>> if you could all remained standing, will have the benediction. >> it and gentlemen, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. >> ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats, and if our wonderful native americans who have received their medals, would like to retire to their seats, i will not make you stand hile i talked. i will say good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and while you might be taking your seats again, allow me to say -- language] -- and i beg your forgiveness if i did not decode my readings -- greetings and i cannot produce greetings for all

of the tribes that we have here today. mr. speaker, leader harry reid, leader nancy pelosi, distinguished guests, honorees, guests and families, we are very proud of you, and i'm very proud o be included today. here during native american heritage month, i have the great privilege of representing the finest military in the world in recognizing the hundreds of native americans who have worn the cloth of our nation in the istinctive way that we

celebrate today, and in such a courageous way defending a country that did not always keep its word to their ancestors. [applause] the 33 tribes and 216 individuals we recognize today represent native warriors that leverage their native tongue to defend our nation through an unbreakable code, patriots that possessed a unique capability and willingness to give of their special talent and their lives.

as richard west, founding irector of the national museum of the american indian so elegantly captured it, language is central to cultural identity. it is the code containing the subtleties and secrets of cultural life. as it turns out, the clever usage of our nations original, unique, and special languages -- these cultural codes was also an essential part of defending our great nation. we have all heard the story throughout history -- military leaders have sought the perfect code, signals the enemy cannot break, no matter how able the intelligence team, and it was our code talkers the creative voice codes that defied the coding in an era of slow, bi-hand, battlefield encryption, such an eloquent way to quickly divide communications. it was doubly clever in that not only the language was decipherable -- indecipherable, the special words used within the language were difficult as well, such as crazy white man for adolf hitler, or tortoise for tank, or pregnant fish for bomber. the code talker's role in combat required intelligence, adaptability, grace under pressure, bravery, dignity, and,

quite honestly, the qualities that fit my useful stereotype of the brave, american indian warrior. hese men endured some of our nation's most dangerous tackles and served -- battles and served proudly. the actions of those that we elebrate today were critical insignificant operations such as comanches on utah beach on d-day, cherokees at the second battle, to name but a few.

these men were integral members of their teams, the 36th nfantry division, the fourth signals company, the 81st infantry division, the 30th infantry division, and so many more, learning morse code and operating equipment to translate messages quickly and ccurately. in the words of navy admiral aubrey fitch, employment of these men has resulted in accurate transmission of messages that previously required hours. rom the start, the service

rendered by these men has received favorable comment, i raise him navy language. these men contribute it not only in battle, the fundamentally to military intelligence committees work in cryptology, and dollar museum highlights the code talkers -- our museum highlights the code talkers as pioneers of their specialty. here, once again, we learned that one of the greatest strengths of our nation is diversity, and your u.s. military, in particular, has always found great strength in this diversity. you may wonder why this is so. when the chips are down and the bullets are flying, and the only way out is to win, it does not take long to recognize on the one hand that one's heritage is not matter much anymore, and at the same time if you can bring something special to the fight through your own diversity, well, so much the better. your military has always lied our way out of the cultural challenges that sometimes accompany -- led our way out of the cultural challenges that sometimes accompany diversity, the we are happy to leverage unique skill sets regardless of individual differences, and through our code talkers, once again, diversity matched innovation with victory. the hero sitting among us are a testament to this -- 33 divers cultures, to be three divers dialect, all fighting together for one nation. native americans have long sacrifice for our nation, well

presented by 20th army, marine corps, and navy medal of honor recipients. the first american woman killed in operation iraqi freedom was a member of the hopi tribe, and many others have served nobly, proudly, and well in combat. while we have benefited as a nation from our native american warriors service and sacrifice, we can also learn from how they managed their journey from war to peace. thanks to her mark boal advances in battlefield and post-battlefield -- remarkable advances in battlefield and post-battlefield medical care, we have many wounded warriors we will need to support for decades to come. the smithsonian makes it a point to note that native american cultures has special traditions to help warriors return home ith injuries or member and veteran sacrifices forever. after the two world wars, most native american code talkers returned to communities facing difficult economic times. jobs were scarce. so where opportunities for education, training. some of the code talkers stayed

in their communities doing whatever kind of work they could find. others work to cities where jobs were more plentiful. many took advantage of the g.i. bill to go to college or get vocational training. the code talkers a compass many things during their post-war lives. some became leaders in their community's, participated in tribal governments. others became educators, artists, and professionals in a variety of fields. many are and remain active in the cultural lives of their tribes, and some work to preserve their languages. all remaining recognized heroes within the tribe. the lesson for us today, these men and women that have served no about commitment and are ready to lead in communities across the nation. they are a national resource, a wellspring of intelligence, innovation, hard work, and resilience. they deserve our best. as we gather here together in

emancipation hall, in the long and benevolent shadow of freedom, i am reminded of the ronson -- bronze statue to my right that warriors become great ot only because of the competence in battle, because of their efforts for peace and unity, and a commitment to people when they return. we can best honor these great warriors among us not just with well deserved and long overdue recognition, but also within our own efforts to continue to leverage our nations that iversity, and to forever honor ur veterans, including our ative american veterans, for

their narrative is an essential piece of our narrative. their journey is our journey, and as demonstrated by our code talkers, our nation's future is built on their contributions to our history. so, now, back to where i started, and these trying to speak it familiar language to our wonderful code talkers and their descendents, --native american language] -- all special code for a special message, thank you. and thank you, ladies and gentlemen. a god continue to shower his great blessings on our great nation. thank you. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, please stand as the chaplain of the united states of representatives, the reverend patrick conroy gives the benediction. >> thank you, creator, the maker of ways, for giving us this beautiful day to celebrate ife.

may the hands and hearts of this nation be raised in prayer and praise for the heroic servicemen and women native to this continent, who as proud members of the united states to the terry served our nation so -- states, served our nation. though in humility lacking desire to be named as heroes in doing their duty, these code alkers from many nations are honored this day by a nation which rises to celebrate their important work in military ntelligence. may the breath of god uphold their noble and heroic

story. they have honorably carried on the great legacy of their ancestors, who understood that service to one's people is the highest calling. may their great example of service communicate to all generations, and to all nations, a message to inspire citizens everywhere to serve their communities. bless all women and men in military service, no matter their racial, cultural, or religious heritage, and their families. god bless america, and grant us peace both in the present, and with you forever. amen. >> a ceremony from late november. there was a oday to orma session to object congress's failure for extending benefits or pass immigration legislation.

>> aurguably mr. speaker, this congress is the least productive one in which i've served in the last 33 years both from a humanitarian standpoint and an economic one. this congress has earned the disdain of the american people irrespective of their party affiliation. i rise mr. speaker specifically to express my and the democratic minorities strong objection to ajourning this first session of 113th congress without extending unemployment insurance eligibility for the 1.3 million americans including 25,000 military veterans who will lose that support in just 48 hours. this number, mr. speaker, will increase by 73,000 people on average every week that we

continue to block extension. that is both a moral outrage and another congressionally inflicted blow to our economy and it's unprecedented whenever unemployment levels have been as they are today. the congress has extended benefits. it is sadly consistent with our failure to pass meaningful jobs legislation proposed by the president. it is sadly consistent with our failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform which is broadly supported by business, labor, farmers, farm workers and a number of religious lieders and members of the faith community. it is sadly consistent with our failure to pass a farm bill which could give confidence to those in dire need of putting food on their family's table

that this congress will not abandon them. and we do so at the very time that our nation celebrates a message of giving and hope. all this we leave undone. after passing a so-called budget compromise whose only virtue was that it was slightly better than e draconian and i rational sequest or the. it is unworkable, unrealistic and ill conceived. so a so-called compromise that will be tested in just a few short weeks and which failed to assure that america will pay its bills in the months ahead. mr. speaker, if i thought objecting to this motion to adjourn by unanimous consent would lead to extension of unemployment for the 1.3 million

americans who have been unable to find work or the house leader bringing to the floor issues i've listed i would object to this house adjourning with so much of the people's work undone. such an , mr. speaker, objection would have no such effect. i and my party deeply regret that reality. and mr. speaker, we will return in january of 2014 urging our republican colleagues to address the of so many millions of americans who want us to do the work they sent us here to do. therefore, mr. speaker, sadly i withdraw my objection. >> the gentleman withdraws his reservation. without objection the current resolution is agreed to and a motion to reconsider is laid on the table.

>> he with draws his objection to the house adjourning. the second session gips on january 3 at noon eastern but law makers aren't scheduled to return until january 7. live coverage when they return here on c-span. while the house is in recess in prime time this week it's encore . esentations of q&a at 8:00 tonight it's our year in review looking at gun laws. we'll show you the president's reaction to the newtown shooting .nd congressional testimony at 9:00 c-span's first lady . ries, an encore presentation

>> cnn political reporter peter hamby talked about the impact of twitter. he cover the 2008 and 2012 campaigns. e dropped -- drew on interviews, and this is 45 minutes. >> hello, i am james pindell from wmur-tv, and peter will alk about the point of the paper and what he is trying to study and where it came from, and then we will ask some questions. this is new hampshire.

it is a tradition. we are going to drill this guy, so, peter, welcome back to new hampshire. that is very good. this is absolutely excellent. did twitter kill the boys on the bus? talk a little bit about the origin of why you had this topic. > kind of two reasons. one, after the campaign, i was jealous, and you may have been

jealous about this also. reflecting and meditating. i am not jealous of their unemployment, but i am jealous of their space, so after the campaign of 2012, i had an opportunity of fellowship at the kennedy school of government, and i had to write a paper on some aspect of the media and the political media, and i started to think about the difference between 2008 and 2012, which were the two presidential campaigns that i covered, and i was on the campaign, in the bubble, as they say, with illary clinton and mitt romney and john mccain and sarah palin, and i have lots of stories about hat, but the candidates were there. their advisers were there. they were on the plane.

they were talking to you. and i cannot stress enough if you have read a lot of history, much of the primary storytelling, the primary journalism about presidential campaigns always emerged from the bus, from the plane. you were out there on the road. when i was out covering mitt romney, i went in the bubble a few times, and i never wanted to go back in there again. it turned out that i was not alone in that. there were a number of other journalists who said the same thing, and it was not because we did not like mitt romney. the stapp was not there, and the candidate was not there. he was not talking, and i started to think about my lifespan in washington and the state of local media. i moved to gcs started working for cnn in 2005, before youtube, before twitter, and between then and 2013, the state of the media had just changed so much, and it had really had a strong impact on the relationship between reporters and the press and campaign operatives and candidates, and candidates are now often afraid of reporters because we have twitter. we have a iphones. everything is immediately transmitted. there is no filter. whereas when the boys on the bus

were doing a documentary about the way they cover campaigns in 1972, you could go out with a candidate after a long day and have a year, and cracked jokes -- have a beer and cracked jokes, and they did not find their way onto twitter, and twitter has really changed the way and pains are run, and i did about 70 interviews with reporters and people who worked in the romney campaign about, you know, these movements in the media, and i sat down to write a 15 page paper, and it turned into a 95 page paper, so it was kind of a cathartic exercise in that respect. >> there is a recent pew esearch study that shows something like three percent of americans are actually on twitter.

given that it has been a medium largely of the elite, why does that matter? you go so far as to say, and i o not disagree with you, and i do not disagree with pretty much anything you write, that twitter is now the number 1 -- this is where the conversation takes place -- >> the conventional wisdom used to be formed in washington or in manchester, any state capital by and about him of tv talk shows -- by an malgam of tv talk shows. this radiated out towards the public, and public opinion changed depending on what the

media was saying. think people should care. yes, the few study showed that 13% of americans were on twitter, and only three percent of americans were tweeting. and twitter is a collection of sort of niche communities. if you like sports, fashion, hip hop, whatever, politics, you follow people who are interested in that, and after a while, according to the operatives i talked to, you start talking to each other. you're talking about scott around, and other people are talking about scott round, and everyone is tweeting about it. the reason it matters is we sort of form our consensus on twitter, and that is what makes it into the new york times. that is what makes it into politico. that is what makes it onto the evening news, and that is what gets projected out there in the bigger universe, so twitter is really the gathering universe right now, and, again, i think it is really changing the way things go. >> just to back this up some, you started this conversation as a boy on the bus. and then in the plane --

> lots of reporters on the campaign. > there are. >> who is in this bubble now, and why? explain this? >> in 1972 when tim wrote "the boys on the bus," the big guys were on the road, bob novak, and, again, they were out there with the candidate, riding the big narratives that would land in the paper and drive television coverage. today, fast forward to 2012, it is a very young group of reporters, and it is a mixture of television producers. i was then in bed -- embed, and basically what that means is you are invented with the candidates, and you are on body watch he and any time he tweaked

his stump speech, anytime he akes a gaffe, any he eats some silly food, you are documenting it with the video camera and writing a blog post, it that your, and then you also have a lot of younger reporters, and then you have all of the others, politico, huffington post, and it consumes your life. if you have a family, if you are older, you now -- you cannot live on the road for what is essentially a two year campaign. there are those willing to fly around the country, and it is pretty fun if you're like a 25-year-old kid, going out there and doing it, but the downside, according to many members of the romney campaign i talked to is

that the press corps likes gravitons, experience, context. i interviewed stuart stevens, who was romney's sort of all-purpose media strategist at length, and he said he talked to reporters who did not know how o read a poll, who could not recognize pretty famous political figures, like ralph reed and robertson, and they saw this as a problem, and, again, these are the folks that work setting the narrative on twitter, really on the web, every day, and they thought that to be a major problem. >> absolutely. you also go a little bit about how obama and romney had a different strategy with the press and a different strategy about twitter itself. compare and contrast those. > well, i think -- look. i laid out early on in the paper, using the romney campaign as a study of how this is changing and the internet is tough, because romney is sort of a cautious. dad -- sort of a cautious guy, a way to build a campaign apparatus, and the romney campaign had to play catch-up. the obama campaign had a bigger staff.

they had hundreds and hundreds of people in chicago monitoring between, and, again, this is not me speaking alone. any number of reporters i interviewed for this said they thought the obama campaign adapted that are to twitter. there are no rules about twitter in newsrooms. this all sort of happened. like washington, the political class discovered twitter in 2009 in 2010, and that was the midterms, and then all of a sudden, we are all tweeting, and we are not thinking about it, how it is affecting the campaign strategy, so a lot of people were using this on the fly. the romney campaign really kind of shut down a little bit as

related to the press. f they saw a tweet that they hought was offensive, they ould get mad about it. i think the obama campaign did a better job of reaching out and massaging things. i talked to david axelrod about this, and he said they learned their the guest lesson at the first debate in denver. >> talk about that. let's separate that out, because i am -- this was not well-known. you can see it, but, boy, follow the twitter feed, this was a disaster. >> yes. it was game over. >> and you talk about this moment from ben smith. >> yes, we are in the press file for the first debate, and traditionally at a presidential debate or any debate, the consensus of what happened is sort of rendered, in the spin room afterwards, reporters talk, and this is what happened, and you trust your judgment. if you were watching twitter during the first debate, everyone, and it was not just the political, it was that

romney looks good, presidential, and ben smith, the editor of buzz feed, a smart political god, he said why do we have to wait to say that romney won the debate? we already know. look at twitter. everybody says mitt romney had one -- had won. ou were there. the romney campaign charged in, and i believe there was stephanie and david from the obama campaign, and they could not get out of there fast nough. a did not want to be there. this was another advantage the a did not want to be there. this was another advantage the romney campaign had with this link the primary season, was they saw how consensus was formed on twitter during all of those debates, so they would watch the debates and see what

reporters were tweeting about, so they would know what to talk about after the debates, and the obama campaign, according to david axelrod, was not really prepared for that. they were caught off guard, fill in the second debate, they were able to go with reporters throughout the debate, doing rapid response, doing fact checks out there to different people during the debate in a way they did not do in denver, which was a total disaster for these guys. >> romney, you go around -- go on to say, twitter help to reinforce a lot of this negative feeling they had towards the press, because they were tweeting some stupid stuff. >> yes. that is absolutely the case. >> this is the thing. it is hard to blame the romney campaign for getting frustrated. >> right, exactly. >> it was a tough, tough, endless cycle. again, because the candidates

today are so terrified, frankly, of the press tweeting every single little thing, campaigns are keeping the candidates away from reporters, the what is a reporter left to do? if you're traveling around the country on an airplane, and nobody is talking to you -- >> spending a lot of money. >> spending a lot of money, they would spend upwards of $60,000 per week on these planes traveling with people, and it is a ton of money, and someone with the romney campaign called it the news hole, and these young reporters would sit on the plane, and they would sometimes be drinking beer, and they would be tweeting and being snarky, so the romney campaign would say, why would i want to have these people here who are making fun of our campaign every day? if they are making fun of his

jeans or his hair or something. there was something called the orchestra pit theory, which is pretty interesting. the fox news chairman, roger, he used to work for richard nixon. that is where he became famous. he has a theory about the political media call the orchestra pit theory, and that is you have two candidates standing on the stage. one guy says he has got a solution for the middle east peace process, and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit. what is the media going to cover? they will cover the guy who fell into the orchestra pit. there was a bunch of reporters waiting for mitt romney to fall into the orchestra pit. he would do a speech about an important issue, and then he would say something goofy about rihanna or chris brown, and that would make it.

>> you also mentioned tupak. >> rubio is good with talking about rap. talking to campaign operatives, no one sees a solution to this. i had a solution with a fairly prominent governor a few weeks ago out in arizona, and this person said, how can the media get better? how can we work with them better? i did not have an answer for them. they are scared. editors at newspapers are terrified for lots of reasons. the web is disrupting them. the media is scared also. >> a couple of questions, and i want to open this up to you, what is retweet journalism?

>> this is interesting. retweet journalism was coined by a man who does not like reporters very much, but he understands how quickly twitter can shape things. he calls it when a reporter just blindly retweets something without making a phone call to see if it is true. an example that kim uses is a story about haley barbour, that he haley barbour was about to be indicted by the feds for tax fraud. nobody really knew who this blogger was, and yet that, for whatever reason that day, that tweet, linking to some story on some blog that no one read was retweeted by major national

reporters, so they are lifting this story up and putting it into the national bloodstream without bothering to check out whether it is correct or not. >> having two sources. >> right, two sources. and that is the problem with twitter at wmur news 9 washington post or the new york times. you have to go through your editorial process. to have a story, you need two sources, and your editor should go that -- go through that with you before. at twitter with an equal velocity is a sketchy blog post, and they are all in that mix together. twitter has been good for journalists in a lot of ways because it is a meritocracy. it has allowed young, hungry reporters.

it is actually a good time -- the pay may not be great, but you can punch through a ceiling that was not there five years ago if you are good, hungry, smart, funny, you have a take, you can rise up based on twitter. it is also a good self corrector. bad journalism gets corrected pretty quickly now in a way that it did not use too. >> so let's bring it back little bit, and that i want to open it up for questions after this one. you know, in the end, you talk about what the press can do better next time. you talk about what campaigns can do better next time. if i am just a voter, what am i supposed to do? am i supposed to block all of this out? >> somebody asked me this question recently also. >> garbage. a lot of twitter is irrelevant

garbage that is not going to help me make a decision about who is the best. >> look, if you're a regular person in texas or sacramento or toledo, wherever, you do not care that scott brown is in londonderry. we care deeply. so chances are if they do not care, they are not following you on twitter in the first place. i think i just wanted to write this paper to illuminate for people sort of why what they are seeing on the evening news or the today show or reading in their local paper, how that story kind of came to be in today's sort of media ecosystem, because i am not sure that everyone -- we all take twitter for granted. i mean, how many of you guys look at twitter? and how many of you guys get news on your phone? how many of you guys watched the

evening news this week at least once? >> that is a lot. >> that is more than i thought. >> he did not say at 6:30. >> dvr. >> that is right. >> but i was actually surprised that a lot of people did know that this was the case, that twitter really was the central watering hole, the gathering place for so many people in the press corps in washington and new york, and a big complaint, again, for a lot of reporters that route covering romney, egg and come out covering romney or whatever candidate, you want to be out there finding stories, digging up stuff, finding color, but a big complaint was that a lot of editors back home in new york and d.c. were just watching twitter all day, so ashley with the new york times will get a call from her editor that says, did you see this thing on twitter that says this about romney, can you confirm this, can you confirm this?

and then she spent her time running around trying to confirm that, which is the opposite of what it used to be. you used to be the one determining the news, and now the agenda is being set just on twitter, and people on the plane are increasingly relevant, because they are not setting news every day, and the candidates are not talking about the news either. >> let's open it up for questions. we have microphones over there. so go ahead and ask away if you have a question. >> great. >> so first off, you are talking about how politicians do not really like the whole twitter agenda. to you think that is a situation where the politicians need to evolve to deal with the new

communication climate, or is it that journalists should devolve and stop using twitter as this medium? >> it is a combination. i think from the journalist's perspective -- again, the last section of this paper, which you can read online for free, on the website, it talks about recommendations for 2016. i do think a lot of reporters that i talked to felt a little guilty about the way they behaved on twitter, and a lot of political operatives, they think reporters need to either be trained in how to use twitter or have an editor for their tweets. even since the election, we have seen -- i do not know if you guys in the romney campaign would agree with me, but i think people are dialing it back a little bit. people are not as over-the-top and snarky and mean and chasing everything as they were during the campaign. i think we are evolving in a way of how we use twitter, which is

good. editors making assignments for 2016 will have to say like, hey, just think twice before saying something. i sent a tweet once about some outfit obama was wearing, and the obama press secretary fired away, and she was right. i have not done a snarky tweet since then, to be honest, but from a campaign perspective, i was talking to and about this on the way over here. dan asked john mccain this question, do you think the straight talk express could exist today, and mccain said no, there is no way. the reporters are too young. there is no filter. every little gas -- gaffe will make it out there. i talked to john todd about this, who said there might be somebody to crack the twitter code. reporters who are evolving will

maybe be a little more forgiving if a candidate says something off-color, and we realize that was just a little bit of a slip up. you not worry about that. we are not going to tweet that. the other is to just shut the media out completely. to completely barraged them, and we will not be able to keep up, and that maybe another way. one other point i make in this paper, which i think is important in 26 teen, looking at the people who might run, jeb bush, hillary clinton. i mean, jeb bush's last statewide campaign was 2006? no, 2002. hillary clinton? look. a lot of reporters covering politics now were not even in elementary school when the clintons were in the white house, so they do not

necessarily hold the clintons in the same esteem the way a lot of our other colleagues that are older in the press do. also, from hillary's perspective, she is not fluent in twitter. in 2008 when she was running, nobody was using twitter. look at somebody like chris christie or marco rubio, who have come of age politically in the youtube/twitter era. they are kind of at ease. >> it is an asset for them. >> chris christie. sure. they know it is going to get on twitter. they are used to this political environment in a way that other candidates, like john mccain, do not, even though john mccain has a ton of followers. >> in a campaign, the last reporter with a blackberry, and i do not know how this is going to work for him.

it will be fascinating. he will have to figure it out. anymore questions? >> hi. great talk. very interesting. welcome to the new hampshire institute of politics. so if i am understanding this correctly, you are saying twitter is really influencing what people are putting on the news, and it is starting with twitter, and if that is the case, because i believe it is, because i use twitter, cnn breaking news, it notifies me, and i do not even have to turn on the news. i wish i had the time, but not during finals, but if that is the case, do you think, especially with our generation i mean, we have a lot of different types of students here who do watch the news, but i know that there are many in their early 20's who are using

their phones and twitter and facebook may be as a means of getting news. do you think that twitter is going to take the lead and surpass nightly news as our generation grows up? is that going to out date nightly news? is twitter going to change that? >> not anytime soon, but the importance of tv is absolutely there, no question about that. pew did a ton of research about how people are processing the media. if you are under the age of 30 in 2012, you were not watching tv news. only about one third of people under 30 watched tv news in the last week or something like that, and mobile -- so tv, newspapers, this way. tv, this way. >> interesting, tv news was always number one, and then cable.

>> even cable viewership. yes. desktop, laptop computers, pretty steady. mobile is going like that. even at cnn, we have made a huge investment in digital. my paycheck now comes from digital, because i am sort of native to that. we get all of our news on our phones, and that is ok. nightly news gets, what, 9 million viewers per night? twitter, influencing only a tiny segment of the population, but its growth potential is huge. something like 60% of the country is now on twitter, or as 90% of the country is on facebook, so facebook has kind of plateaus. twitter has got a lot of potential. but where is it will not take

over the evening news, i do think that digital as a whole will surpass it. i mean, the only reason i have cable is to watch sports and hbo. like, that is it. and c-span. obviously. otherwise -- and i am not alone in that. i am 32 years old, and plenty of my friends wish they can drop their cable subscription, but they cannot because they want news and sports, but they do not need all of those channels, and they want to watch on their own time. the commercials. >> except for cnn. you watch them all. >> except for cnn. ok? and sorry, one more point about this. in the ranks of campaign politics, there is just as big generational churn going on where people use the web all the

time, and people are starting -- in the campaign ranks, people are starting web forums as opposed to tv forms, and they just realize the growth potential is there for the web, whereas -- and the obama campaign was working this out too with their tv ads. they were not just buying local news. they were buying sort of niche, targeted ads. >> go ahead. while he is asking that question, i want to ask you a question. a longer answer, i know, so i apologize. what does this mean for the primary? a system that has always been extremely transparent, town hall meeting after town hall meeting, not just reporters. everybody has got a phone. everyone can broadcast, and the idea of retail politics, it is

different. it is what you saw with mitt romney. it is different for someone to kind of think it through. >> yes, i know him way more about new hampshire. but you are totally right. if you are a republican candidate running in the primary, and we saw this in 2012, you can go on fox news and reach really directly a ton of primary voters in five minutes, and even the romney campaign admitted that fox news is a safe environment for republicans, so you are not going to get asked the hard questions there. you know, i do not -- i really have a hard time. whimsical. how many primary voters are there in new hampshire? >> for the primaries? about 100 to 150, depending.

>> ok, so if it is like a smaller -- i think this is counterintuitive, but if it is like a smaller primary, i do think you have to go out there and shake hands, whereas in south carolina -- >> there are some risks involved. >> in south carolina, it is like half a million primary voters, so you cannot hit everyone, so you have to go tv, radio, but, yes, the way campaigns can control their own messages, you do not have to do local media anymore necessarily. you still do, but you can create an info graph on facebook and share that, and there are no annoying reporters asking you questions when you are making a tweet or creating a web ad. twitter users are pretty tuned in. there are primary activists in new hampshire and iowa, and i see their facebook traffic. that is the way a lot of activists communicate, is on

social media now, so why go on local news? they will ask you a tough question on wmur --i am just saying they are weighing these things now. >> my name is scott, and since i was a fresh and, last year i was in high school, and throughout the whole 2012 election, i noticed a lot of juniors, sophomores, and freshman had these twitter accounts, and it seemed that the more twitter accounts there were for a younger group, so all of these twitter accounts will become voting, because they were not in 2012, which will most likely expand the potential, as you touched upon, so i was wondering what you think, as more twitter users to come voting age people,

how you think either party could grasp onto the demographic of the twitter users that are becoming voting eligible? >> yes, that cuts to sort of what we were just talking about. young voters are tough to find and contact, and they are tough to motivate, frankly. they do not necessarily show up. so the web just as an access point to reach young voters. on twitter, social media. so, you know, i think -- again, this is why sort of the old media is dying and digital is rising. we all use the media in a different way than our older friends do, and you are going to get your news from twitter.

in 10 years, maybe you will still be getting news from twitter, that it is just a key access. the web. >> ok. anymore questions? this is jim merrill, who led mitt romney's campaign here. >> peter, it is great having you here. i just want to say this was a fantastic piece of work you put together with this, and i really enjoyed it, so thanks for being here. two questions. the first one, you talked about, and we all know how quickly this involved and the lack of policies and procedures to govern how this unfolded with reporters and everything else, and i remember, i think i signed up for twitter in 2008, so i remember the first time it struck me the power of the medium, and they're there -- and there were the results coming in that i cannot get anywhere else.

can you talk about whether there were any policies with news organizations that govern how the embedded reporters treated, and any change over the campaign, some issues over time, and if there were, i would be curious to know how that works, and do you expect that in 2016. that is one, and two, talking about how it evolves, is the twitter feed the future of our candidates and elected officials? i am curious. >> i will answer the first one. i actually unfollowed cory booker. he would say, it was great to see you at this event, and then, love you too, bro, kind of childish, kind of unbecoming, frankly, for a u.s. senator, but who am i to say the way things are going? as to guidelines, look, i know

from the cnn perspective, and i am certain other news organizations do, we have social media guidelines. a lot of it revolves around not tweeting out other unconfirmed information, so-called retweet journalism. we saw this with mandela, who died. there was some twitter buzz about it, and cnn has pretty strict editorial policies and really good journalists, frankly, and they sent around a reminder, let's just wait until we can confirm this, so we played it safe. i do not think so, i did not really see a lot of editorial changes across the board or have heard of any sort of crackdowns. >> it did not seem like there was. >> it did not seem like it, but then smith said, he did not want

his guys tweeting in name crap on twitter, and he said, only tweet smart stuff, and we can go back and look at those tweets and see if he was right or not. i just do not think so. i think we were all figuring out as it happened on that as you mentioned, and twitter just kind of exploded at some point in 2009, and we kind of never looked back and took a pause and said, are we doing this right? but, again, i do think, i do think -- i do not know if you agree, but the snark has died back of little bit. my friend scott works for real clear politics, and he is a great reporter, and sometimes he will e-mail me, did you see this thing on twitter? it is so dumb. dude, just close twitter. back away.

the number of reporters who said i think more clearly, i write more leisurely when i am not on twitter all day. it kind of scrambles your brain if that is what you look at first thing in the morning and the last thing you see before bed. it affects your thoughts, and also, twitter is a negative place. not to harp on you, but pew measured the negativity of different platforms during the 2012 campaign, the tone of people talking about president obama and mitt romney, and twitter was the bottom of the barrel, below facebook. it is just a negative, snarky place, just generally, so that kind of feeds -- you absorb some of that when you're on twitter all day, so i think people are being more judicious. again, a number of editors that i talked to said they are going to think more about heading into 2016 about do tweet this, do not tweet that.

>> going back to those feeds during the debates, getting to a similar level of snark. >> we are supposed to be objective. i guess. >> anymore questions? i want to talk a little about about what you were saying before. we had a chance to deeply think about this, so how are you going to approach your job differently, or how have you already begun to view your job differently? >> well, one thing, as i just said, there are days when i just do not go on twitter. i think that is valuable. one thing that twitter did during the 2012 cycle was it made small things seem big. staff hires, endorsements,

smalltime endorsements, campaign infighting. what was called process stories, things that will influence voters, but they are about politics, because everybody in the media was on twitter saying the same things, and if politico had a story about some focus group sang, all of the other news organizations were inclined to chase it and confirm it, and all of a sudden, we are talking about the same small stuff. a lot of conversations with reporters revealed that amidst all of that, there was the stuff that was really richly reported, the magazine pieces, the long form stuff, where people took the time to dig into mitt romney's time as a leader in the mormon church in beaumont, or some issues. those things landed with a

pretty big impact, because amid all of this sort of surface level snowflake journalism that sort of evaporated son contact, the media are --meatier stuff one of the things my colleagues and i do, i do not have to write a story every day. why do i not rate -- wait one day or, god forbid, four days, to write something, and then it is richer and more valuable, and i am detect a mat from some people, and that is something i hope to do more of in 2016, maybe stay away from the bubble, the bus and the plane, and can't out. >> an issue for buses also. the newsroom. if it is how many pages you are going to get, you can do 12 posts, 5000 page views, or you can do one post and get 10,000.

>> yes. editors have to figure out balance. there will probably still be a horde of twentysomethings who can crank out copy so they can get those links, but balance that out with reporters they can maybe step back and do bigger sort of pieces. >> one last thing here, and if there is any other questions, go ahead to the mica, but you kind of addressed this a little bit. where is this all going? are we on the cusp of something new and the way it is going to be, or are we in a transition phase, and we are figuring out how to use this better? rapid response is very simple now. hit back at the reporter publicly, not just e-mail or the phone, does the narrative is being set on twitter. people can see this interaction. is that where this is heading? >> again, i do not know. i think that -- first of all,

they are using instagram throughout the campaign. sort of popped later. we just do not know. i talked to casey hunt, who works for the ap now. she said to me, can you imagine a candidate who walks to the back of the plane and sees reporter sitting there with google glasses, and everything is live stream. that is not improbable at all, and she and i were both wondering, i do not see it getting better.

and there are still reporters that campaigns are still talk to. figure out what is in their head, what makes them tick, but, man, it campaigns can deliver the messages on social media with web videos on their own terms, increasingly, they are going to do it. at the end of the day, the mission is to win. you do not want to get thrown off message, and i think if they can't control the message, they are going to drive. >> eater, thank you for coming, and this is great. if you have not read it, you should google it. "did twitter kill the boys on the bus." thank you for coming. [applause] >> all this week in prime time, we are bringing you encore presentations of c-span's "q&a,"

tonight, former governor bob day. after that, you look at some of the news and events that led some in -- some in congress to push for changes in nations gun laws. it's our year in review at 8:00 eastern. following that, from our first ladies influence series, maybe eisenhower. >> lincoln did not decide early on. until the last minute as link very often did. he met with the pennsylvania curtain and that's when he finally realized he had to do something and he did decide to on the night of november 17, just as he said to his old friend, james speed, he told him the night of november 17, i found time to write about

half the speech and then he took the rest to gettysburg and finished there. there's very good evidence lincoln was not invited early and in fact wrote the speech leg but it does mean it wasn't important. he invited a lot of people to go and took a lot of care and attention over his words once he knew he was going. but just because he didn't write for two or three weeks doesn't mean it wasn't important to him. >> the story and talk about events and circumstances surrounding the gettysburg address and the president's plan an approach for the speech. that's sunday at 11:00 eastern as part of american history tv this weekend on c-span three. earlier this year, southern methodist university hosted a conversation with every director of the white house office of faith taste and neighborhood partnerships. established in 2001 by president george w. bush, the office is tasked with helping faith-based and community organizations

provide federally funded social services. they and -- they explored the importance of the office. this is just under two hours. [applause] >> thank you for that kind introduction. ladies and gentlemen, we at smu and the center for presidential history is honored to have you here with us this evening. i hope i can speak for all of us when i say it is an honor to have our five guests and panelists with us today. these five people have served our country well. they have led the charge in finding fair, constitutional, efficient, and effective ways for our national government to assist and partner with faith- based and neighborhood organizations in our midst which are doing great social good. in short, they have invested

personally in making our country a better place to live in. we have the opportunity to hear from all of them are on the same stage. for years, president osha and his advisers believed that small faith-based and community organizations had been at an unfair disadvantage, competing on an unlevel playing field when it came to qualifying for and accessing and receiving federal funding. although they were serving american communities in many ways, they did not have the resources, information, or connections to pursue federal funding that larger, more prominent organizations have. in some instances, faith-based organizations were finding themselves at a disadvantage in

applying for funding specifically because they were faith-based. the white house office of faith is an committee conditions was established. each of our panelists has a server is serving as the director of this very office. i encourage you to take a good look at your programs. you will see that they are all eminently incredibly qualified, experienced and hard-working people but for now, please allow me to briefly introduce all of our distinguished guests. our first guest, john dulio served as the first chairman. he is currently a professor of politics, religion, and civil society and professor of political science at the university of pennsylvania and is involved in multiple organizations aiding our nations communities in his hometown of philadelphia. after he left office, president

bush appointed our second guest, jim twqohy as the new director. he served for four years and is now in his third year a atve mari a university. our third guests served at the office of faith-based and community initiatives from 2006- 2008. since 2008, he has served as the distinguished senior fellow at baylor university and is president of the sagamore institute and international public policy research firm. when president obama came into office in 2009, he oversaw a revamping of this white house office including renaming it the office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. he appointed as its new director our fourth guest, joshua dubois. he left his office after serving from 2009-2013 to author a new book and become a weekly columnist for " the daily east" and start values partnerships aimed at helping companies and

nonprofits partner with the faith-based community. finally, i would like to introduce our fifth guest, melissa rogers, the current executive director of the white house office of faith-based and neighborhood partnerships. before assuming her white house post in march of this year, she served in senior positions at the center for religion and public affairs at wake forest university divinity school, the brookings institution, the pew forum on religion of public life, and as general counsel for the baptist joint committee for religious liberty. i encourage you to take a look at each of their bios on your program. these are truly remarkable people. we have the opportunity tonight to hear from all five of these experts and civil servants. allow me to explain how we will proceed. i have asked each of our panelists to share 10-15 minutes about their experiences, successes and difficulties, their views on the role of the white house in matters of faith in the public square.

after each is had an opportunity to speak, i will lead a discussion amongst our panelists about some of the most important issues they have raised. finally, at the end, we will open up the floor for you to ask questions of our guests. it takes very little faith to believe that i have spoken enough for now. panelists, we are eager to hear about your experiences and thoughts on the role of the white house in matters of faith and the public square. audience, please join me in welcoming our first analyst, the first rector of the now office of faith based and neighborhood partnerships. [applause] >> thank you very much, brian. it is an extraordinary pleasure to be here. i want to thank brian and the other leaders of the center for bringing us altogether. it is a real personal trait to be here with my friends and

colleagues, jim, jay, joshua, and melissa, melissa not only being the first woman but the first person whose name does not begin with j. [laughter] each of my colleagues here served with incredible distinction. i say that -- this is not the thing you kind of say when you are all together and you have to be nice, i mean it from the heart. jim succeeded a crazy fat man from philadelphia [laughter] and then succeeded in institutionalizing the office under far from easy circumstances and was able to forge faith-based and community initiatives plenty. jay sustain that office and work creatively to grow the effort even as the sense drained from the second term hourglass. if you don't believe it, just wait for the book coming out in january. it tells the story. joshua transitioned the office under a new president of a

different party and engaged the widest spectrum of leaders of all faiths and no faith and established centers in every cabinet agency and other federal units as well. i am a book salesman, as you can tell. i am selling their books and i am on commission, by the way. [laughter] last but not least, melissa, whose history with the office predates her own directorship, having served from her perch at brookings as a key confidant and friend to both the first bush and the first obama fa so- calledith czars and she has begun to develop exciting new faith-based partnerships and initiatives. god bless each of them and god bless resident george w. bush and god bless president opera obama. -- barack obama. i have been teaching at ivy league universities for more than 30 years. i qualify as having the key value of an ivy league professor which means i can speak for five

minutes or two hours on any subject with no essential change in content. [laughter] before you hear from my betters on this panel, let me inflict 10 or 12 minutes or so of my thoughts about our topic for this evening, fate, the white house, and the public square and i will offer four sets of points. the first point i would make is that today, faith-based is not only a term associated with a white house office that is soon to be 14 years old and a faith- based, more importantly, is a permanent part of the public discourse about religion, policy, and civic life. in the half dozen or so years that are seeded the establishment of the office, small but intellectually and ideologically and religiously diverse cadre of policy wonks and opinion leaders came together. what happened was that we trumpeted a fact, a fact that was hiding pretty much in plain

view. namely, the fact that america's urban churches come the synagogues, and mosques and other houses of worship and, most of all, the small street- level ministries concentrated in the nation's poorest places. all of these functions as sacred places that serve civic purposes. food pantries, daycare, drug and alcohol prevention or treatment, homeless shelters, afterschool and summer education, youth violence reduction, welfare to work placement and job training, health care, prisoner reentry, and literally scores upon scores more. in many cities from coast to coast, these faith-based organizations were not just add ons but accounted for much or most of given types of social service delivery either on their own or in partnerships with other groups or with public agencies. the vast majority of these sacred places serve people of

all faiths and no faith, most did not discriminate on religious grounds in mobilizing workers or volunteers and their primary beneficiaries, at least in most urban areas, were children, youth, and young adults who were not themselves members. while the larger more professionalize and more secularized religious nonprofits were, for the most part, treated fairly in competition for government grants and contracts, smaller religious nonprofits including communities serving ministries in inner-city neighborhoods were often discriminated against, sometimes for innocent reasons like byzantine bureaucratic protocol but also, in some not so innocent cases, out of outright hostility to religious people and places. president clinton and the first lady clinton were the first major fence, white house fans come of faith based, the first federal faith-based center was established during the second

clinton term out of the office out of the department of housing and urban development under secretary andy cuomo., it was in the 2000 presidential election that faith based went national to stay. vice president doran governor bush had their respective favorite locutions on the subject. their respective messages on faith based were much the same. i still think the best single sentence in this regard was the one that governor bush first delivered in his july, 1999 duty of hope speech, the speech that launched his presidential campaign. " government cannot be replaced by charities but it should welcome them as partners, not resent them as rivals." a new white house office, while respecting all federal church, state doctrines and limits would

build on the federal so-called charitable choice laws that had been and active in the late 1990s and would welcome religious leaders into the white house, into the public square, into the public discourse and debate and dialogue and it would promote faith based and community initiatives and partnerships to expand mentoring for the children of prisoners and achieve many, many other civic goals. not everybody was thrilled with this approach. orthodox secularists, mainly among democratic party elites, and orthodox sectarians, mainly among republican party e lee, did not like the bipartisan centrist level the playing field approach. still, each candidate persisted in embracing and in articulating this vision. thereafter, so did governors and mayors in each party. although it has received relatively little attention, the white house office has its younger siblings in dozens of

state governments all around the country. second, today, the imperial evidence on the existence of faith-based organizations and programs is both deeper and wider than it was back in 2001 when the office was established. for instance, a forthcoming study by my university of pennsylvania colleague is being conducted in concert with orders for sacred laces come of the nations leading national nonsectarian organization that tends to the historic preservation of older religious robberies involved in community activities and purposes, it will indicate that the civic replacement value of the average older urban congregation is what it would cost tax ayers were these sacred places to top supplying social services and serving civic offices as they do. this replacement value is, if anything, several times what was estimated to be when the first

generation of studies were completed. faith-based organizations and programs have, what he called, i halo effect is respected economic development that goes even far beyond social service delivery. stay tuned for those interesting academic findings. i know you cannot wait. [laughter] third, in the courts of public opinion and the courts of law, the core ideas and sentiments behind the white house office that began in 2001 are at least as widely embraced today than before. for all the church -- state controversy that has turned this into a toxin, nearly 3/4 of all americans including republicans and democrats believe in the civic value of sacred places and believe that most to a very good and cost- effective job at supplying vital

social services and support a level playing field for all religious nonprofits when it comes to government grants. it is certainly true that in the past dozen years or so, we have witnessed a rise in the fraction of americans that claim no religious affiliation. the survey researchers have turned this 'none.' when i heard that 15% of americans were nuns, i got excited, look out. even many of the so-called nones see themselves as religious or spiritual and consider religion important in their only daily lives. moreover, churches are second only to the military in public trust and confidence, way at a public schools, newspapers, labor unions, big businesses and congress. over the last dozen years or so, virtually all of the major constitutional and other legal challenges to faith-based have

resulted in rulings that either favor faith-based efforts or that challenge those that would treat faith motivated citizens as second-class citizens. alas, our nation's social and civic capital is in excitedly bound with its spiritual capital. that is a fact. it is a fact warmly embraced by most americans without regard to party, religion, demographic description, or social economic status. that said, the lives of future white house office directors will be no less interesting or surrounded by political conflicts and crosscurrents that our respective tenures were. my final points -- to me, the soon to be 14-year- old white house office, in addition to all the actual substantive ongoing good works should serve now and in the

future as a symbolic reminder that, deep is the divisions may go on church-state issues, whether in general or in particular issues like religious hiring rights, what unites us is always more important than what divides us. as my jesuit friend liked to preach, and essential unity and nonessential diversity in all things charity. who among us does not want to find ways for diverse faith- based organizations to partner with each other, with secular nonprofits and with federal, state, or local agencies to improve and expand the health and human services that go to america's elderly shut-ins, to the ever-growing numbers of senior citizens that many regions and cities live alone or other elderly relatives or friends? who does not want the same faith-based and neighborhood partnerships to improve and expand in relation to the u.s. department of agriculture's food and nutrition programs?

to curb this bikes in child heard hunger when the reduced price meals the kids get during the school months are no longer a readily available. a bipartisan, centrist, problem solving, community anchored vision was behind the original case for faith-based. i do not mean to say that by harkening back to that vision, all of our disagreements will melt away nor do i mean to say that by rallying together to meet specific challenges like the two i just mentioned, we will have nothing about which to fuss, fight, or sue each other over. i do mean to say that the focus exclusively on the disagreements while forgetting the past, present, or potential common grounds, to dispute without regards to what resulting the disputes might yield in the way of a common good is the road to civic tradition. -- perdition. the white house has persisted in

part because people of diverse faiths and no faith focused fatefully and together on the civic challenges that faith- based and neighborhood partnerships could help to meet. doing so with genuine compassion, looking for compassion and truth in action, and caring especially about the least of the last and the loss of our society. speaking to a group of boston inner-city clergy in 2005, senator hillary rodham clinton put it this way -- "who is more likely to go out on a street and save a poor at risk child and someone from the community, someone who believes in the divinity of every person, who sees god at work in the lives of even the most hopeless and left behind our children?" that is why we need not to have a false division or debate about the role of faith-based institutions. we need to just do it and provide the support on an ongoing basis. " in different ways, presidents clinton bush, and obama embraced that vision and with different

approaches, each of my friends and esteemed colleagues tonight should be credited with fighting the good fight and defending and translating that vision into action. what a blessing each has been and what an honor it is to be here this evening with them and with you all so thank you and god bless you. [applause] >> once again, i'm in the position of following john delulio, author, scholar, expert on all things faith- based. it reminds me of the seventh husband of elizabeth taylor who said, on their wedding night, to his new bride, i think i know what to do but i'm not sure how

to make it interesting. [laughter] as the longest-serving faith- based director, i will give it a try. properly understood, the faith- based initiative is about changing lives. it's about finding and funding the most effective programs of with public and private resources, programs that help addicts recover, the youth turn to opportunity instead of yang's, the jobless find work, the homeless stable housing, children of prisoners, and reentering prisoners jobs and housing so that they contribute to society instead of attacking it. these problems are pressing today as they were when the faith-based initiative was launched, perhaps even more so, in the last four years. we have seen an increase in the number of people living in poverty according to the census bureau, an increase of six point

7 million people. president bush believed in america's armies of compassion and the transformative change of their programs. he also knew that two office government programs at the national, state, and local level discriminated against them. government often commit a kid that if tape-based rich wanted to partner with them, they would have to change their identity and secularized. at the time of president bush's election, the federal government was regularly forcing some groups to change their mission statements and diversify the board of directors of they were not all of one faith and take down the mezuzah at the door or the crossed her by and even change their name if they wanted to play ball with the federal government. asked the metropolitan council of jewish poverty in new york it was denied access to the grant because jewish was in their name or the orange county register mission in los angeles. ask old north church in boston who was denied a grant.

ask the seattle hebrew academy after their earthquake when they were denied a fema grant to help rebuild their school. ask the salvation army in janesville, wisconsin. all had been manhandled by government and the high priest of secular orthodoxy who weregot of secular orthodoxy that were hostile to all things faith- based. effort begins with protestants and other americans united in the separation of church and state, an organization known as americans united. from george washington's , he added the words so help me god and bent over to kiss the bible.

even thomas jefferson, the author of the law of separation of church and state was, two days after penning that phrase in a government building attending sunday church services with u.s. government employees. when president bush talked about the power of faith-based organizations, he was squarely in line with presidential precedent. cries that it is under attack? he was ushering in theocracy. all of these charges proved to be groundless.

the initiative was constitutional and succeeded in every single challenge including the supreme court of the united states. the freedom from religion wasdation, my successor decided on standing grounds that they were, in no way, government-funded. the ace program had been sued by the american jewish congress and one reversal by the circuit .ourt the real winners were the schoolkids being taught by these notre dame grads. it went unchallenged because it was fair and forthright. it leveled the playing field that the doctor had so carefully analyzed in his important work. was the charge that a

theocracy was coming to power. this also proved bogus. the only evidence of divine intervention took place when the poor lawyer was hunting and survived being shot at point- blank by vice president cheney. [laughter] the charges the initiative was paid back to the religious right. and when the associated press was given, by me, a list of all discretionary rants, billions of dollars, and the reporter could not find any evidence of grants being funneled to the religious right. these attacks that adhered to the face base initiative despite the best and most fervent efforts served their purpose, to help stigmatize the initiative,

the poor were punished by their so-called friends. will showat history about the faith-based initiative. that it was a presidential priority and that it succeeded against all odds. it was at the heart of the compassionate conservatism and was the priority of his presidency. in his firstned five state of the union speeches with pilot programs announced each year and later funded by congress in a bipartisan fashion. he attended to get other andslation in congress succeeded after some. he scheduled event each year to this initiative and spoke with several faith-based conferences throughout the year that he started to help learn how to access government programs.

there is no disputing president bush's commitment. while a change the trajectory of his presidency, he never wavered in his support for the faced base initiative. it as much now as he did when he was running for office. it was one of the proud contributions he made as u.s. president and his library prominently features it as part of his legacy. i will cite five accomplishments that i am most proud of. the rightent defended of faith-based groups to be in the public square. the local hud agencies stopped harassing the salvation army and

the executive order went unchallenged. the president promoted title vii of the civil rights act. of the hiring rights religious employers. i was there at the signing ceremony in the east room and thoseesident touted fundamental rights for groups to hire on a religious basis that had been held up by the supreme court unanimously in 1972. the president succeeded in getting parts of the so-called care act passed in provided tax incentives for charitable giving. the president reached out in bipartisan fashion and i recall my second week on the job tom a -- whenoffice meeting

senator hillary clinton and other democrats were there in the oval office talking about the faith-based initiative. governors out to urging them to open a faith- based office. you know who did he act oh most of the democratic -- do you know who did? most of the democratic governors. most of the senators that were we tried to do what we could to reach out on a bipartisan basis. while sometimes these efforts were futile, i share the view that bipartisanship should be at the core of the future of the faith-based initiative. all of george bush's signature programs were funded by congress and helped countless americans.

third, the access to treatment and recovery program that he started for drug addicts to use vouchers to be able to choose faith-based programs if they wished. the prisoner reentry program and helping america's youth program. what wasyou realize done against a pretty strong head wind, you realize that president bush's efforts were not in vain. the defense of faith-based organizations has to continue. government punishing faith-based organizations like ave maria university, a tiny school in southwest florida that is seeking to maintain the sincerely held religious belief that is forced to file a lawsuit. unfortunately.

you realize that it is never safe for faith-based organizations in the public square. be interested in hearing about why the voices of cardinals and evangelical's, the little sisters of the core, all of these voices have been ignored. the highlight for me was the opportunity to tour the country and see the many great faith- based organizations at work, volunteering their time and expressing their compassion and love, answering the fundamental questions. the great courage of these men and women.

i was at a drug treatment program in pasadena built around the torah with a tremendously great success rate. i met a 12-year-old boy that was not able to read a word at that year oft after a mentoring, was able to read at the fourth grade level. i remember the homeless shelter run by a woman whose name i don't remember. there is a woman running this incredible homeless program so effectively. i will leave you with my biggest laugh during my time as faith- based director at the white house. the president asked me to organize a meeting of all of our critics. he said, get them together and hear what their concerns are and see if you can find some common ground. i organized a meeting in my office. americans united, the aclu, the

leadership council on civil rights. a lot of liberal groups that could not stand the bush faith- based initiative. it was hard to find today everybody could meet. it turned out that that wednesday happens to be ash wednesday. andnt that morning to mass whenriest gives you ashes. a bald person comes to the floor, they see a blank canvas. out in them.mes this priest on this morning decided to do a life-size reenactment with mary and joseph. so i came back from mass to the office.

in with a big black cross on my four head and they thought i was making a statement. at the end of the , it is a unites us desire to make this country more strong from within and to live up to our highest ideals. [applause] >> i would like to add my word ryananks for jeffrey and for hosting us as well as presidential history. you might be interested to know that the esteemed white house historian has written authoritative account on white house history and identified one of the most important

innovations in the modern era. recognizete i wrote the national archives director, the bush center staff who are here. serving the white house was clearly one of the high privileges of my life. that is one thing that each of us share on the panel. when i was invited to serve as i went todirector, the others to ask for their counsel. event fellowship that those of us at the table enjoyed was really worth the price of admission. that, it is really important to ignore knowledge that we were the hired help.

it wasn't our ideas that mattered. it was the council we provided, the presidents we served, the execution of those ideas that we were part of. let me also acknowledged that there were hundreds of staff over the past dozen years that have served that cause. were men and women that were brought to washington not because they were looking for a job title but because of their idealism and and their commitment to cause. to unpack during this whole history exercise that you are performing here. when president bush announced the initiative and named john as i was serving as

president of the think tank in indianapolis, a fan of all the precepts that john had laid out. i confess, i was skeptical of the idea. houseeved in a white strategy. a united states operation was treading on dangerous territory. was cautiously optimistic about what might happen. for context of why, there were really two points that animated my interest in the 1990s. i was quite interested in seeing my faith applied to living problems. i was desiring strategies that would further that for me and folks that would share my faith. i also came to work as a welfare

reformer. what welfare reform success that authentic and transformative life change doesn't happen in government programming. behavior.vize good we had 97,000 families on welfare, and within a few years, that number reduce to 7000. down andent unemployment went up. this should because for great celebration. the problem, they came to us and said it congratulations.

but you're not even at the 50 yard line. needguy tells us human from their desk. he showed us the healers in the neighborhoods. the antibodies against those diseases and hardships. encouraged and realize that there had to be a civil society solution. how do you take big government grassrootst to small and neighborhood charities? there were others in washington beginning to think like this. and charitable choice that john mentioned was asserted in the national welfare law of 1996 as an attempt to open the door wider for faith-based

partnerships and level the playing field to address some of the issues that they powerfully described. was a governor george bush in texas and in indianapolis mayor. pioneering these strategies. the government and policy does have their limits. one of the precepts of charitable choice was to protect the first amendment. said, tos, what we groups that did not want to diminish their spiritual mission , they should not apply for government grants because they would be sued and they would lose.

his leadership in parliament ended the british slave trade. he also taught us that the of thespiritual mission int faithful are ill fitted a pluralistic society as governments. back to the transition team that i wasd my commentary, encouraging of this strong presidential role while skeptical of the u.s. government role. clearly succeeded on that front. both john and jim referenced these points. culture change that was historic and profound. there is a book called the culture of disbelief that said religion was the only acceptable prejudice in america.

faith-based was not in the vernacular. today, it is commonplace and a presumed positive because president bush, like the iconic arm around the shoulder on 9/11 and the bullhorn firemen went city after city saying to faith-based and grassroots leaders, when you survey neighbor in need, you're serving your country and i am here to thank you. that message permeated and the culture has changed. back to the transition team. us go to the states. to my unbelievable powers of persuasion, i absolutely created a different all.

it looks like a very heavy cabinet agency. as a result, many lives were changed for the better. just to give you a glimpse in respect to our time of what that looked like. there were 12 federal agencies that had faith-based centers doing the work of equal treatment. so, a determined attack. one of the last cabinet meetings that president bush had. report on an to eight-year progress on this determined attack on the compassionate agenda and three things were happening in my head at the same time. and ourlot bigger imaginations than in actual space.

my first thought was what do i say when it is my turn to give a report? i am between the budget director and the chief of staff. then i began to look around the table at the secretaries that launched faith-based and community initiatives. the prisoner reentry initiative changed thousands of lives from alva discriminated. we had just returned from a trip to baltimore with president bush. the day after the state of the union was to be able to tell 20 guys that america is the place for second chances. sitting next to her was secretary of the department of homeland security whose agency lifted up the arms of so many

faith-based and community groups after katrina. they are the first in and of the last out, the true heroes of disaster response. did or have the lions share of the policy work when you consider what happened in africa. aids mancans died of did africans and the previous wars combined. know about the $15 billion solution to that problem. you may not know it was embedded in the thinking of that strategy because 87% were indigenous african faith-based community groups. 75% acrossed malaria

the continent of africa. one of my favorite accounts is the commerce department. kirby john caldwell who you may know in texas did an thelievable job in turning war zone into a wonderful place to raise a family. the list could go on and on. wounded warriors and producing gang violence -- reducing gang these were not efforts that were first about equal treatment or about money. it was about human need. the dynamic and strategic partnerships addressing more need in more effective ways.

they are secondary to the object which partners with the right organizations to make a difference. let me conclude with a return to where my bias lies. obviously all compassion is local. i did work with the governors. that formedly those offices. every state had growing partners. and mayors all across the filled manye they of the presidential primary slots. we had palin from alaska, richardson from new mexico. remarkable leaders. nonprofit organizations are

small. they operate in local communities, hidden from public come but they have together to comprise a valuable force. if you read the duty of hope , look first to the organizations already healing and helping across america. there are 1.6 million nonprofits in america. jobs inces one in 10 the american economy. large part of how we do business in america. it revitalizes society and moves closer to having us create a pathway to stronger partnerships. thatnal word is a story andn shared with one of our

passionate in action roundtables. his mentor is andrew young. after a trip to the middle east, he was visiting with a local congregation and give them a speech. a lady in the book -- back said dr. king, you're the good samaritan. he walked to the side and said i don't want to be a good samaritan. i was just there. it is a nasty place at a dangerous road. fixes to be the guy that it. the guy that puts up lights, is acreates the road that blessing to its community. the groups that do that every and fix the city roads

sidewalks and repair schools, and redeem broken lives are the faith-based groups. we are so privileged to serve. thank you for letting me tell a few stories about it. >> it is wonderful to be here with you. thank you to jeffrey and bryan for organizing this event. i was a little concerned about coming today. i was wondering if this was one big ploy by the aclu to get us all in one place to take us out at the same time, but so far so good. it really is an honor to be at this particular center with this remarkable group of men and women.

and jay and melissa are comp list professionals at the top of their field, and yes, president bush ably lead for eight years in the highest office in the land, but more important than their positions and titles are the people that this group of leaders have served. millions of vulnerable americans from all faiths and backgrounds are able to live lives with greater dignity and self- determination because of the white house faith-based initiative. i am honored to stand in this group for those people and to represent an institution that embodies the best of the american spirit. the faith-based office began formally, but the partnership with president obama existed a long time before then.

i had known the president for several years and had been starting in the senate office and then on to the 2008 presidential campaign. i have to say this was an area where the president had some pretty well-developed thoughts already long before he met me. it is well known that his first foray into public life was as a community organizer. what it is important to know that that organizing in the south side of chicago was with and among churches. helping to set up job-training programs and getting their food pantries in order and making sure that their voices were heard down in city hall. so when barack obama entered the national political scene, he was determined to work at the intersection of religion and politics and to try to do something about this also -- this false premise that progressives and democrats had a disregard for even antipathy toward faith and values. we heard echoes of this approach