that a discussion on the role that political spouses have played in history. after that jim webb and martin o'malley speak at a democratic dinner in iowa. ♪ >> this week on "q&a," our guest is "the weekly standard" senior editor andrew ferguson. he talks about gop presidential candidates, his career, and his approach to writing. brian lamb: andrew ferguson of "the weekly standard." we call this our odds and ends with andrew. i want to go over some of the columns you have written and get your embellishment.

let's start with showing an appearance of years, your first time on c-span in 1986. andrew ferguson: the general point i was trying to make is that people seem to sort of assume the responsibility, journalists assume the responsibility to become experts in everything, in every manner of public debate and hold forth on them and i do not see that they have done much work, much research on the pieces that they do. i think that in magazines like "the spectator," you see people popping off for the sake of popping off. brian lamb: that was 1986. andrew ferguson: looks like i

had taken a quay looter something. i remember i could -- a qualude or something. i remember i could smoke during the interview, that's how long ago it was. brian lamb: only: call-in show, somebody called up any of lung cancer and that might have been the last time anyone smart. andrew ferguson: crist for hitchens. brian lamb: -- christopher hitchens. brian lamb: you have been a pundit all your life? andrew ferguson: i would hate to think i was a pundit. it was interesting to think about that, 30 years ago because it is an obsession of mine in washington journalism, as that guy said on there there is a class of people that make themselves experts on everything by which i mean they

become experts on nothing so they can talk about the intricacies of centrifuges in iran and the minutia of the religious freedom act in indiana. it is just implausible. people really do not know enough about that many things to arrive at a real, plausible conclusion that they can articulate to people. it is one of the fictions we all live by here. brian lamb: we are in the political season. how much time have you spent with politicians in the last six months? andrew ferguson: i have not spent that much time with them. i have written a fair amount. it is in odd thing when you go on the campaign from our -- campaign trail now, it is so crowded. at this port in the cycle the

actual election will be held next year. and the iowa caucuses will be eight months from now. you dial that back to 1988, which i think was the first election i really covered extensively, at this point in the cycle you could call up dick gephardt's office and say i am going to be in new hampshire i would like to talk to him. they will pick you up and exited her and drive to portsmouth -- in exeter and drive to portsmouth and you would have a half a day with them. and now, at this point in the cycle, you have to beat down the door to get time with these guys at all. when you go to events, i was at an event in des moines for an article about jeb bush and it was an event the first annual

ag summit, to bring out the republican candidates to talk. half the republican candidates in the field showed up. there were maybe 450 people in the audience, 500 and there were 300 reporters. there were 1.2 normal people per journalist. ranks and ranks of people sitting there with laptops and phones at the ready. i just thought man this has changed quite a bit. brian lamb: how close did you get to him? andrew ferguson: this is the perfect example of beating down the door, i went for a long time getting unanswered e-mails. and then a phone call or two would be answered and they would say, oh yes we want you to come

see the governor, we can hardly wait. and then radio silence for another 10 days. this is not just true of bush's campaign this is true of all of them as far as i can tell. the call up and said that if you can be in des moines next saturday we can give you 20 minutes with him but you have to fly to the more. -- to des moines. brian lamb: let's run a clip of when he was recently in iowa, it may have been the same trip you were on, to get a sense of how he addresses an audience. jeb bush: i do not know why the press is here but it is good to see them. thank you for supporting your congressman, he will meet your help going forward and early money does matter. i want to get the legal part of this out of the way i am

seriously considering the possibility of running for president. all of this allows me to talk about the possibility in a way that does not trigger a campaign so thank you for allowing me to be lawyered up. i have fond memories of iowa. i got married when i was 21 years old, i fell in love at first sight my life can be divided into b.c. and a.c. i met my wife when i was 17, it took me four years to convince her that i was ready to marry her then and there. i fell head over heels in love with this young, beautiful girl from mexico and it kind of changed my life. part of that was we got married quickly, we had two kids, we lived in venezuela and i came

back to work on my dad's campaign and the beginning of that was in iowa. brian lamb: what did you see up close that we do not see on television? andrew ferguson: not much. i guess you are closer physically in proximity to them in a way you are not. what did you see up close that we do not see on television? i was at that event and that was another one of those things, i showed up. i guess bush's campaign spokesperson gave me a ride over there, we met at a bar i walked into this place and it is a museum like place outside of des moines. inside there was 1.5 normal people per journalist, ranks of cameras. it is just, such overkill in a sense because nobody is going to say anything at this point unless they make a mistake of course that is newsworthy. polls do not matter.

anything that will affect the campaign happens behind closed doors were they are lining up money or campaign operatives. these events are perfectly staged and control as much as they can be controlled. and that will affect the campaign happens behind closed yet all of these news organizations are spending thousands of dollars to send somebody to des moines and stay at the hyatt so they can walk 20 minutes of jeb bush talking to a room full of islands. -- iowans. brian lamb: what is your sense of why these people run? andrew ferguson: a lot of them -- one thing i have noticed about this field and i think it is different on the republican side than it was before. how many of them are pure politicians. that is, they really haven't done anything in their life since they started their campaign for hall monitor in

seventh grade and have been running ever since. scott walker started out of college, marco rubio has never really had a job, jeb bush started really late but he had these business jobs that depended a lot on his celebrity. christie is a guy who was with the prosecutor's office and straight into elected office. their motives i suppose are slightly more suspect because this is the next run on the latter for these guys -- rung on the ladder. to show that you are king of the hill you get to run for president, it is the next step. brian lamb: i want viewers to know that they can go to google, type in andrew ferguson, "new republic" -- "new republic,"

"the weekly standard." andrew ferguson: not anymore. brian lamb: this is a column that you wrote earlier this year 2015, about huckabee, christie, and paul. "the fantasy will come to when and long before he reaches the white house get. -- white house gate. they wanted, we can assume, what a professional gambler, a fashion designer, or a collector of 19th-century doll houses. no racecar drivers need apply. neither do they want a prickly unconvincing hipster or a 52-year-old man who still plays air guitar." andrew ferguson: those last three people are huckabee, pa ul and christie, who i lumped

together after they had one bad week. huckabee was actually a very good governor of arkansas but he seems to have decided they wanted to be a talkshow host and a creature at the same time a terrible combination for a presidential candidate. a sh -- he started to show signs of his pr igishness. the hipster is rand paul who have shown himself to be short tempered and i thought if he is getting this matter this early it is probably -- this mad this early he is probably not going to be able to sustain a campaign. andy other one was -- and the other one was chris christie who was just portrayed as returning

from a trade trip to england. i think the "times" reporter talked about him going to three different parties with bono the rockstar. that also does not strike me as a presidential kind of affect. i do not think fdr ever went crazy because he met bing crosby or ronald reagan because he met madonna. i hope you never met madonna. it is not something a self-possessed and worldly guy does. brian lamb: your career, we saw you back in 1987. you were working for "the national spectator ergo how long did you work there? andrew ferguson: it started in indiana and i think i started in

84. we all moved out here in 85 the following year and i worked 88, i covered the 88 campaign so probably until 89. then i went to an editorial features writer and did that for a couple of years and was asked to write speeches for the first president bush. his chief speechwriter was a friend of mine. i did that for a year. as i said before, when i started working for him in the hellish year of 1992, i started in january when his approval was 47% or 48% and by march i got it down to about 35%. it just continue to plummet. the longer i worked, the worse it got. it was an invaluable experience and i have minister spends for him. then i went -- tremendous

respect for him. then i went to "washingtonian" as a writer and then john called up and said we are going to start a magazine and we have fred barnes and david brooks so let's go. i went to "the standard." brian lamb: on the personal side if you are talking to young people today, they do what you have done? you have a family, can you make enough money to make it work? andrew ferguson: i really do not know because the business in the time that i have been here has changed utterly because of the introduction of the internet. we started "the weekly standard" because there was no weekly conservative opinion magazine. there were monthlies like "the spectator." there was a biweekly which was bill buckley's "review."

we decided that the pace accelerated to the point where we would be behind if we did not have something every week to comment on what happened the week before. of course i am going to look back on that as just a joke. now you are out of date if you are five hours behind the new crisis of the century and you have not read the last 40,000 tweets about it. when that change started to happen i thought what i do is done for. there is not going to be an opportunity left for people to come up and write the kind of stuff that i write which is sort of longer and more free-form and relaxed. it is not really on the news, to say the least. but i was wrong about that. in fact, now there are so many

journalism jobs and so much journalistic activity in washington three times when i first came here. when i first came here and you wanted to be in the opinion line of work in journalism, you could work at "the spectator," "the new republic," "washington monthly," that was about it. now buzz feed has a huge political operation, the daily caller the huffington post. but all seem to have 80 people working for them. that is one of the reasons that you go to these ag summits and there are all these people, have generated enough money they can send somebody. brian lamb: one of the things i want to do is talk to you about writing and words and what they mean. this is chris christie on the campaign trail.

chris christie: i think what really matters to folks is do you get the job done? do you tell them what you believe from your heart even if they do not agree with every word of it? let me say this to my fellow republicans in the room as we prepare to enter the primary season. if the standard you will hold candidates do is they must agree with you 100% of the time, let me suggest something to you. the only person you agree with 100% of the time is the person you see in the mirror every morning. the fact is, if we hold candidates for public office to that standard, let me tell you what you are going to get. liars. brian lamb: your reaction? andrew ferguson: every time i see him, even when he is making

kind of an inoffensive comment like that, he has a way of turning it into kind of an accusatory thing. you people do not get it. let me explain it to you. you are not supposed to agree with him 100% of the time. it just reminds me of this tremendous truth that all of my friends from new york and new jersey do not understand which is that the rest of the country does not like people from new york and new jersey. i saw the same thing with giuliani. all of my friends in new york and jersey, when he ran for president last time, and of course you did not make it into the presidential year, were saying that he was a shoo-in and he is so popular. i was not going to like him indiana is not going to like him, he is a new yorker and they do not like new yorkers.

i think that is christy's problem as well. it is a harsh in-your-face, unpleasant. brian lamb: you wrote in your column "history records no case in which a republican hurt his reputation among fellow republicans by yelling at a reporter. it is always assumed that the reporter deserved it just on general principle." andrew ferguson: the have gotten in trouble because you snapped at a "new york times" reporter on the trade trip i was talking about. people were suggesting that that was a full paul to be rude -- faux pas to a reporter and i have been around republicans all my life and they do not mind it. brian lamb: why do republicans not like reporters? andrew ferguson: do you assume they are all antagonistic and to a large degree they are right. they feel that they have not

gotten a fair shake, that they are an unknown species to a lot of reporters and again i think they are right about that. there are a lot of reporters who have never had a conservative republican in their circle of friends. and tend to think that conservative republicans must have a screw loose somewhere. brian lamb: i do not know how close you get to calling yourself a reporter, but here is something you wrote, talking about antagonistic and sarcastic. the book is good -- "the book is pretty good, by the way, written in a smooth and jokey prosose." andrew ferguson: i was impressed that he spoke truth to power. i am not big on name-calling but when you have the insult and the person perfectly matched as huckabee does there are think it is fun. brian lamb: does anybody tell

you what to write? andrew ferguson: no, and i have probably suffered for it. brian lamb: you are told to write what you want to write? andrew ferguson: bill kristol is the chief editor of "the weekly standard," and i have known him for 30 years sincwee the mid-80's. we started the magazine with total respect for each other and if anything my respect has only grown. i cannot speak for him. he has never had called to call me on the carpet for something i have said and i have never had reason to think i have to ask to say something in particular. brian lamb: in a lot of these columns you have been critical. let's launch a little bit of rand paul, and you talk about his open shirt.

rand paul: i do not get it, i am from pennsylvania and i do not get it. you want to be new york? do you want to be california? you have a governor that is allowing your energy industry, something nobody predicted was there 10 years, 15 years ago it is there and you are tapping it and creating all kinds of jobs and you have done for your second now? why would you give that up? what kind of craziness is going on in the state? how could you even consider? do you want to be new york? there is no fracking and no natural gas. in california, the monterey shale formation is one of the biggest in the country and it sits there because the idiots do not want to bring it up. they do not want civilization, they do not want to advance. do you want business or growth

or jobs? return your governor to office. brian lamb: does calling somebody an idiot work? andrew ferguson:, hardly ever especially if you mean it. brian lamb: does he mean that? andrew ferguson: probably, i think so. i have called people names and print over the years. but it shows that you have run out of other ways to discuss the person you are just going to because you ran out of gas your creative juices are dried up so you are going to say he is an idiot. on the other hand words like that can be used to good comic effect but if you really mean it and are hurling it as an epithet i do not think it is effective. brian lamb: here is how you wrote about it and i want to ask

how much you think about it. [laughter] andrew ferguson: not at all. brian lamb: with his impeccable libertarian credentials he has posed as a different kind of republican. uniformed in the post-hipster rig of genes drescher, and poorly knotted tie. such people inevitably make over use of twitter and they fall helpless before it's awesome power to expose its users' most unappetizing weakness. how long did it take you to write that? andrew ferguson: longer than it would you to read that although that does take some time, it is a long sentence. the way i would do something like that, i think the sentence is probably overdone now that i hear it read back to me. what would happen was something like that is i would write it out in the first draft and i would over elaborate.

there would be too much going on in the sentence, too many jokes or idealettes running around and i have to comb it back and do it again so it does not sound too extravagant. my problem is extravagance, the thing i have to avoid. brian lamb: what are some of your favorite words to use in a column? or what are words you do not ever use? andrew ferguson: i can't use them, i won't tell you. [laughter] andrew ferguson: you know, if you gave me two minutes i could come up with them. brian lamb: you did a column on the word issue. andrew ferguson: i hate reach out as a verb meaning that i telephoned or call somebody or ask something. i am not big on the word share i shared with him that i am

going to dinner. i have a whole list of those. i have been really on alert lately for the phrase data-driven. i've noticed clinton loves to say things are data-driven. first cousin to that is evidence based. what they are usually talking about is somebody did some social science studies somewhere that produced some lame data ostensibly to prove one thing or another and that is data. data drives their judgment, meaning that we are not putting emotion into this, we are not thinking off the top of our heads, we are taking the data and going where the conclusion would lead. brian lamb: i've got a word i want to ask you about at the end of a sentence or. -- sentence here. it is the prize that a candidate

that would use twitter to engage adversaries would be uncomfortable with an interview with a cnbc cupcake. cap take? -- cupcake? in this day and age you can get away with that? male or female? andrew ferguson: i have called men cupcakes too. i use it as the shorthand for the extremely attractive, sometimes too attractive people that have reading the news on the cable channels who do not carry a lot of gravitas and show off a lot of -- it is not like they all went to the sorbonne or are members of mensa or something. brian lamb: are you a member of mensa? andrew ferguson: i could never get in. brian lamb: what is the requirement? andrew ferguson: 200 and something.

probably double what mine is. brian lamb: another politician you write about is governor huckabee. >> "god, guns, grit, and gravy." mike huckabee: it is not a recipe book for southern cooking. here is the point of the book. there are three major cultural bubbles in america. new york, washington -- we are in two of those. and the other is hollywood. from those three cultural levels and might fashion, government music, entertainment movies, television all the things that set the american cultural table. the point of my book is there is a big disconnect from the people, the values, the attitudes, the lifestyles of

people living in the three bubbles and people living in what we often call the flyover country. brian lamb: does that work? andrew ferguson: his demeanor? brian lamb: talking about flyover country. andrew ferguson: i don't think it works. there is a great deal of resentment towards washington and the over class in general whether in entertainment or media or finance. i talked about in that piece about huckabee, was the danger that republicans, especially in this hyper specialized age where the echo chambers are the only components of the political conversation. right-wingers only talk to right-wingers and the same with left wing. they will pick up remarks from

the other side just so they can refute them. you can get your own kind of bubble that he is not talking about there. in which -- i said this about him, when he was promoting his book, when he would get in trouble was when he went with like-minded radio show hosts and he would just start talking. you forget you are in a bubble as well. you are always exposing yourself to people who agree with you on almost everything. as i say, the internet is really only tripled the tendency people have towards that. brian lamb: the once you have covered and written about, who do you think is catching on the most out there? andrew ferguson: i think everybody says scott walker. who i have never met. in person, once i think. he does seem to have a lot of things that people like. especially primary voters. talk about the bubble.

they want somebody who looks like he's stood up for them. i'm amazed to the degree to which primary voters are the most motivated by resentment. the sense of being put upon. those people really don't understand us. here is a guy who does understand us and he is going to stick it to them. and that happens on both sides. hillary clinton will give her own version of that kind of thing. i don't think i was actually true 30 years ago. resentment has always been part of politics, obviously. the degree to which it is almost exclusively the motivating factor in truly committed republicans and democrats is you know. brian lamb: in your article about jeff bush -- jeb bush,

tell me what you envision of the audience reading this. i think he proved he was fairly conservative when he was governor. then you dredged up this. at a public forum he was asked what he was prepared to do for black floridians. a questionnaire evidently expecting a bundle of special programs swaddled in ghazi rhetoric. history's answer, probably nothing, became instantly in finance -- infinite. andrew ferguson: i think he tried to defend it at the time. but it's so shocking and grading on the ear -- greeting on the ear. pure ideology is often greeting -- grating to people. you would think it was 94 when he ran that campaign. when i first -- first met bush,

he would come by the american spectator office a few time. he liked to hang around journalists and intellectuals. that would not have struck me as particularly harsh, because i was used to the conservative point he was trying to make. not a hard point, but simply a point about government either serves everybody or it doesn't serve anybody. if you start dicing the population up, you have programs over here and there. you do it more over by racial classification, then it can be something quite pernicious. brian lamb: less famously, he said women on welfare should be able to get their life together and find a husband. andrew ferguson: he talks about the mistakes he made by saying this not much line about

programs for black people. but he did not bring that one up. very much. i think because it is so crude. brian lamb: how much time you spend researching? andrew ferguson: a longtime. brian lamb: you did an article about mitch, a number of years ago when he talked about his split marriage when his wife left him and married a doctrine california. -- dr. in california. where do you find this stuff? andrew ferguson: i don't remember the daniels thing. i think a friend had told me about it. there was an old clip about it. so i followed up with other friends. brian lamb: are you worried you will do damage to these folks? andrew ferguson: absolutely. that when i was worried about. my god, i've never met mrs. daniels. i have nothing against her. i think her life is her own. it's not true of her husband he

thrust himself into the public light. i really went back-and-forth on whether this should even be brought up in the story. i figured if the article is going to have any claim to being comprehensive, i had to mention this. if he was going to run for president, somebody was going to message -- mention it. i was partly covering my rear end professionally, but also because i thought somebody should say. if somebody was going to push it into the front, might as well be me. i really didn't like it. it was just mentioned recently. brian lamb: almost offhandedly. let's change to another politician. ted cruz. you did a long piece on him. you went to houston to see him. andrew ferguson: they were quite accessible. this was last year.

2013. a year and a half ago. time flies. yet, they were very accommodating. i think it was not about me it's about the magazine. they thought they would like to reach that audience that th "the weekly standard," reaches. brian lamb: you wrote, you will discover that ted cruz is far more than a freshman senator. only eight months in office, he is also the scary mccarthy-ite bomb thrower known for extremism and arrogant disregard of the facts. what were you getting at? andrew ferguson: the headline was " washington builds the

bugaboo." he was a guy who definitely wanted to become a public figure. the sort of washington journalistic establishment was more than happy to accommodate him and make him look a lot more extreme than he actually is. and also they ran all the -- one of the terrible things about journalism are these so-called fact checks that magazines and newspapers run. they are much more complicated than simply checking fat. -- facts. miracle of miracles, i kept finding that half of what ted cruz said was not true. in fact, it is much more ambiguous than often he was absolutely correct. this is sort of a method by which they turned this guy into a monster. when he is not. i'm no big fan of him, but he's

not what people want to be scared of. brian lamb: let's look at a little bit of him on the stump. >> thank you very much. thank you all for coming out. god bless the great state of new hampshire. [applause] i've spent all of last week down in washington dc. it is great to be back in america. [laughter] jennifer, i enjoyed hearing, you said that you thought new hampshire was ready for hillary. i'm actually told that this dinner tried to get hillary to come speak. unfortunately, they couldn't find a foreign nation to foot the bill. [laughter] brian lamb: why is it politicians take their tie off?

they are dressed in a suit and then all of a sudden it comes off. andrew ferguson: because they're just people. they really want to just talk to you. they want to get down and said the formalities and just talk straight. brian lamb: god bless the people of new hampshire. andrew ferguson: [laughter] it was terrific. a lot of that piece is about the way he comes across in his person, which is -- i trace it back to him being a champion, i think national champion debater in college. he started in junior high and high school and i want who had helped coach him in high school said he would stand in front of the mirror for hours and

practice his gestures. and repeat what he was going to say. and look at himself to make sure everything was moving right and would be at maximum effect. you still see that here. this is a guy who looks like you wound him up. and let him go. if you came back to years from now, he would still be making the same hand gestures and using the same jokes. brian lamb: in this piece about him, you write, he paused lost for a moment in thought. i'm convinced the real divide in american politics isn't between republican and democrat. it's between the people and the entrenched politicians in washington dc. you write, it sounded like an applause line to me. he went on for a while until leaning back with his press secretary tapping her back barry -- blackberry, he began to sound as if he were giving a stump

speech. you mentioned that more than once. andrew ferguson: that's what i mean about winding him up. i was writing around with him in the back of a car -- riding around with him in the back of a car, in close quarters, and he was doing the same thing. putting himself with what he had already told me. he was one of the more odd experiences i have ever had in reporting on somebody. i made a joke that i thought how badly would i get hurt if i just opened the dire -- door and slipped out, and he would keep talking? this tells you a lot about him i guess. his press secretary told me not long ago that after the came out, he wanted her to buy a crash helmet to give me for the next time we rode around in case

i jumped out. she didn't do it. i appreciated that he didn't hate me completely after i wrote that. brian lamb: what kind of college you enjoy writing the most? -- column do you enjoy writing the most? andrew ferguson: you know, because i think if you see as a reporter -- iffy as a reporter, and i doubt myself, i like doing nsa where i have 45 books. they just stay put. i put them on my desk and they are still there when i get back. whereas, literally a human subject is a moving target. it's almost infinite the amount of money -- information you can accumulate about a person. you never feel like you are done. brian lamb: a political

candidate in another column, this is in 2012. the most puzzling thing about the career of gore the doll, who went those up and 86, with the reverence in which he was held by people who might have known better. he was famous for announcing the death of the novel as an art form, and as if to prove the point, he kept writing them. let's watch a little bit of gore vidal when he got the award at the national book foundation event and was -- you tell me what you see. >> nowadays it seems that the program of literature -- progress of literature is really first you print the book, then you publish it. and it saves such a lot of time. it's not for everybody, -- it is for everybody, everybody can dance around the fire and he

delighted we live in such a glorious era. where is buckley tonight? bill? you can come up now. usually i let him out at midnight but. [laughter] brian lamb: he's talking about the deceased bill buckley. andrew ferguson: they had a long-running feud. brian lamb: do you remember what year? 68 when they debated each other? andrew ferguson: yes on abc, and buckley called vidal and unmentionable name referring to his sexual inclinations. and he called buckley crypto not

nazi, and it got worse from there. i was with buckley one time where i can't remember it oh ted koppel was going to interview him. a very well-known abc news reader. he was interviewing buckley. he had a set of where he had a screen, and he showed buckley the tape of that famous encounter. from 1968. buckley, one of the few times i've ever seen it, was taken aback and speechless. it was because he had been told there were no copies of this confrontation with vidal. he was the same debit. he thought he had lost his cool -- he was ashamed of it. he thought he had lost his cool. anyway, he hadn't seen it in 45 -- 40 years, i think he was not

happy to see it. brian lamb: in your column, you write about the death of gore thevidal, about something that was sent by diane so here. that he had a celebrity novelist of taking special care to tag buckley as the arch conservatives. white arch -- why arch? the two tags make for a serious imbalance. perfect years buckley's views were safely on the rightward edge of the american popular consensus. the d-- vidal's were shared by a tiny minority. andrew ferguson: the reason i wrote that, it was right after gore died. not speaking ill of the dead but that doesn't mean you can't

ill of the dead's fans. they were lionizing this guy. i have tremendous respect for vidal's style. but he was an anti-semite. his views were so far beyond what ordinary people would think of as even remotely plausible. about huge conspiracies running the country and. stuff. for some reason when he died people held him about some kind of paragon. it was all a slight defense of the establishment protecting its own. it is important to protect his reputation. brian lamb: you said, the man must have felt bulletproof with impossible -- implausible

romances like lincoln that he wrote in burr. the word 'crapola', did you look that up? andrew ferguson: i think it has anglo-saxon roots. [laughter] brian lamb: i found the subject you have for in the most about is dwight eisenhower. -- written most about is dwight eisenhower. here is comments from brigadier general karl retired as executive director of the dwight d. eisenhower memorial commission. >> even monumental heroic sized images of general president and eisenhower will be framed as you see here by three transparent 65 foot tall stainless steel tapestries, depicting a great

plains landscape of kansas artistically rendered as you see here. this will be the only national presidential memorial placed in a very difficult urban park setting. but this is a superb site surrounded by institutions directly related to eisenhower's presidency and will be directly accessible to millions of visitors. brian lamb: why have you written about this so often? you point out $44 million have already been spent on something that does not exist. andrew ferguson: probably another 100 million dollars plan when they actually build the thing. this story appeals to me in many ways. one thing is, i actually get kind of irked and passionate, passionately irked about this. which i don't often get emotionally entangled in what i write about.

but, i do agree the eisenhower. i think he was an amazingly great man. in all kinds of ways i think some people don't even realize. it's another thing about circling the wagons. this commission, went out and hired an architect -- the most famous in the world. they seemed to hire him because he was the most famous in the world. for no other reason. you just can't really criticize when he comes up with. he came up with this mess of a totally preposterous arrangement of columns and screens, to put in the middle of this park in downtown washington. not far from here, actually. it seemed like a classic case of what tom wolfe used to talk about, the most average people are so intimidated by the

assertion of artistic superiority, and we all feel so disarmed when talking about the arts that when somebody like that comes around and throws this, we are supposed to say, he is frank geary so he knows something. the next thing you know, $44 million is going to him. taxpayer money. we are stuck with a big empty square down there. on maryland avenue, and no memorial to eisenhower at all. i'm worried about what will come from this. nothing will get built. that wouldn't be the worst. the worst outcome would be if they actually build the design. it is a very just dispiriting kind of played -- display. brian lamb: you went to occidental college.

a man, who is deceased, he worked for pct out in -- kcet in los angeles. he wrote a program on occidental and relationship to barack obama. i want to show you his promo of that. then ask you why you wrote about occidental and barack obama. >> we spent the entire day on the campus of occidental college , whose claim to fame this day is that the president-elect, barack obama spent the first two years of his undergraduate college experience at occidental college. during this day we spent there, we not only met his very first political science professor, but we actually stood on the very steps barack obama stood on to make his first political speech ever. we also visited his exact dorm room.

it is still there. in one piece. i've got inside information about his dorm daze with one of his dorm roommates from back then. brian lamb: promoting his program on occidental and barack obama. you wrote about a dvd. explain. andrew ferguson: he did a segment about occidental college and barack obama. you can see from that, he was such a wonderful television presence. he was so enthusiastic about things. it went right through the screening grants you. just a wonderful performer. he applied that kind of enthusiasm to barack obama time at occidental college. the thing about barack obama's time at occidental college is he left almost no egg pression --

impression of any kind. there is a shrine set up to him in the lobby of the student library, or used to be. it is supposed to be you know, obama's time at occidental. but there's really -- he wrote a poem in the literary magazine. other than that, there is no real trace of him. kind of like a water bug skidding across the top of the surface of the school. the school has twisted itself into a pretzel to try and assert its importance in barack obama's life. in fact, it wasn't that important to him. it got him out of hawaii, but then he went onto columbia where he actually did start to have real intellectual influences. he is a perfect metaphor, if i can use that phrase, for people trying to gin up enthusiasm when there really isn't anything there. brian lamb: and that it

reflected the way he did his television. andrew ferguson: yes, everything was breathless. he stands there, and there is a place where obama supposedly gave an anti-apartheid speech. he stands there with the camera on and it's like the enunciation has happened. it's almost overwhelming to him. i really like that about him. again, it says a lot about obama that there really isn't that much in there. brian lamb: i would suggest to our audience that they can look that up, june 18, 2012. the remainder of it is you talking about two books written about barack obama. from a conservative and one from that you -- you ended up liking david but better. andrew ferguson: is a wonderful book. there is another one by a guy

who claims to be a right-winger. but the book is just trash. i say the truth as a conservative republican, i'm always kind of sad in when the intellectual standards on the left are higher than they are on the right. one of the reasons i used to be a lefty -- one of the reasons i drifted right was because the left had abandoned intellectual standards. i saw this in graduate -- graduate school. instead of embracing those standards, so many of the people on the conservative side fall for just preposterous books like clients books about obama. -- klein's books about obama's. brian lamb: last time you are here you talked about your son. how old is he? andrew ferguson: 24. he has a job now. he went to uva.

brian lamb: when i was looking on the web, i thought i saw a picture of him with -- how often can people see your work in "the weekly standard," at all? andrew ferguson: if you ask my boss, i'm sure he would say not often enough. every couple of weeks. i am doing a sequel to "crazy you." my publisher asked the two do a sequel. they are supposed to be making a movie. it would be great if i could time the next books to release with the movie. then i might actually sell some. which would be a first. brian lamb: andrew ferguson writer for "the weekly standard," and book writer. andrew ferguson: thank you for having me.

>> for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at q and a.org. they are also available at c-span podcast. >> at c-span marks 10 years of compelling conversations on q and a, here are some other programs you might like. at the cup talking about her political views before she became a television commentator. george will discussing his book about wrigley field. and robert novak on his memoir, "the prince of darkness: 50 years reporting in washington."

you can watch these anytime on c-span.org. on the next washington journal former american idol contestant and 2014 congressional candidate clay aiken will discuss his recent run for political office, the ford -- subject of a four-part documentary series. also foundation economist kyle talks about a new report on how much americans will pay in federal and state taxes this year. and a look at the pentagon's f3 five joint strike fighter program and other weapons systems, with a global business reporter. we will also take your calls and look for your comments on facebook and twitter. washington journal is life every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern on the stand. -- on c-span. >> monday night, policy director for alliance tho