is not that person. at the not very well. forget a personality thing. get rid of the jeans, put on a coat and tie, and be the professional that we need to get

this country out of the doldrums. i think you will see obama reverting to personality and try to move the campaign that way, through enthusiasm and excitement, their key word, forward, their slogan. mitt romney will do the opposite. he will try to keep it on the economy. any poll, that is what people care about. >> do you see that being a winning strategy? in times like this, let me different from 2008 -- personality has always played an effect in the way that the american people vote. they want to imagine someone that they can have a conversation with. because things are so difficult right now, do you see that management role, that very serious tone being a winning strategy? >> i think they both have the potential to win. obama has the potential to win with his enthusiasm and grass-

roots network, and he gets back to talking with the teleprompter. it romney could win based on the economy. right now, the obama campaign is doing a really good job of lurking romney up. a clever strategy on their part, but it might be a bit early for that. there is only one time when it matters who is ahead. this race will go back and forth. it will be fascinating to watch. it is great for me to watch because i actually get to sleep at night. either one could win. i do not think there is a way to tell. >> thank you for being here. my question is, in your mind, who is the vice presidential

nominee that not only complement him, but also gives him the boost in the polls that you want to see? who, among the potential candidates, would you advise him to select? >> i would advise and to take someone that i do not think he will take. i think he will choose an extremely competent guy who made the complement him, but certainly doesn't overshadow him, like rob portman from ohio. he has ohio, he has great skills. if i am advising mitt -- he is not going to win because of excitement, let's put it that way. i would look for someone that did bring excitement. sarah palin brought excitement to john mccain. chris christie would bring excitement to mitt romney. i doubt that happens, but that is where i would lean. again, i have nothing to do with

that decision. nothing but a guess. >> i was wondering, you have likened the obvious differences and similarities between this election and the last. bush, having beaten the came in the original runoff, mccain comes back to run again, loses, mitt romney -- the entire continuum is losing back-and- forth do you fear the same thing is happening again? the fact that this will be a re- election in the middle of a termed president, does that affect the candidates coming forward? is it a horse in mid race wanted to change, not ready to jump in front of the camera just yet? >> ghraib question. -- great question. there is an element of that in chris christie or something like that, not ready to be in front of the camera, but there is a

bigger issue. the bigger issue is you get to do this once. you do not normally get the nomination year after year. you get one time. which time is it going to be? i have been through this with several candidates. it is a tough issue. when jon huntsman's people called me first, i had met him once. i thought he was a really great guy, i don't him for environmental defense fund at. we called and asked if he would be interested in joining a small group that is trying to get him to run in 2016. no mention of 2012. i said, yes, that sounds interesting. i signed on and they said, would you still sinon if he knew that small group was un me?

i said yes. we started studying 2016. we thought about it, we were playing all the games. is jeb bush going to run? newt gingrich, will he flamed out? it is like a giant chess game again, and you are trying to figure out, more than anything -- they will tell you, it is done about needing more experience. they are trying to figure out -- in politics, you are not in the game to lose. politicians do not play to lose. i do not play at my business to lose. they tried to find -- it is a miserable for to win. they want to find the surest path to have a chance at

victory. all that has to do is who you are running against on both sides. >> another question. i think it is interesting that there is somebody on facebook right now who will be running for president in the future at some point. will it be to the point where the country's best and most qualified would actually not want to run for president, as there might be too much exposure? more importantly, do you think this country has been conducive in wanting the most brightest and most qualified to step forward to take office? >> i did dan quayle's presidential run in office -- in 2000. the republican party intends to nominate in terms. think about bob dole. yet, there was a guy in texas, george w. bush, who, very

wisely, dropped hints that he would run, but never said that he would. that was a tough presidential race. the thing i got out of it, dan quayle is one of my best friends. the silly potato thing will dog him forever. the run one of the largest companies in the world. he is brilliant. one day, we were going up a ski lift in telluride, colorado, where he has a home. it was miserable. nobody was skiing. dan quayle does not know miserable days. you ski sunup to sundown every day. we are ready only people on the left. we are going up and it was one of those days where it was miserable to be president. w. was president. kind of forgetting to i was with, i looked at him and said, why would anyone want to be president? he did not miss a beat.

he said, because if you think you've given skills to make life better for people in this world, it is your duty to run. he was dead serious. i am not sure all of them approach it from that tour of the standpoint. a great senator from a director who recently passed away. he was the same way. i filmed him once in his home in atlanta of. it was a sunday. it was after he was riding his lawn mower in a white shirt, tie, black slacks. it was like 110 degrees out. i said, paul, what are you doing? he snapped at me and said, i fear people respect me enough to elect me into the senate. i thought that i should dress properly when i walk out of the house. the thought that he thought that was incredible.

john mccain probably has more character than anyone i know. there were so many things that i wanted to do in the race and others wanted to do that he would not consider doing. in hindsight, i think he was right. >> those who put themselves out there for their air and character to be scrutinized. mccain obviously knew firsthand. it was the family that was potentially attack. >> i have had a lot of clients. it is not the client so much. they are of a stern age when they are not around -- it is their kids. many of you know with kids, -- i had a couple college year. i still do. you do not want the pictures out there. but dad sure does not want the

pictures out. we had to damp that down a lot. jon huntsman came back from china, the ambassador to china, a conquering hero, and because of the laws, he could not know that there was this effort for him to run for president. he had a clue the people were talking about it. he went straight to the white house press corps correspondents' dinner, totally jet lag, goes to that -- i thought the meeting was on monday, so i missed it. sunday morning he called me and wanted to hear an update on what people were thinking. he had a lot of full-time employees, a major operation going, and he had no clue. and he was not necessarily happy about that. as a matter of fact, i remember a few weeks later, we were

sitting on the beach in newport. he said, i have been back three weeks from china, and i have yet to have my laundry done. things like that. he got pushed into that. now, i think jon eventually -- his daughters became famous during the campaign. his wife loved it. i am not sure jon ever love the process of running. i think he thought, correctly, that he could be a fantastic president, but unless you want to go through the process, it is pretty horrible. i chuckled to myself with all of my skelton's in the closet, i could not run for dogcatcher. these guys get scrutinized.

>> a quick question. in this presidential campaign, do you think it will be more art or science? >> what i mean by that -- what i mean by that, there is the data side and then the personality side. >> it goes back to this question, where you have a data candidate, mitt romney, and you have a personality candidate, if it comes back, which i think it will, barack obama. now, both sides have those operations going completely. they have massive data, a social networking operations. all that is huge. at the top i see one guy that is very much data driven and another that his personality- driven. they are as different as night and day, i think. he will get a good example of both, i think.

>> a couple of thoughts and a question. this issue of the tax return with mitt romney. two, it seems like mitt romney is not really running to win. i get the sense that his approach is more, let's let obama lose, let's not go after and win the election. what are your thoughts about those items? why is he running away from his success? i thought success generally was out of a good thing in our country? >> barack obama's based is not necessarily in this room. there might be democrats in this room, voters for obama. they're very well could be. but the average voter, looking across this room, i would say is a mitt romney voter. you have to be careful about

these things. i do not think mitt romney is not in it to win. my gut tells me that mitt romney has wanted this opportunity since he was a child. he came from politically motivated parents. he has had this extraordinary career -- and i know two or three of the people of this -- they grew up thinking, not i want to be president because i get a cool air plan, but i think i can do the job and it would be the most important job in the world. i could do a great job and leave a great legacy for my kids and family. when you are talking about -- i would guess -- is the aggressiveness of the campaign. you and i talked earlier. one thing you have to remember is, how many people would rather

be a head right now, or when somebody has a ballot in their hand? ballot in their hand. the money that they have spent now to arguably do a pretty good job taking some of the wind out of mitt romney's business successes, calling him not just a wealthy guy, but a questionable guy -- all these offshore accounts. i have another clyde who shall remain nameless who will also not release his tax returns. it is troublesome, because it leaves this? . i have never heard a good answer on why you do not. mitt romney's answer is the standard answer. i do not want to give them fuel. well, most people think about that and think, i wonder what is really in it. i do not think he will ever give

it. he sticks with his decisions, big time. i do not know. i think the tax return thing hurt him badly. i think we will still be hearing about tax returns in october. i know we will in this other race that my company is involved in. it is kind of a murky issue. he is not being up front, and that is the scary thing. >> number of voters have been credited largely for having created a lot of the force that elective obama. and of the things we have seen in the past few years is rented youth unemployment that has hit them in record numbers. my question is, what do you see happening with the youth vote in this cycle, to you think

republicans have bridge that relationship with the younger voters enough to get them to switch to the other side? >> in general, would you say younger voters are richer or poorer? or repair they do not have their careers yet. they are in their older car, an apartment inside of -- instead of a home. the tendency is for them to lean towards the person who is not going to increase taxes -- i mean, who will increase taxes on the rich, to help provide for the less rich. let's put it that way. but what happened? you are right, all those people really helped obama. funny, a lot of people did not vote, but it was the enthusiasm which created this groundswell that swept barack obama into office.

how many people have you seen on television? i thought he was going to pay my car mortgage. i thought i was going to get a new car. the weird thing is, there are a lot of people who think that. the question is, do the people not vote for obama this time, or do they move to another option? he brought in a lot of new voters who may not vote again because they are disappointed, and they might vote for mitt romney, but they are probably not going to vote for obama. they will not make, what they consider, a second mistake twice. the youth vote will be less vital this time around. mitt is trying to capture it with the use of his kids. i would, too. i have not seen in the oil under a fervor, but that begins after labor day, after the two conventions.

do not count what you're seeing now as indicative of where the race will go. >> this is the first time i have seen youths engage in offices to address things like paying off student loans or funding of new businesses, attaching young people to help care for their families. if the republicans are to come in now, do you see that continuing the kind of policy, where they will put specific people in place to address younger voters and younger constituents, whenever people make up a significant part of the population? >> i hope so, and i would put that in the same category as hispanic voters, for republicans. republican will be dying on the vine unless they address some of the kids and minorities in this country. his kids. i would, too. i have not seen in the oil under a fervor, but that begins after labor day, after the two conventions. you look at hispanics in particular. those families have the same values and ideals that most republican families do. there is this incredible tie

there but the whole immigration issue has ever win the republican party in their eyes. racere doing jeff slate's in arizona, and it is a tough issue there with immigration laws, the supreme court knocking them down. at the very top of mind for me. but if there are two things the republicans can do, target the kids and hispanics. it is not an evil thing. it is just telling them that a republican, in my mind, is an absolutely good person. they just happen to have conservative fiscal policies. that is how i look at it. the man who broke his glass.

>> i do not know if this is a question more than a stream of consciousness. maybe some questions. i really made a mess. recently, there were a couple of changes in government in germany, italy, france. would you be able to name who ran in each of these elections? >> would i? heavens no. i walked in the day after sarah palin was named a vice presidential nominee. i was able to film her for three hours. i went up to her suite. she was in an odd spot. as i walked in the front, you remember the famous racks of clothes. and then you had a big pile of shoes. seamstresses were doing their thing. and then i hear sarai yelled

from the back room, fred, is that you? come on back. i rounded the corner and here is what i saw. she is in a white robe, her feet are on the desk. she had two stylists behind her. one was doing a perfect hair do up, and on this side, down, to test them both. behind her were the call and tucker, of briefing her, trying to get her to properly pronounced the names of all those people you asked me to name. i do not have to. i am not running for vice president. it was the craziest thing i saw. and then one of them was using this steam curler, so it was like flames coming up. i thought her head was on fire. she had the weirdest tier 2 i have ever seen in my life. all the people were back there. then she looks at me and says,

you are the branding guy. which one will it be coming up or down? when you read the book, they said that i recommended down, but that is not true. it is the whole library and look. -- librarian race. >> anybody in russia, italy, spain, they know who is running for president. my question is, in the 1920's fdr contracted a parallel the disease and was in a wheelchair. i doubt most americans knew that he was in a wheelchair. how does the marketing blitz, that has become the political campaign, how has that benefited us, how has that contracted from the actual political process? >> of course, the goal is to let

you know more about the candidates. it is my job to let you know what we want you to know about my candidate, and to find the things that the other guy does not want you to know, and amplify those. guess what? it works both ways. another big issue now -- everyone talks about the newspaper's dying off. it used to be you would vote for whomever your favorite columnist would tell you about. they would tell you the details. that has not really changed, but it is just where you get the information has changed. if i want to know who the president of so and so is, i can find that in five seconds on my iphone. we did not have that. yes, newspapers are dramatic -- dropping dramatically -- and it will be interesting to see what happens in the long run -- but

the volume of information that people get is about the same, with the exception of those details. fdr, you are right. i have gotten in some trouble recently for wanting to get more information out of people than others wanted. believe it or not, i think the system works pretty well. i have had some clients -- that i will never name -- by the end of the campaign, questioning whether they would make a great congressmen or whatever. those people, invariably, do not win. not always -- not even 50% of the time -- but pretty often, the voters get it right. i think obama was a mistake, but who knows? that is to the voters chose. they had all the innovation in the world to pick from.

-- information in the world to pick from. >> thank you for coming. my question for you is essentially a multiple choice, with a bit of an explanation. has the media lost credibility this time around with their coverage of the obama campaign, or is their credibility about the same? i will assume, perhaps, the credibility of their coverage, in the eyes of the american public, as it relates to the campaign, has not increased. your thoughts? >> well, there are fred's thoughts and the rest of the world. as we know, i do not think the media properly vetted barack

obama. we were talking earlier about people whose time was not yet. i think there might have been a time for him to be president, but not when he was in the state senate in illinois, a u.s. senator for two years? what does that take to think you should be president? know, i do not think the media properly vetted barack obama. maybe he is like dan quayle. maybe he just felt it in his heart, and that is good. but to the extent that everything about john mccain was vetted? absolutely not. have they done so over the past three years? i do not think so. i think they have to somewhat more -- what is fascinating to me is will that happen between to tender and the end of october? i do not know. it and not just be the media. it lobbied both campaigns tried to pull those facts out peter of from where you sit with your experience, do you think the american people are on to what should be a lack of credibility

of the media's coverage of the obama in the last four years? >> i do not think so, kevin. the you and me in the world, who are in the like dan quayle. business, we know more about it because we care more about it than the average guy at home. but if you are talking about the average guy at home, i do not think so. they see simple things. but they are really important to them. they see their next-door neighbor does not have a job. it is not just that the economy is bad, but this guy told me it was going to get better. maybe it did not get better. i always say that we do a fairly good job, in my company, at these things because we are simple. this is as simple as you get. you remember james carvel saying, it is the economy,

stupid. well, there is an opposite side. somebody is going to have to make some of the most miserable, hard choices, as you well know, on earth, and they will have to get them through congress, which is another near- impossibility, unless the composition of congress changes. if the republicans alike mitt romney and get control of the set and maintain control of the house, vast changes will take place. i think they will be for better but a lot of people will think worse. changes will take place. if the obama retained the presidency, the republicans maintain the house, and the senate stays in democrats' hands, you are not going to see a lot of changes. at least, the republicans will pick up enough seats to make it difficult to pass sweeping legislation. i like that fact because i am not an obamacare fan. i would not want to see what

obamacare became, or what it would turn into in a lame-duck presidency. i do not think people studied it like everybody in this room does. >> in terms of rhetoric, with , i feel like the democratic party has a bit of an easier time expanding the economy. short-term economics, keynesian economics is easier to understand. wealth distribution is popular. if you do not have money, it sounds great. unions and government jobs sound great. how can the republican party changed rhetoric to make long- term economic decision more palatable to the general american public? >> i do not know. if i could answer that, i would

be a very wealthy man and mitt romney would be making me to come talk to them. that is the challenge for the republican party. i think your question sums up this race. i am probably not going to start today. i think i pay enough taxes. i am not excited about paying more to help somebody, in my brain, maybe did not work as hard as i did. brain, heack obama's has not been given the same opportunities that i have had -- at least the way they sell it. they have not had the opportunity -- i started my business what i was 19. i wore a coat and tie everyday seven days a week for 20 years. you would have to kill me to put a time now, but i did that. i busted my you know what. $3,200

total. this is not a month. i thought that was the greatest success i could have been my life. there is a guy, arthur brooks. he talks about earned success is the greatest gift somebody can have. i have seen that a million times. i have seen clients and friends who inherited a bunch of money, i have seen others who made a bunch of money. the one to earn it by themselves -- and i earned my tail off and made a little bit of money, and i'm ok. i know he is right. bob corker has as on the air that we did. he is running for senate in tennessee. he is talking 4 -- about earned success. he made this dramatic amount of money quickly in the construction business, but it was not enough. he could not figure out what was missing. these are interesting as. these are not like any political

as you have seen. he is talking directly to the camera about why he turned to politics. it was not politics that he turned to. it was the ability to help others. he made his money and he thought, that is the answer. it was not the answer. he went to haiti on a church trip and came back to chattanooga, where he lives, started to help thousands of families there. he came back and was shocked to find that some people in tennessee live as poorly as those in haiti. what did they do? they elected him mayor. then he was a well-to-do more for these people. he gets happier in his life as this goes on. he gets to the senate and he is frustrated because it is hard to get anything accomplished. you have to go back and remember why he got into this first. if he was not there making those tough decisions and banging his

head against the wall, it might be somebody else who might take the easy way out. that, to me, kind of sums up politics. the one that are there for the right reasons, the one that will make our world better. right now, we need to see more of them because the world is not perfect yet. >> i presume this might be difficult to answer, but i'm hoping to get the best answer i could. >> i am leaving now. >> we bring in a lot of very compelling and interesting speakers -- and you are one of them. >> and then there was me. >> you are one of them. we benefit from a non-partisan the point. we focus on issues, and therefore, build coalitions around those issues. we work with some people on the

right, on the left. it just depends. we start to see what people are thinking and you get an appreciation for it, or you do get out and you have a substantial debate. i tend to think there is not enough true, rich debate in this country. it is neither polarizing or there is a push for there to be total compromise, as opposed to real and true debate. one of the things that i would excuse -- to get to the best solution -- you have the republicans, when the affordable care act was going through, republicans were running ads. >> you need obamacare? >> yes, there were running ads criticizing obamacare stealing money from seniors. that was patently untrue. then you have the democrats criticizing mitt romney and republicans criticizing mitt romney as being able to

capitalist, shifting jobs overseas. pitney untrue. at best, when the campaign gets the engine going, what they're giving us is completely dishonest, in a sense. my question is, as voters, i get it, that is how people are, that is how they are going to duke it out. how do we, as voters, know when they are trying to pull the wool over our eyes, no when it is dishonest, and know when there is substantial debate? is there a trick we could ask for? >> yes, call may and ask me who to vote for. give me a state. comptroller in north carolina. first of all, i would differ with one thing you said. i do not think the examples you gave were dishonest. they are selective. there is a big difference. >> they are equivocating, at best. >> there is always true in what is sad because you have these

fact checks. something came up that was interesting. i was on with the direct mail director. he mentioned something that he thought we should promote. i "that is a stretch." "i don't think i can put that on the air." direct mail is not subject to fact check. lesson one, don't read your direct mail. just watch tv. [laughter] it is like anything else, michael. you have to make up your own mind. we have this great gift now called the internet. don't just go to michaels' website or kevin's website and find out what he wants you to know. that is what i am going to be telling you. whatever is on the website, that is what a guy like me has decided based on a poll that you want to know. just type in kevin's name, and

don't go to the main thing could start going down. page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 of google. read those things. that is what i do. we don't go to see anybody that we've not checked out. i would like to know as much about them when i walk in the door the first time as a year later when they grounded it is card. you have got to work. don't take what fox news tells you ias gospel but don't take what cnn or msnbc to tell you as possible. once upon a time, cnn was having great ratings troubles -- still having them now. we are talking to people there, suggesting that they took the middle of the road. fox obviously as the conservatives. there's nobody in the middle.

if you took somebody like wolf blitzer, somebody that became walter cronkite or became edward r. murrow, and put them on a network that was blatantly nonpartisan, i think it would be an incredible gift to america and i think that would be a great business model. if you have a whole bunch of money to invest, i will help you do that. >> wow. that was a good answer. thank you. [applause] so we have for you just eight little -- a nifty little mol eskin. this is like your -- >> now, i love these.

kind of infamous story -- a few years ago, i went to a meeting with the guy i had not met yet, but i had been hired to do his campaign, a guy named erik snyder. the new governor of michigan. i got hired a day before, and weaver goes, "you have dinner with him tuesday night, you feel him wednesday." i don't know anything about him. no choice. i take this book with me, i go to the restaurant, roundtables in the corner. he is a good-looking guy, looking like a governor -- this is a good sign. [laughter] i went over and i said, "rick, i'm fred davis," and he looks up hi!"e goes, "alloh,

uniquely high voice. i take my little book out. at the end of the dinner -- first of all, i loved him. second, smart as attack. kind of a great genius -- he saved gateway computers and made money and this sort of stuff. i just adored him. next governor of michigan. at the end of the dinner, "fred, have you come up with any great ideas?" we are filming the next morning. "well --" and i opened my little non-gen next book. i opened it up, and the word was "nerd." that was the one word i had written. deathly silence at the table. it isay i look at it, i

that michigan has tried everything else. you tried at a talk. the most recent governor was a female. you name it. barnyard animals they had not tried yet, and they had not tried a nerd. it is time for a nerd. when i said that, i purposely did not look here. rick had this look on his face. but the second i said, she goes, "oh, honey, that's you!" [laughter] he won a resounding victory. thank you, kind sir. [applause] >> in the weeks ahead, the political parties are holding their platform hearings, with the democrats voting on in their

final platform recommendations ain detroit. republicans will start the process of the tampa convention site. c-span's coverage of party conventions starts monday, august 22, with double the gavel coverage of the republican national convention in tampa, and the democratic national convention in charlotte, north carolina startin september 3. >> live today at 12:30 eastern on c-span, an update on yemen with john brennan. he will be speaking to the council on foreign relations in washington. also, a nasa update on the mars rover curiosity. that is live on c-span3. later this month, every speech and every minute of the republican and democratic conventions. at leading up to that, more campaign coverage today with president obama in colorado for a couple of campaign spots, one

of them at 3:15 eastern live here on c-span from denver. >> the library of congress as a new exhibit, "books that shaped america." 88 books were selected for their influence on america and american culture but here's a brief interview on the exhibit and how you can join in on an online chat. >> we call it "books that shaped america," as opposed to other words we considered, like "changed america." looks slowly have an impact on american society. so many books had a profound influence on culture and society and the very essence of what america is. the earliest book is ben franklin's book on electricity grid and of course, thomas paine's book that really kind of a spark or save the american revolution.

novels are a critical part of american culture. many of them identify who we were becoming, the aspirations we had as a nation. others told about experiences that we had uniquely as americans. we also thought that it was very important to look at non-fiction and books that either were self- help or broke dowler years of some kinds. we look for books that were innovative, that showed america as the country and inspired going to the frontier. that could be literally or intellectual. >> if you would like to participate in an online discussion with the associate librarian of the library of congress, one that we will then air on booktv, we like to hear from you. emaile us.

>> now a look at new media and political campaigns in the past decade. university of north carolina journalism professor daniel kreiss discusses his new book, "taking our country back," before an audience in a bookstore in chapel hill. this is one hour, 25 minutes. >> the telltale signs -- yes, we recognize these. for today's lecture, we will approach elections with a look at the last two presidential elections and the revolutions in campaign communications and fund-raising that occurred with the full integration of the internet in the fund-raising process. we have a peek at the implications on history in the 2012 elections. to help us negotiate this terrain, we turn to dr. daniel kreiss, assistant professor at

journalism and mass communication. he received his b.a. from bates college and master's and ph.d. from stanford university. he was a postdoctoral assess it in law and fellow of the information society at yale law school, an institution with which he is still affiliated. his very recently published book, "taking our country back," presents the untold history of the new media and democratic political campaigning over the last decade. in the book, dr. kreiss traces innovations in on-line campaign, brought about by young staffers from the 2004 howard dean campaign and the later impact on a variety of political

campaigns, organizations, an advocacy, and of course, on the 2008 obama campaign. you can order this book here at flyleaf books. in addition to his new book, his research has appeared in journals including "new media and society," "critical studies at the media and communication," and "the international journal of the medication," among others. we are delighted to have him present this summer's final installment of the election series. please join me in welcoming dr. daniel kreiss as he discusses network politics from howard dean to barack obama, 2004-2012. dr. daniel kreiss. [applause] >> i want to thank you all for coming today, and i want to thank the humanities program at flyleaf for extending such a

wonderful invitation to be part of such a great series. i just finished my first year at unc, and it is programs like this that made my time in chapel hill be so wonderful in my first year. what i want to talk about today is my recent book. the book presents a history of new media and electoral campaign over much of the last decade. through the lens of looking at how the democratic party and its candidates have taken up new media, and i want to say one quick thing here, that our focus on democratic campaigning in the book to tell the history deeply and well for reasons that we could talk about in a.q. n/a -- in a q&a. on the republican side of the aisle, they have had eight different history. the infrastructure that serves the two parties are different. the sort of firm that provides

services in the online campaign sector is different. all of this makes for a different history over the last decade. we can talk about that more later on as i go on, i will talk more about the title in detail -- what i mean by craft, networking politics, and the notion of taking our country back, which is the title of the book, i will explain in more detail, which refers to electoral mobilization more generally. first, i want to talk about how i came to this work. it is a story that begins in the dead of winter in 2004 on the frigid streets of sioux city, iowa, on the eve of the iowa caucuses, and it ends in the offices of one of the most powerful political consulting firms in politics, blue state and digital, a firm that did not exist when i began his research. at is one of the back stories here, how much things have

changed over the last decade in terms of the major players and how the major candidates have taken up the web. i want to talk a little bit about how scholars and journalists have thought about the uptake of the internet and electoral processes. second, i want to talk about the findings of the book and show how the story of the uptake new media in politics is a story of innovation, infrastructure, an organization building. i will focus on key moments in the broader history that i sketched here. in terms of folks coming together on the dean campaign and creating innovations in new media and culminating in the obama campaign in 2008 and now in 2012. finally, i will talk a bit more expansively about what this all means. how should we think about the interaction of new media and democratic political process? what is new, what is not so new? what are the applications for

citizenship, the ways and which we carry out democratic processes. ok, let me start by saying how i came to this work. during the 2004 democratic primaries, i was a master's student in journalism writing about the presidential election. after watching the outpouring of candidacy,nd dean's i was excited by the potential of online and network media to potentially create new forms of democratic political campaigning, small-d democratic, but also engaging citizens to do new things. you can see that this is the howard dean game, and the idea was that folks around the country could gather together in a multiplayer video game and sort of carry out rules as if they were canvassing voters in

iowa. how is that translating to on- the-ground, old school, shoe leather politics? where was the intersection between the two parks being a graduate student, i emailed a bunch of folks i found on line who were volunteering for the campaign, and in the middle of the night, i flew to lincoln, nebraska, and i drove 2.5 hours into sioux city, iowa, and i spent a couple of days following volunteers, watching them through baptist churches and roadside barbecue joints, supermarkets, native american cultural centers, folks going door to door talking to voters, etc., about the upcoming election and their role in it and how important it was that they turned out to vote. now, we all know the outcome from the dean campaign in 2004. i did not necessarily that night in terms of anything

eveafter we watched volunteers d the concession speech. we did not notice anything out of the ordinary. by the time i got back to drive to the hotel, the infamous dean scream was on the loop on the radio, which none of us had really noticed by the time we got home, it was clear that this would be a major media stories. little did i know at the time that the spirits of seeing that organizing taking shape on line, seeing what was taking place on the ground, and sometimes the disconnect between the two, formed the basis of the set of questions that i would spend the next decade pursuing about to enter relationship between technology and democracy -- the interrelationship between the technology and democracy and the questions that ended up framing this book. bringing about fundamentally new forms of democratic process, making new things like the

levers of accountability, forms of representation, and changing democratic conversation around elections -- those became the big framing questions for the study. it took me to some unexpected places. the first thing i did when i entered a ph.d. program was turned to the scholarly literature on the subject, and when i found -- i will present this in a broadway to frame what i will talk about the next hour. generally, the claim is that changes in new media technologies and the tools themselves lower the costs of organizing political participation. "cost," i mean it in a broad sense. you can gather around candidates, you can go on the internet, the computer, find other folks who might be inclined to agree with you in some way.

it lowers the cost of organizing action. in the old days, he might have had to go door to door to find people who might support your cause. now what you can do is set up an online site and publicized it your e-mail and gather a whole bunch of names of folks who might be interested in participating with you. one of the things that scholars have argued is that new modes of citizen-driven engagement might be happening independently of these formally organized campaigns. everybody can set up a web site for a candidate like howard dean. what you need a campaign organization for any more? -- what do you need a campaign organization for any more? what a lot of organizers were suggesting at the time is that we will see a broad shift away

from these formal organizations and more towards distribut ed, to centralized type of organization. i will argue against that at a bit, but that is one of the groundings of the scholarly approaches so far. finally, there was a lot of suggestion that online politics entails leveled collaboration between peers and citizens themselves in a way that undermines elites. i think that is open to debate, i will talk about this more later on. with those questions in mind, with of the scholarly literature in mind, i wanted to figure out if i could answer questions of my own. not only did the democratic theory questions i started with, but the miracle -- the

empirical questions. why was it the dean campaign, and later the obama campaign? why weren't other democratic candidates seen as advancing the uptake of new media in politics in similar ways? secondly, i was puzzled by the enormous growth in online campaigning in between those four years, between what we saw in 2004 and what we saw in 2008. what would explain that? maybe the tools got more powerful, or maybe it was something else. finally, as i watched the democratic party campaign, i was still wondering what were the larger democratic institutions. i did a couple of things to find answers to questions. first of all, interviews. i could do more in the q&a about how when about researching the book. i interviewed everyone who to talk to me who had worked in new media and politics over the last

decade or so. what i ended up with was talking to over 60 staffers to work on a number of different campaigns, including al gore, howard dean, wesley clark, john kerry, barack obama, tom vilsack, hillary clinton. pretty much all the major democratic party campaigns. because i really focused in lot on the dean and obama campaigns and work for the democratic party that some of their former staffers did, i also interviewed nearly the entire internet department from the dean campaign in 2004, as well as the senior management on the obama at new media division in 2008. in a lot of those folks are now working for the president's re- election bid in 2012. these trees is quite correct in that way. -- the history is quite correct in that way. -- current in that way.

i have tried to weave these together into a coherent history. one of the wonderful things about online publishing is that folks set up blogs talk about the work they did, what to talk about what works and what did not. you have access to what works and what did not in a real and vivid way. i engaged in participation with the barack obama campaign tools, looking at functionality of these tools. what what is this and be able to see through the technologies -- what would as citizen be able to see through these technologies? let me start with the broad empirical argument, the history. this might be a little difficult to see on the board, but i will talk through it. one of the important things to

remember is that new media in politics has a history. we often forget that there is a history in terms of people doing things over time, organizations doing things over time. is history short of this shapes -- is history sort of shaped the way the candidate is made it every way. the remnants of a failed campaign, howard dean's campaign in 2004, was really the significant dissemination point for a whole new way of engaging and using the internet and on- line campaigning. the dean campaign was a host of a number of innovations in terms of how to use the internet. things that we take for granted today -- the first systematic use of e-mail for a political candidate. you get about a million e-mails from different causes that did not exist as systematically in

2002, 2003, when the dean campaign started to pioneered this. second, social networking platforms. back in 2002, 2003, the dominant social network was a friendster. one of the things that the dean campaign did was create their own pro-social networking platform. -- proto-social networking platform. and things that are less visible to us but are enormously important, content management and databases. how do you know your voters are on line? how'd you know whom you should be talking to and who you should avoid talking to? that is one of the things that the dean campaign did well. i will say a little bit more about this in a minute. you have to know how to use

those tools effectively, to mobilize supporters and coordinate their work and some wine, in order to raise money and disseminate communication messages and get volunteers in the field. when i use "network politics" and the title, this is what i'm referring to, ways of coordinating the labor of volunteers who are gathering across the country. in the old days, they would show up in field offices. now what you do when every volunteer in a non-swing state like california can be making voters and and to swing states? how do you make sure that everyone is on message? real briefly, the history here -- it turns out that after the dean campaign ends, his former staffers, who you can see represented as the little

individual, found an extraordinary array of political consultancies, training organizations, advocacy groups, etc. it is through them that they carried the lessons they learned, technologies they developed, and the skills they developed in the dean campaign to many other sites of electoral politics, and they become a conduits of these innovations across the field. they not only to read those tools and techniques wholesale, -- they not only carry these tools and techniques wholesale, they made them more powerful. the history that i want to focus on today is the movement of former dean staffers to the democratic party after the chairman was elected. they became the technology and internet directors for the party

and implemented a whole new way for the democratic party to be engaging in electoral politics. afterwards, they go from the democratic party to the obama campaign in 2008. the new media director of the obama campaign in 2008 was a former staffer on the dean campaign. a direct transmission of technologies, tools, and knowledge. that is the pie in the sky, the larger, overarching argument. i will illustrate a little bit of what i have been talking about. i want to start by talking a little bit about a innovation, how this all came about. look at the let's state of web campaign in 2000. in 2000.al gore's site this refers to creating html

versions, a simple internet- readable versions of campaign literature, and putting it on line. it tended to be static content, informative content that you could see gore presented his vision of the 21st century on the front page. there is not a lot you can do. it is not very interactive. it is very much and to present substantive information to voters. the model that the staffers at was for undecided voters. they saw that most of the people who were visiting the candidates' web pages were undecided voters looking for information. a very deliberate model, where folks who are curious about the candidates go on line and do their research and get this substantive information.

during the 2000 cycle, there was also this inkling that maybe this was wrong. maybe the folks visiting the web sites or supporters. campaign's start to take advantage of this and say that supporters may be checking out our online and we-will be asking them to do stuff for us -- we might as well be asking them to do stuff for us -- volunteer, donate, etc. bill bradley was doing a lot of small boehner online fund raising -- small donor online fund-raising work. you heard a lot in the campaign in north carolina that you could go to our website and print a lawn sign. you do not have to go to a campaign office. you can just do it yourself from

a printer. the gore campaign was innovative in treating customizable -- creating customizable policy pages. it was an early way to take advantage of social networks. one of the challenges of was that there was no will develop industry of online -- no real develop industry of online campaigning in 2000. there was no real dedicated firm, no real dedicated political technology at this time, little in the way of best practices for campaigning. which explains why well into 2003, most of the presidential candidates' lack dynamic sites that we would now associated with the presidential campaigns. this is the dean campaign, a screen shot from his website in

2003. limited functionality. there was a way to sign up for e-mail and learn about the issues he was running. the links to contribute funds came relatively late. it was not as prominently featured as you would expect on a campaign website. the campaign website at this time offered very little in the way of discussion organizing opportunities. dean was by no means exceptional. all the candidates had websites that look like this well into the 2003, 2004 electoral cycle. what drove innovation was not a political candidate. it was bloggers. here i want to talk about what we call the net-roots, and bloggers themselves call themselves the net-roots. the story behind the dean campaign was a story of

destruction. -- disruption. let's think back to the 2003, 2004 cycle for a minute. 10 at democratic best candidates are vying to defeat george w. bush. among these candidates is gov. dean, who was running as an insurgent, outsider candidate, whose campaign centered on opposition to the iraq war as well as his claims to represent the democratic wing of the democratic party. a key part of this story is that pete net-roots, this online collection of bloggers, who were progressives looking to remake the democratic party -- they were upset by the party's illegal complicity with the iraq war -- elite complicity with the iraq war -- started to get behind the dean campaign. this was a forum for other folks

to gather around dean's candidacy entirely independent of the campaign. these are the organizing tactics that the dean campaign would later take up in response tho what these bloggers were doing. blog format, and that it discussion links, and lots of things to outside sites such as the official campaign. they were basically saying, "we are here, we support dean's candidacy, we will get him elected to office." this was a news site basically designed to facilitate on-line gathering of people who shared online interests. you get together interests in dean's candidacy, you can join meet-up for dean with everyone

else in your neighborhood. bloggers drove this initially, and they were the only ones who responded to the requests that the campaign get involved in this. bloggers to pitch this, and it was only later on that the cabinets of started to embrace this as a tool. that became a central organizing backbone of the campaign in 2004. what is interesting is that these were social modes of gathering together and organizing for a candid and online, and then get adopted by the dean pann itself. this is a leader screen shot of the web site in december. it adopts much more of the blog format, and john norcom in terms of creating a set of tools for people to gather around the

campaign and take action. "contribute" is a lot more fun than center. the ways and which you can go campaignd help the out by passing out fliers, audio and video, being able to send them out, etc. you can see at the top that the campaign had an official blog, first for a president to candidate. these tools that we see as standard today. the social networking site at the campaign develop on its own to start organizing friends and families for dean. the whole point is essentially that the campaign itself

realized that ids great that we have this blogger energy around the dean campaign, but how do we get them working towards our electoral priorities? that was the impetus towards this the more social orientation of the dean website. campaign manager joe trippi set out to coordinate these efforts to better coronate their electoral work. in electoral politics is about money, message, a volunteering. he hires a bunch of folks who come from outside politics, and here is where we talk about processes of innovation. there were a lot of folks who worked for the dean campaign who came from the high-tech sector, startups like silicon valley, tech hubs around the country. folks were looking for new work, new challenges, new opportunities, perhaps more

meaningful work. when you interviewed them, they were interested to see that it staff they developed in commercial settings could be applied to a presidential campaign. trippi brought them over and they were behind the design of these websites. another thing was creating a protected space of innovation. the ethos there was experimental. they had a culture that said to experiment with these new tools. even if you don't know what the payoff is going to be immediately, we want you to try new things, and of supporters in new things. part of this was driven by the fact that dean was the outsider candidate. part of it was driven by the fact that there was an extraordinary group of people there, who came from sectors where this was encouraged and welcome, etc. just to show you a little bit more in depth two of the tools

-- the social networking platform -- more than 20,000 supporters went in and profile limbs of in much the same way -- profiled themselves on a much the semi they would on -- same way they would on friendster. ways to get the word out on dean's campaign on the social network. this was the integration of the social networking platform with an events tool. i will talk a little bit more about mybarackobama.com, which was used to great effect in 2008, used by supporters to planned events in their own neighborhood. you can normally create an event and you can search in your zip code to find all the other events that were created by your neighbors or your friends or

family or folks who did not even know who lived in your zip code. you could go join one of those events. all this could be independently organized on the campaign, just by supporters themselves. ok, we all know how the dean campaign ends in 2004, but i should say that it was very successful at least for a time. it proved very successful in organizing, at least in terms of conventional metrics you think of when you think of electoral politics. dean shattered a record at the time, and just to give you a sense of where we go in four years, 2008, obama raised $50 million in february of 2008 alone. enormous jump in scale in terms of online fund-raising. you can see the numbers coming in now dwarfing what dean was

able to put together in 2003, 2004. dean became the front-runner in the press and the polls for a time. one of the legacies of the campaign was opening up the rhetorical space for democrats to become more critical of the sitting president in 2004. even though he lost, dean made a number of important -- he change the dynamics of how the democratic party was running at election. the next thing that happened was that while there was so little practice, many ofn his staffers state and electoral politics and developed firms and 20 organizations, etc. -- and training organizations, etc. they wanted to figure out how to this this in the service of

democratic politics, uppercase d, democratic party politics. this was a firm that carried many of the technologies and tools from the dean campaign and brought it to obama four years later. it was founded by dean's former staffers, three of whom had a background in high tech sectors. they received the intellectual property and essentially ended up rebuilding it for dean's political action committee, democracy for america, which is a community organizing political action committee that is still active in local chapters in the country. blue state took that will set and rebuild it and made more in subsequent years.

first, i want to talk about two other projects of infrastructure-building that were important for the obama campaign and really for the democratic party more generally. blue state digital, as in the name, is expressly partisan firm. a lot of the firms that did campaigns in 2004 were mostly geared towards nonprofits, non- partisan. they would work on both sides of the aisle. in the wake of the 2004 campaign, you saw a host of firms that would only work with democratic clients. these were more ideologically and party-driven consultancy's. they would take corporate clients, nonprofit plans, but there was the value of getting democrats elected at this point. secondly, they provided a range of technology and strategy services. technology meeting, where as i said before that there were no

dedicated tools for campaigns after 2004, these firms traded their first sets of political campaign technologies that could be used on line. what is important to note there is that the tools for nonprofits just lacked the capacity that was needed for a presidential campaign. campaigns need systems that can be implemented and scaled very quickly. presidential campaigns get millions of hits for a very short period of time, whereas most of province have more consistent tracks. political campaigns, particularly at the presidential level, at more needs than the nonprofit certainly did. let me say more about two of these infrastructure-building projects. first, dean, once he became chairman, invested a lot of time and effort in rebuilding the

democratic party's boehner databases -- the democratic party's voter database. he brought over blue state digital's technology director. the democratic party lacked a database. the story of the voter database is very complicated. i needed an entire chapter to tell the history in the book. on eight broad level, think of before dean bill to the national voter databases. essentially, you have 50 different systems around the country. the data was not standardized. every state party had a different set of data at they might collect, different formats they were collecting it in.

files were often incompatible. what is meant for a presidential campaign is that you had to learn a number -- 13, 14, 15 different systems. you can imagine what a nightmare was for a primary campaign, where you had to learn 20, 30 different systems, etc. the of the challenge for presidential campaigns and the party itself, you could never queried the entire electorate itself. you could not figure out what all democrats were looking like you could only do these little silo database systems. building this was a priority for dean, in part because there were a number of databases that the kerry campaign used in 2004 that crashed often did you know the nightmare of knocking on doors numerous times because you cannot have that the -- because

you do not have the data of who was contacted. they worked out a system where the national democratic party assumed the cost of improving and maintaining the state order files and building new databases in exchange for the permission to aggregate that. the system that resulted from that is called votebuilder. this is what they used in 2008. the democratic party's database and a voter files, with an interface system built around it. what this will help to the party to was standardize data across all the party systems and, more effectively, be able to collect and capture date on the electorate. the barack obama campaign in 2008 generated over 200 million

pieces of information on the electorate just from people going door-to-door. all that is now a house in the democratic party's voter database and becomes the foundation with which the campaign can go back online outreach programs in 2012. we start to see this cumulative data work that goes into how campaigns conduct elections. also, the democratic party makes this available to all of its candidates. everyone from state senators to presidents can come in here, access the same data, which makes a powerful because i often hear me term elections, democrats are generating data on the electorate that presidential campaigns can use later on. the second part of what dean did is bring on an internet director that built and helped to refine and online organizing platform for the democratic party. this is called partybuilder.

i told you about how blue state digital rebuild the dean tools. this was version 2.0 of the dean tools. you can see the similar organizing features. people can create events. a new feature is that people can create groups -- african- americans for the democratic party, etc. online fund raising, petitions, blogs. this was a platform that supporters of the democratic party could use in 2006 during midterm elections. it was this system that became mybarackobama.com during the 2008 presidential election. let me say a quick note about this. what is so important about this -- this is a screen shot of the obama 20008 website from july 2007. when obama announced his

candidacy in 2007, the campaign had in place a platform that could support thousands of support groups around the country, immediately killing online and starting to take action for the candidate. before these tools exist, essentially, candidates would waste months or they had a more static web site and did not have a way to get supporters engaged and a way to hit the ground running. the day obama an ounce, thousands of groups around petric already mobilized around the campaign and take action, whether it is through fund- raising, online event creation, local canvassed events, etc., or even just keeping up with what the campaign was doing in a dynamic an interactive way. the story of the obama campaign is not simply about the tools, however. both tom vilsack and bill

richardson used blue state digital services during the 2008 election. but after, essentially, the folks from a blue state digital brought their platform to the democratic party and the obama campaign, one of the innovative things that the obama campaign did very well was creating an organization around those tools to use them effectively in some way. i love just framing this by a quotation michael slaby, chief technology officer in 2008, gave me when i interviewed him about the work of the campaign. now he is the chief immigration -- integration officer in 2012. folks were already mobilized around the obama candidacy -- his charisma, rhetoric, just the opportunity to elect a democrat to office for the first time in a long time -- into concrete

electoral resources. the mantra of the media division was money, message, and votes -- the staples of electioneering treat you need money to do television advertisements, to court and eight field campaigns. -- to coordinate field campaigns. you need to get your message out there. and ultimately, on election day, you need to turn people out to the polls. what slaby is talking about is that they were able to put in place the tools and organization necessary that translated the interest and energy around obama's candidacy into those resources that would help them win an election. they created eight new media division -- a new media division which was sprawling, over 140 staffers and volunteers by the end of the election. you can see the large areas of work here. the important thing is that they

were using tools to generate practices that would basically be constantly translating that energy around obama into the resources they needed. i will talk about design, the role of design that it play in the campaign, and organizing, mybarackobama.com, and real briefly about the analytics team that was making sure that people would be taking actions they needed to take it from there, i will take you into 2012. real briefly, this is the site redesign, which you can see looks a lot different from the early website i showed you about the obama campaign. the campaign spent a lot of time working with talented designers to think about how a candidate's website is going to reflect the addition of the

candidate barack obama -- reflected the vision of the candidate and what barack obama's candidacy means to the nation. what they did is develop what they referred to as an aesthetic of obama online. the idea is that they wanted to help supporters and staffers alike imagine obama as a transformational figure, and a campaign as a participatory movement that was really changing the way that electoral politics work in america. to show you how they did this online through the design, you can see the iconic obama blue, what you think of in your mind when you think of the obama campaign, at least when you think of colors. this was done so very deliberately did they wanted consistentl -- this was done

very deliberately. they wanted consistency and in terms of typeface and color to suggest that the candidate was efficient and competent as a manager and organizer. remember, obama was relatively new to the political scene. he was a junior senator from illinois. it was doing things like standardizing the typeface so you would not have mixing and matching of different images, etc. and they wanted to create this experience, this is that that was integrated. -- this aesthetic that was indicated. they poured through historical documents and would stylize a portrait of the candidate that would recall things like the civil-rights movement. they wanted to create a visual impression that obama was this historical figure in some way. they tried to do this through design. they created esthetics using

official-looking documents. they created a supporters seem where different groups would see their own identity represented in the campaign's logo, such as using a rainbow flag for gay and lesbians for obama, etc. the design would help to restrict this image of the candidates and campaign itself. this is a screen shot from the dashboard of mybarackobama.com. the important thing is that the campaign wanted to steer supporters who were interested in obama's candidacy to doing that work on the ground. they did a whole bunch of stuff. you can see again that this is a later version of the original dean campaign tool. you have the capacity to create events, the capacity to fund raise, to create a network of other supporters who might be in your geographic area or part of your affiliation, wor --

affiliational network. if i was a supporter in california, i could use this interface to make calls to undecided voters in north carolina, in ways that was furthering the field effort of finding out, supporters were. another thing this campaign it was developed analytic practices, which in the industry is known as optimization, that would also probabilistically increase the likelihood of doing what the campaign needed to get done. wouldampaign continually test different images on the website, different colors on the web site, to see what would be more likely to generate people taking the action he wanted to take trade with it that says "-- whether that says "change, joined the

movement," whether you saw the red button that said "learn more" versus "sign up," all that was continually tested. there is a set of different categories, so that when you visit a web page, the campaign could collect a whole bunch of information about you. it would know whether you had visited the site previously, whether it you had made a donation, whether you purchase something from the store, with the you had an account on -- whether you had an account on mybarackobama.com. did you live in a district that was leaning strongly democratic, a battleground state? they would support the content based on who they knew you were and where you're getting content

from. if you are visiting for the first time, he would get the general welcome page,a nd urge you to sign up for more. but if you are from a battleground state and you had visited previously, he might get a direct link to their application for "vote for change," an on-line registration tool. when you move all the way down -- if you already have a mybarackobama.com account and you are taking action for the campaign, it will take you right over to their canvas tool so that you can contact voters on line. to go back to michael slaby and talk for one minute about what this meant, optimization alone is worth $57 million for the campaign. again, this is all about figuring out what color is, buttons, what language to use,

more than the entire state budget in florida, for example. just by making these small tweaks designing a web page, it is and better. it was headed up in 2012 -- i have about 10 more minutes and i will take questions. the area of the history of just talked about helps us eliminate certain things to look for in the coming election. i want to talk about two areas in particular -- the growing use of on-line volunteered and leveraging them for field efforts, the data that goes into contemporary campaigning, and finally, new forms of both social and individualized information. i want to begin with the caveat

-- it is exceptionally difficult to talk about an election. i will be talking the general trends i have seen from the outside. there is lots of claims about what people are doing and oftentimes what campaigns talk to the press about is something they want the press to know and not necessarily what is actually going on behind the scenes. that is one reason i did interviews after the campaign that ended where it gave me a good look and people were more reflective. i want to speculate a bit based on what i am seeing in terms of what i have to learn from studying this of the last decade. ok, on one level, we sort of see the extension of the early organizing around my barack obama dot com. . this is the-board system that was new and designed and essentially it -- it extends

zero -- older organizing activities and at some new ones. and when can create an account and immediately what happens is you are dropped into it volunteer team based in your is it code. you can see i signed up in their party members and i can say a profile of myself, etc and different folks are organizing team events in the area. you can see all the different things that i can do dialing into this campaign. i can register voters, i can make turnout calls, all of which is tracked in numbers i can say because i want to motivate myself and mobilized -- and mobilized volunteers but also the campaign can see it. they have a sense of what's going on on the ground. one of the important things here that is not visible to you but

that was an important part of the redesign was that the death of the folks generate making calls using this applicant -- that the data the folks general making calls using this application or going door to door, is that this data is now sync with the boulder file as it was not in 2008. the campaign online tool in 2008, there was a lag. there was not an easy way to make calls from california into north carolina. it would take a while for that data to make it into the voter file. this integration, as far as i understand, is more seamless. every time you enter information, i talked to joe smith, and he is an obama supporter and that immediately goes in the campaign of voter file not just available to me but to all the organizers and headquarters in chicago.

that integration is very important. the mitt romney campaign has developed similar tools. although not based on a team model, at least not that i can tell as of right now. you can sort of see this is the back end of their-board. they can create fundraisers for the campaign and donna and volunteer and buy stuff from their store. there's also a point system that reveals this. the general sense is ways in which you concrete platforms where volunteers and supporters can get involved in the actions of the campaign. at the same time, we see both new social flows, and i will talk more about individualized information flows, to new social close.

based on twitter, it played a more marginal role in 2008. was a new service event and facebook, which the campaign mainly used as an organizing tool -- they set up groups for high-school in states like iowa and when folks join those crowds, they would have field organizers reach out to everyone gathering on line. facebook and director are two essential communication tools for contemporary campaigns. on twitter, campaigns want to create social information. it is a digital two-step slow. flow, you want to reach out to folks supporting you and pass on information with the idea that you will find it more credible as a decoder to see information coming from one of your friends rather than a political penn came -- a political campaign.

it is disturbing information through social network online. obama will put out messages on twitter and hopefully the people who follow him will re-tweet those messages or it will get picked up in other ways. facebook, folks can signal their allegiance to candidates. they can join apps for candidates and facebook offers new ways for candidates to collect information. if you join a facebook application of one of the candidates, the campaign has access to your name, gender, date of birth, your social network status and they can then start to run targeted messages to your zip code. or they can figure out who are the influence hers in a

particular network and send them messages and get that message disseminated. the growth of these more social information flows go hand in hand with individualized information flows. i am talking about the idea the campaigns can now use of online advertising to target voters in vastly new ways. target subsets of the electorate. the use of online advertising to basically three different things. the first is to find supporters. the call this list building. if you look at the advertised on left, they are saying happy birthday, barack. they want to get your e-mail address for the campaign. once they have my name and once

they have my e-mail address, they will send you a higher order. this is what they would call mobilization. you can see that the first ad was to sign the card and after i gave them my e-mail address, it was given a small dollar contribution to help win a dinner with barack obama. you see some listed building to see some motivation. campaigns have a wealth of targeting and other areas. this is one of the areas that has seen explosive growth this campaign cycle is online advertising. geo-location by it zip code and congressional district -- if you are in a high interest congressional district, a campaign might send an online ed to you.

campaigns want to advertise on sites that are read by people they think their supporters are in some way. i will not go into the voter modeling. they talk offline identities to online identities. it is anywhere from 60-80% effective but the idea is you can actually find a set of targets in the voter data bases. they might want to reach daniel kreiss and they could go to a third party matching firm that can provide the campaign or more likely an ad agency serving the online ads with an ip address that would reach my machine and thensenfive they can incentivie ads. based on to their target is. it is not water% per but this is

matching what used to be separate categories of information. finally what is known as lookalike references. this is running targeted advertising to voters as individuals based on matching groups. if he wanted to reach a set of voters to say the romney campaign has been talking about this, these are off the grid that boaters. the might not be watching a live television. people who are watching live television maybe voters 18-24 years old who might be living in urban areas. essentially, you want to find voters who look like them on line who have similar browsing habits and serve them with ads. that would be lookalike audience. it would not the individual advertising but your advertising to universal people who have similar browsing have it based on what you have already realized your campaign party is.

i can happily answer any questions but let me pull back for a second and talk about this democratic practice. it is a picture of obama speaking at unc and a picture of my recent mitt romney campaign event blurring together. there are certainly continuities who have used these as media tools. what i argue in the book is that new media has dramatically amplified institutional ways of engaging with electoral politics. campaign's use of new media has lowered the cost of doing things that we have been doing for time immemorial, making donations on line, volunteering by canvassing, phone banking, planning events and fundraising. these are the staples of

electoral politics. with the new media has not necessarily done is make candidates more responsive. we don't see transformational democracy. it is not about coming up with new policy positions that mitt romney should adopt. it is more about how can we raise money for this candidate to get in office. the media tools work best as a coordinating machinery. when we have ideological commitments and party commitments, it provides us ways to get involved. for campaigns, the media is a way to mobilize individuals to deliver the financial and political resources that they might need. it gives a sense of endurance that offer in the book. the subtitle of my book is taking our country back. it was first used by the archconservative pat buchanan in

1992. i illustrate the point that to see continuities it with electoral politics even in the face of considerable technological change over the last decade. what we see is a hybrid form of electoral politics. the combined vote management to leverage the data in new ways, leveraged data to help make sure supporter actions are being coordinated but also it is really empower it to be sitting somewhere were in the past you just watched the television but now you could go on line and gather with folks around the candidate and engage in the democratic process. that is really powerful. we see an extension of some and we see an application but also -- we see an application but also empowerment around electoral politics. with that, i will stop and

invite questions. [applause] >> the floor is open. wait for the microphone to get close to you. >> one of the things obama did during the 2008 campaign was his vice-presidential candidate, he did that through phone messaging. is that something they have abandoned it? is that something they are continuing to use and how effective is it? >> bett is a great question. -- that is a great question. it was highly lauded that obama would announce his vice- presidential candidate through text message.

i can say a couple of broad strokes about that. you have to think about mobile technology. more and more internet content is being consumed on mobile devices. campaigns are thinking about how to optimize their website to mobile and do things like text messaging in order to mobilize folks not in their particular area. they are using applications on things like i phones to do voter canvassing soon as you can enter into -- you can enter into a volunteer contact on your iphone and that can sync with the database. mobile this certainly central to campaign efforts and i think it is being used to make a couple of different ways. campaigns want as much as information as possible and that will figure out what to do with it. along the way, most importantly, creating more efficiencies in the campus in

process, campaigns are thinking about how to advertise on mobile and do that in better ways than has been done before. i have not seen the romney campaign say they will use mobile. to try and engage with mobil and different ways is the goal. other questions? >> getting people to do something this november, is there any effort to go beyond this immediate persuasion and mobilization to try to create a long-term basis for supporting a

party or a program through building up an ideology? the survey data shows that people's ideas are very uncoordinated. there is a lot of very low correlation between support of one issue or another. is anyone thinking more long- term education of the supporters of either the liberal or conservative line? >> i think that is the $50 million question. that is a great question. i can speak a little bit about it. in 2008, the folks i interviewed in -- on the obama team thought very hard about how they would

keep the energy and enthusiasm and the campaign's 13 million member list engaged with the campaign. what makes this difficult, i think, this is how i would sum this up -- government and policy making is different in campaigns. as candidate obama often looked different than what you can't see as president obama and all of a sudden, you have to steer the national democratic poliparty and all its other officials. they might represent more conservative districts. there's a need to compromise with the opposing party. it is less the stark black-and- white than what comes through in

a campaign. a lot of the challenge that folks who coordinated the online side of this of obama campaign in 2008, how did they translate the energy around the campaign to something like the health- care debate? how did they engage folks and say here is a set of things we need from the health care. ? . what i think happened was they tried to do a host of town halls and get people talking about the issue but ultimately, any policy-making had to be coordinated through the democratic party and there were different issues in terms of what people were willing to accept and the compromise their willing to accept. at the same time, organizing for america which was the organization in the word -- and the democratic party, tried to

get conservative democratic candidates. that was less the energy that was fueling the obama campaign to begin with. you have this general dissipation, i think, of the energy and no clear what the endgame of the health-care debate would be. you could call your senator but it was hard for america to organize around things like the public auction which might be different than what the democratic party line was. you have some very complicated forces emerging at that point that made it really difficult for organizing for america to translate easily that energy around obama into something longer lasting. it certainly seems to me that the republican conservative entry -- infrastructure has invested in the ideology

building. there is a wonderful book by a yale professor that looked at the rise of the republican legal profession through a network of foundations and think tanks, training for conservative legal scholars, that essentially built up and did the ideological work that resulted in the current course. those sorts of efforts look different than what this narrow short-term goal. i don't this conflicts with it. they are ultimately, pretty complimentary. you need good candidates in office if you're a democrat added the same time you need the larger institutions. they can feed off one another. i don't necessarily know they democratic core later to what the republicans have built up. other questions?

yeah? >> how much of the use of the new media is being done on the congressional level? >> that's a great question. have any raw numbers for you. i have a sense of what other emerging research i have seen has that it is pretty on even at the state level. some candidates are very quick to adopt new media tools. barry recently, there has been a set of new media tools that have been lower priced and the idea is that there would be more widespread adoption of these tools. around things like canvassing. i continue to think the big challenge here is not necessarily the tools and not new media but the energy around candidates. you still need volunteers using the tools. you could have the best website in the world but that does not

mean there will be energy around the candidacy. my sense is that it has been uneven. this certainly has been a number of candidates who have embraced it. there are other folks who have done less than the new media area. i just finished doing some ethnographic work and they invested a lot and social technologies and tools. that drove a lot of conversations on line. that was one of the first big state efforts that i saw around. the long arc is for this to be more of a routine part of campaigning, having a well developed new media practice. how much is that going to be incorporated with all the other campaign activities that a candidate pursues? they make very calculated

calculations. is it based on the new media or is it based on television advertising? is it worth investing in online advertising? it seems that television advertising is saturated. they are constantly making these benefit analyses. every candidate will have a facebook page within five years unless they are already -- we might be at that point already. generally, the option is in that direction that this will be a routine practice. yup ? >> i am curious about the last statement as to what percentage they think are people who are not really following the campaign on tv because they no longer watch broadcasting -- it seems like most campaigns focus primarily on tv advertising and

that kind of thing. how many people can they not reach because they are not focusing on tv? >> the digital director of the romney campaign does targeted victory advertising on television. they say 30% better off the grid and/or time shifting their viewing like watching -- like using the d b your were watching on the computer. or watching -- led d is in theirvr were watching online. - or watching a theirdvr or watching online. the electorate is moving in that direction. i think this one of the reasons why we have seen in the past decade -- there is a wonderful book by a scholar call "ground

war is," which charts the rise of campaigning in the last decade. part of the story is that campaign to realize that television broadcasting is no longer as effective as a was in 2000 and made enormous investments in their old school door to door shoe leather campaigning of the past. that has been on the wane since the 1960's on. new media is part of that campaign story that more and more personalized voter contact me to be made in some way. whether it is through using an on-line platform or going door to door or whether it means figuring out how to use on-line advertising or social not work to get your message out in new ways. broadcast television, in some ways, is antiquated.

campaigns are spending the vast majority of their resources on advertising, traditional television advertising. the proportions are creeping up. the numbers i have seen right now is about 25% of the advertising budget going on- line. that is significant. i think it is moving in that direction. >> in 2008, my recollection is that the obama campaign was really running the show at least an aren't counted. -- in orange county. the democratic party was not well organized and had a terrible database. i have not seen much evidence of either the obama campaign for the democratic party in orange county making much headway. thus far.

is this because some of us are not aware or are things just beginning to develop? >> in terms of the on the ground organizing? know the campaign strategy. this falls in the realm of speculation. >> you have to have an energized volunteer base if you want to use this data and i have not seen a whole lot of evidence of that. >> i think that certainly seems to be one of the concerns. this election is unfolding in a radically different context than 2008. the question i would ask is to say it -- is that energy and enthusiasm there to translate into resources this time around?

ultimately, that will be the story of new media. it is effective when it works of that court machinery. it translates that energy and enthusiasm into resources. you tell me you have not seen much on the ground and i don't know the numbers here compared to 2008 but willie obama campaign match the volunteer operation of four years ago? i don't know. my sense is that they will try very hard to recreate that momentum and enthusiasm and energy y. ep? >> the obama office is on franklin street. i have had a moderate amount of contact with them and especially women for obama isrevving up

right now. we are in june-july. i think it is in kind of slow motion. churn up byhu september, we could be in big trouble. we're not hearing and seeing it just yet at an important time of the year. >> it is hot. >> that's exactly right. [laughter] we can't let ourselves be fooled by this. we really should all get out and do what we can and try to join the various groups so we can do that on the ground. i think it will be vitally important. >> one more question and a brief answer.

>> you have spent a lot of time doing a lot of research. i will call with you have shown us the lead spot. wherever there is a light side there's a darker side. people who try to use new approaches provide misinformation, incorrect information. can you talk about that for a second? >> i can. let me say a little more about that. >> this is available on our video library at >> c-span.org. we will go live next to john brennan of homeland security. the government foiled a plot in yemen to bring explosives to the capital. the obama administration has increased attacks in yemen to counter the militants.

this is just getting under way. this is live coverage on cspan. >> let me introduce the chief adviser to the president on counter-terrorism strategy, policy, and implementation. he also coordinates all the homeland security-related activities throughout the executive branch. they respond to things like cyber terrorist attacks. you open with a few remarks about u.s. policy on yemen and you and i will have a conversation, 15 minutes or so, and we will open up to questions. mr. brennan? [applause] >> thank you very much, margaret. thank you all for being here today. it certainly is a pleasure to see so many familiar faces inside and outside of government

who i hope are here because of their abiding and deeply rooted interest in yemen and u.s. test u.s.- relations -- yemen relations. there is a terrorist threat emanating within its borders and for good reason. al-qaeda is most active there. it has murdered yemeni citizens and kidnapped and killed eight workers, harvard american interests, and carry out attacks in united states and repeated attacks against u.s. aviation. likewise, the counter rest -- the counter-terrorism efforts into focus on the use of one counter terrorism tool, targeted strikes. at the white house, we have always taken a broader view of the challenge of yemen and u.s. policy. two months ago, a number of

experts and yemen wrote an open letter to president obama arguing there is it perception that the united states is focused on al qaeda to the exclusion of the social and economic the hills of yemen. they say u.s. officials publicly conveyed that the united states is making a sustained commitment to the yemen political transition, economic development, and stability and is in that spirit, i am here today. both in my official capacity and someone who has come to know and admire yemen over the past three decades. i want to begin with a snapshot of where yemen is today. the president and his administration have made progress for implementing two key elements of the gulf cooperation council agreement that ended the rule of the former ruler and provided a road map for transition and reform. as part of a military organization, commanders including supporters have been

dismissed or reassigned. discussions are under way to bring the military under unified civilian command. just two days ago, the president took the important step of issuing a decree that reassigned several brigades under the command. in addition, the president has appointed a committee of representatives from political parties, youth groups, women's organizations and oppositionists in the north. that committee met for the first time this week. on the security front, several forces have achieved quite a few wins. as one resident said, it is like seeing darkness lifted from our lives after one year. elsewhere in yemen, checkpoints are being removed and businesses

are reopening and public services have risen debentures cities and public servants are getting paid. the energy infrastructure is slowly but surely being restored including the pipeline which supplies half of their oil. yemen continues to face extraordinary challenges. violence remains a tragic reality. we saw this again and last week's clashes with the minute -- with the ministry of the interior and on saturday. yemen remains one of the poorest countries on earth and conditions have only been compounded by last year's of people. most yemenis still like services to basic -- lack access to basic services like water and electricity. the unemployment is 40% and chronic poverty is that 54%. 10 million people, half the population go hungry every night. one in 10 children does not live to the age of five.

president obama understands the challenges of yemen. he has insisted that our policy emphasize the governments and development as much as security and focus on a clear goal to facilitate a democratic transition while helping him in advance political and economic reform so it can support its citizens and counter the terrorists. you see a comprehensive approach in the numbers. this year alone, u.s. assistance to yemen is more than $337 million. over half this money is for political transition, of humanitarian assistance, and development. let me repeat that -- more than half of the assistance we provide yemen is for political transition, humanitarian assistance, and development. in fact, this is the largest amount of civilian assistance united states has ever provided to yemen. any suggestion that our policy toward yemen is dominated by

counter-terrorism efforts is simply not true. i want to walk through the key bullets of our approach. the united states has been and will remain strong and active supporter of the political transition in yemen. that is what president obama called on the president to step down after unrest platts last year. having consistently advocated for the transfer of power despite some people thinking this would work against harter -- counter-terrorism operations, we worked hard with them to promote an inclusive national dialogue. president obama issued an executive order authorizing sanctions against those who threatened society. we will continue to push for the timely and full implementation of gtc agreement. we call on all yemenis to show

that will put the national interests of yemen in front of personal concerns and abide by the letter and spirit of g-60 agreement. our comprehensive approach helps strengthen governments and institutions upon which the yemen long-term progress depends. despite decades of rule by one man, yemen has a foundation on which it is building. it is a vibrant civil society, and then media, and leaders to place larger national interest above politics, and religion. the president is one such leader. this year, i met with him twice in yemen and spoke to him numerous times. i have been impressed with his commitment to his nation, his integrity, and his willingness to make difficult decisions to move this country for even a great risk to himself. the yemeni people are indeed

encouraged to have the president as their leader. we're helping to strengthen the yemeni government institutions so they become more responsive, effective, and responsive to the people. we are parting with ministries to expand special services, improve efficiency, combat corruption, and advocate transparency. we will support law enforcement groups to uphold the law. we're continuing our tradition of helping a civil society conduct parliamentary oversight. andise public awareness empower women, provide leadership and advocacy training and build a capacity of political parties to engage in peaceful democratic discourse. of course, lasting political and economic peace is difficult so long as half of the yemenis are malnourished and will not survive another day. that is why the third approach

is the media to humanitarian relief. united states provided nearly $110 million to humanitarian assistance to yemen, most of the through the un. this makes the united states the single largest provider of humanitarian assistance to yemen. these funds are allowing our u n ngo partners to provide food and food vouchers, improve sanitation and basic health services to meet other urgent needs. u.s. aid is providing more than $64 million to improve security. they want to enable units to scale up for starving children. with u.s. support, unicef and the world health organization completed a large skillet immunization campaign which may have successfully halted a polio outbreak that began last year. even with these efforts, some of the yemenis remain desperate. we commend the european union for doubling its donations to

yemen and encourage other donors to contribute more to the united nations response plan which is less than 60% funded. this will create relief for millions of yemenis. we are part and with yemen in a fourth area, the economic reforms necessary for long-term projects. the $68 million in tradition assistance -- in transition assistance include assistance to improve the delivery of basic services including health, education, and water. we're helping an address its staggering health gap by iran -- renovating health clinics and providing them with equipment and helping to train doctors in child health and supporting community health education. we're helping to foster more productive techniques and provide you

we are encouraging efforts to stabilize the economy that would undertake reforms that would raise a living standard. following the success of yemen in the south, u.s. aid is supporting the yemeni government efforts to repair war-torn infrastructure and rehabilitate communities. for its part, yemen must have a plan to address unemployment and poverty as well as the development of its common -- its economy. international donors want to know their contributions are not be inappropriate and private funds are part of the comprehensive plan. , providing a vision of where

the yemen leaders stand. this brings me to the final pillar of our comprehensive approach to yemen, improving security combating the terrorists. yemen cannot succeed politically, economically, socially so long as the cancer's growth og hrap remains. it must be fought and won by yemenis. to their great credit, the president and his government including the defense commenting -- combating the terrorists a priority. so long as aqap minister and chief of army staff and the interior minister, have madethas its murderous agenda, we will be

a close ally with yemen. just as our approach to yemen is multidimensional, our counter to his or -- our counter-terrorism tools are many. with our international partners, we have put unprecedented pressure on their aqap. plots of imported and keep aqap leaders have met their demise. attention has focused on one tool in particular, drone strikes.

in june, the obama administration declassified the fact that in yemen, our results of resulted in direct action against opposition leaders. this spring, a -- i address the subject at length and why strikes are legal, ethical and highly effective. today, i simply say that all our efforts in yemen are operated in conjunction with the yemeni government. every effort is made to with us. yet many citizens who have avoid any civilian casualties. contrary to conventional wisdom, we see little evidence these actions are promoting anti- american sentiment. in fact, we see the opposite. our yemen partners are anxious to work been free are more eager to work with the yemeni government. the strikes against the most senior and dangerous terrorists and not the problem, their part of the solution. he did bridget we're helping yemen build capacity for its own security. we're spearheading the international effort to restructure the yemen military. the $159 million we're providing

to yemen this year, almost all of it is for training and equipment. we are empowered in the yemen is with the tools they need to conduct an intelligence-driven operation.

wolour approach to yemen is reinforced by broad support from our international community. the cooperation council especially saudi arabia, the g- 10, friends of yemen, the united nations to push for a peaceful solution and facilitate a successful transition. the international community has spread u.s. sanctions against those would undermine the transition and provide humanitarian relief and offered assistance. international partners including the u.k., germany, china, russia and others have helped. saudi arabia offered $3.25 billion on top of significant fuel grants that gave yemen money against their loss in infrastructure. this will be critical in the years ahead. this is our support to yemen. we're providing humanitarian relief, strengthen the government, improving economic development and improving

strikes against the aqap. the united states is committed to the yemen success. we share the vision that died so many yemenis, again and were all citizens shia and sunni have a government that is democratic and responsive to justice. we are under no aleutians. given the tremendous challenges that yemen continues to face, progress toward a future like this will take many years. if we have learned anything in the past two years, is that we should not underestimate the will of the yemeni people. despite the seemingly insurmountable odds in front of them, hundreds of thousands of men and women took to the streets and engaged in political and social movements for the first time in their lives. in so doing, they helped pave the way for change that a few years a

testament from the resilience of the yemeni people. it builds on the future and may not be determined by one thing only. the people there have long hard road the day of show their willing to make the journey. they will continue to have a partner in america, thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you mr. brennan for that comprehensive policy to yemen. you mentioned that helping yemen move to a transition that is democratic and responsive and more just -- how does that jibe with what of the united states most important partners in the transition which a saudi arabia? ago would have been unimaginable. that yemen did not devolve into an all-out civil war iswhat is i

arabia politically and economically? will saudi arabia allow the flourishing of a more vibrant and democratic yemen? with the kind of institutions you cite? >> saudi arabia has done more for yemen and any other country in the world in terms of financial support. it shares an important border with yemen. there were one of the key drivers and supports the agreement that called for this political transition to take place. embedded in that agreement, this political transition. whenever i go out to yemen, i will invariably go to saudi arabia. what they want to do is make sure they are working together. i have found only support coming out of saudi arabia.

of having a vibrant civil society. >> the one yemen to continue alg this path. yemen has a historyso the saudi. >> yes, they have other religions that have been there for quite some time. they're moving into this new phase. the saudis want to make sure that they can take advantage of the foundation it has already established with the yemen. i think that is consistent for what the region is trying to do. >> [inaudible] the president agreed to step down before his term was up. he agreed to the gcc agreement

allowing elections to take place. the saudis realized that getting the president out of the position is not impossible. it was an achievement. they needed a much broader effort under way. >> how would you compare you hadi and president salaah in combating aqap? partnered with yemen for a number of years. there were ups and downs. there were times under the former president were there were strong disagreements about the need to have a sustained effort against aqap. anyone who knows yemen knows there are some many different things that come to bear with in yemen. i think the yemen government before president hahdi with ceo operations would affect their political equities. that cannot be partthe presidenr

focus and has spread the determination. he says even if he does not tell me outside world, of a counter-terrorism effort. , men women and children, will be protected as much as they can. >> you see a more consistent and dependable player? >> there has been lots of consistency since the present into his own. let's move on or >> lived on to syria. there are increasing reports of media and not just coming from the asad government that extremists are coming in from all over the world and joining the rebel cause. could that threaten u.s.-saudi interests? >> the history of belt that has

been they have tried to take advantage of bullets or are going through political change. or chaos. we'll see what they do in iraq. we have seen them in malta and yemen because of the political problems there. the syrian opposition has come out in a big way because they are concerned and they have said they will not allow al-qaeda to take advantage of the situation there. what we have to be mindful of his bed al qaeda is a worldwide enterprise and they will be looking for opportunities to exploit. >> how does the funding model currently in operation -- it seems that could contradict your policies. the u.s. and the west are not

really involved with funding the yemenis. could that be self-defeating? >> there are a number of things in support of the opera -- opposition. i will not go into all the details but there is a lot of humanitarian assistance going in there. we want to make sure of that we understand exactly who will be the recipients of any type whether it be communications, equipment -- the tragedy that has been perpetrated on the yemeni people

is something that needs to be addressed. we're very much supportive of the effort by the opposition. >> does it matter at whose hand? the secular rebels are now complaining that they do not have the weapons and firepower that some of these and newer and more extreme rebel forces do. >> any night on the news, clearly there is a lot of news on syria. there are a number of elements within the military affected. we are concerned about the extremist elements. i will say when you look at the

opposition as a whole, the overwhelming majority of them are not of al-qaeda. they are civilians truly trying to gain control of their lives in the future. i think we need to be able to do that until there is a multiple effort to work with the country in urging countries in the area. what we don't want to do is to anything that would unintentionally lead to greater bloodshed in the country. >> in the northern part of the country, where the rebels are holed up, they don't have the same control that the libyan rebels did. can you see forced -- circumstances in ways the west might protect them from attack forces? >> the situation in syria has been evolving over the past few months. united states government always looks at situations and looks at what types of narratives might unfold. accordingly, they look at what the contingency plan might be. rest assured, various options

that are being talked about, these are things the united states government has been looking at very carefully and try to understand the implications and trying to understand the disadvantages and the advantages of this. the president has kept us busy the president has kept us busy making sure we do