it was an acute problem because we had a number of potential terrorist threats against infrastructure and yet because we are transparent society, we had online access to all of the emergency exits and tunnels for all of the public buildings in seattle. i think you are absolutely right that there are built-in things that we have to look at the individual cases. professor calo: are you a law student? awesome. ms. durkan: will give you an internship. professor calo: i think as a privacy law nerd, i should tell you that there is a back-and-forth that happened early on between pvacy scholars.

one reviewed the others book, and she gave it a slightly negative review, saying, where are the dead bodies? you are talking about the digital person, but what about people posh lives? -- people's lives? i feel like we are seeing more and more dead bodies. some of the bodies are dead by their own hand because of something they did and they kill themselves. other people are dead because of drone strikes and other reasons. information is power. sometimes that power gets abused in violent ways. i appreciate your point. i recommend that back-and-forth as a student of privacy law. ms. durkan: everybody gets to

leave with one thought. >> i am still the optimist on the panel. we should be worried about the physical, the blurring of the lines between online presence and real-life presence and the risk that you are sharing. despairing of congress, i doubt -- the supreme court is getting it -- in the majority holding -- analogize in -- for example -- the riley case, that your cell phone is the digital equivalent of dragging a foot locker behind do in saying that that is beyond the scope of law enforcement for a search -- in recognizing the tracking -- the gps tracking -- that was far beyond -- not just law enforcement, but social norms in the individual relationships -- i think we will

try on a lot of things and get the wrong -- in the corporate space in the government space -- but we will get the right answer. the platform is not laid but we are doing the right thing by engaging. raquel russell: any invention or innovation can be used for good or bad. we have to make sure that we are not sleeping when innovation and intervention -- is being used for bad. the conversation around the information and data, the expectation -- i do think it is shifting. as it shifts, i think that is ok. i honestly do. there are still the checks and balances of making sure it is not going to work against you,

the same way that technology can be efficient. it can also be used against me and can be a power that is abused. we, as a society, have to make sure that we are doing what we can as a democracy. professor calo: on a hopeful know, i things have gone too far , and now there is beginning to be a reaction and a correction. i think you see that in the supreme court. they're all of these cases -- there is some meaningful competition around privacy in places that you might expect, like companies competing with one another. even among federal agencies, we are seeing competition among privacies. different agencies are getting into the next and pushing each other in terms of what to pursue.

on one level, i am hopeful. i think it is said we had to get so far down that road before reaction started to happen. ms. durkan: i think looking in this room shows that this matters. i believe in our democracy, that it is the people who can and will to size -- decide if they have the information. thank you for coming. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: the senate returns from recess tomorrow and begins debate on the iran nuclear agreement. 38 support, 56 oppose.

six have not announced their position. if they pass a resolution disapproving the deal, president obama says he will veto that and there are not vote in the senate to override his veto. the senate back in session at 2:00 tomorrow. you can see the debate live on c-span. we expect the house of representatives to debate the iran agreement on wednesday with a vote by the end of the week. follow the debate life here on c-span. >> a signature feature of book tv is our all-day coverage of book fairs and festivals from across the country, with top nonfiction authors. here is our schedule. in the end of september, we are in new york for the brooklyn book festival, celebrating its 10th year. in early october, the southern festival of books in nashville. the week after that we're live from austin for the texas book festival. and then we will be covering to festivals on the same weekend.

from the nation's heartland, it is the wisconsin book festival in medicine. and then on east coast, the boston book festival. then we will be in portland, oregon for word stock. and at the end of november we are alive or the 18th here and road from florida for the by any book fair international. that is a few of the fairs and festivals this fall on c-span2 book tv. >> now, a look back and communications with of the george w. bush white house. we will hear from presidential candidate howard dean, julie mason. this is an hour and a half. >> good morning. i am the dean of the lord's

herbert school which medication here, and it is my pleasure to welcome to you to this morning's panel on white house communication in the george w. bush residency. each of our panelists will open with a short statement of their own perspective on the topic we will then have discussion among y invite audience participation. i have a minute bad news i have to give at the beginning, which is you will notice that scott mcclellan is here. he is ill, and not is able to make the trip. we are sorry he is not here for we will try to soldier on as best we can. i just want to note the presence of mr. calico in the audience and thank him for his longtime support. [applause]

i will introduce the panelists and sit down and allow them to go in order. i want to underline the question. many people will be arriving as we get underway. to give everyone a to ask questions, please ask questions and not make statements. thank you. i will introduce all four of the panelists, and unwanted go in order. to my immediate left, worn crispy leads strategists. he was special assistant to president bush and deputy assistant to vice president dick cheney. he has also been a fellow at the kennedy school of government he is the author of three books. next to him, howard dean is former chair of the democratic national committee.

is he was presidential candidate and six term governor of vermont. he is now a strategic advisor and consultant for the affairs practice. most important for today's event, he is senior presidential fellow of the calico center for the study of american presidency. julie mason is heard nationally weekdays from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. on potus channel 124. she has more than three decades of experience covering state will pull, and national including four presidential campaigns. went straight to increase his announcement we can make it five. congratulations. [laughter] edward rawlins have a distinguished career as a communications expert. he managed president reagan's

landslide victory in the 1984 campaign, and has had major roles in nine of the presidential campaign. he has served in the imitations of four presidents is a frequent political commentator for fox news and other networks. he is a senior presidential fellow at the calico center's 2009. our first speaker will be mr. christie. >> thank you. thank you for that warm introduction for all of us. good morning to all of you. letk you to you, those of you here at hofstra university for the interview tonight.

i am honored to share the stage, to give my perspective about the experiences i had in dealing with mutations in english white house. it is also privileged to share the stage with friends. i know governor dean for several years. we actually agree on issues more often than not, believe it or not. we always joke about that. julie mason, who now is at serious xm, i actually have the privilege to host a show on the same channel, with the former governor on saturday mornings. i want to give a shout out to and rawlins, who i have known for a long time, who i consider a friend and a mentor of mine. i was in dallas last friday to sit down with president bush for a little while. he is very happy, very healthy, and he is angry spirits rolling his administration this in happy spirits following his administration. if you know anything about george w. bush is a phase wealthy and. what better time to fight him in better spirits to talk about his

favorite pastime? how do you turn from dallas, where the president was in good spirits last week, to a conference here at hofstra in long island, to check about the george w. bush administration, in general, and more particularly to talk about how we communicated in the white house? i think of course, the best place for me to start is at the beginning. i started in day one committed the george w. bush white house as the deputy domestic policy adviser to vice president cheney, before moving over to the special assistant to george bush in 2002. from day one, what we tried to do is we tried to define how the president would communicate his policies to the american people who had alike at him, as well as our friends and allies around the world. in the opening days, call rose, who was the senior adviser, he had an organization he has brought together on a regular basis of all the senior staff in

the white house. he named the group that blair has group. they did meet in the warehouse. they sat down and they looked at the president's policies, they looked at his messaging, they looked at all sorts of things of how we are we are president -- how we are listening president bush for success, and how do we make sure we keep them there and keep him on message? these are the most senior folks, who in the white house, the national security advisor, the press secretary, they can all gather around. call rose was pretty smart. he recognized that those who sit around the senior staff table in the white house every morning by not necessarily give him the most candidate lies and candid approach. he brought together a second group of which i was a part of, call the conspiracy of deputies.

he figured that the deputies have nothing to prove except using the candid counsel, and they might be more forthcoming about where we are. is the president messinger or doing a good job? in one of the earliest meetings we had the conspiracy of deputies we sat down and thought what does george w. bush presidency look like? this was early in 2001. how are we going to make our market and communicate to the world who we are? the first thing we sought to do, we wanted to be a different kind of republican. we wanted to position the president as a different kind of republican and communicate that. we wanted to look at new ways to communicate our policies, we wanted to offer solutions, and we ended to look to try to find the coalitions that we could build a bit beyond our traditional base. we also wanted to make sure that the president changed the tone in washington and communicate

that he sought to do so. here we argued over things like how do we stress personal responsibility? i do we share credit with our allies, and how can we treat others with dignity and respect rather than attacking one another? we also sought to deliver on what we promised. for president bush investment number one, reforming public education. number two, finding ways to have is to shins of faith to work together to modernize security, and of course to find it description drug benefit part of the medicare program. i will look to historians to assess our track record of success, but i think that we did a fairly good job. before i close, i want to give you a sense, very briefly, on how we communicated internally to make sure that our methods were being articulated properly to the country of the world.

twice a week they would bring together a group calls the message meeting. yes we talked about the message. we would talk about president bush's calendar, the day following we were sitting in the meeting, and we would go three months out and we would talk about everything from who he would meet, where he would travel, what human vision -- what he would visit and what he would say. do we have a strong theme? we have a purpose? the most valuable commodity that the president has is their time. where we properly utilizing the time? beyond this, we would sit and we would say that we need to make sure that his policy time, the policies he has articulated when you look at no charge best you hide, window that modernization social security, that it was spent well. the meetings were beyond the

walls of the white house. the was difficult when i had to be a part of was the policy one. we would bring together every single policy deputy in the white house policy organization. we would have these big easels that war on the back wall, and they would say monday, 20 minutes available, tuesday, 10 minutes available, and they would let the policy deputies pointed out. i need five minutes of the president's time because of this, and another deputy would say that that does not make sense because the theme and message we have this week, that is off message. that is not what the president is talking about.

from an internal perspective of making sure we really zealously guarded his time, so that he can prepare for his speeches and prepared to go out and interact with the american people, as well as our internal discussions of dealing with those who live your way to get to the oval office you need to make sure your utilizing that time for early, we felt that the first term of the administration did not go beyond this form. there is so much more complex apparatus to say, in particular the george w. bush white house. are we on message, are we communicating, and are those vacations resonating? it is not all seriousness, and it is not all about whole numbers and words president coming up and coming down? after 9/11, the vice president of the united states was insecure in undisclosed locations that we euphemistically dubbed as the cave. i'm a big fan of saturday night live. and one night they had darrell hammond, the comedian, who had been tasked to play dick cheney.

they had him in this little cave in afghanistan, and he had a little coffee maker where his heart was supposed to be. it said i am invincible, invisible, and it tastes grade. i said, did you see that saturday night live's it that they did about you with zero hammond? i brought a copy. it was avg and just for those students who do not have dhs machines. scooter libby looked like he was going to kill me. but we paid our close attention to the way we sought to make it with the public, and the public talk to us through serious discussion as well. thank you very much, i look forward to our discussion. [applause] >> thank you very much.

i've never been inside a white house bush press operation. i'm going to take a slightly different tack. most people know that i have extremely strong views about this particular president's administration, and his successes or lack both foreign and domestic. i do not see a lot of pointed reiterating. but i do want to make some observations that i think are fair and i will be surprising to most of you. i do president bush for six years while he was governor and i was governor. he was a good guy, a standup guy. he kept his word on business dealings that he did not have to do. he was in his legal rights to not have to do it, but i liked him as a human being. he was very politician. he does not get a a lot of

credit for getting angry politician, because he followed the greatest politician, bill clinton. the last one was franklin roosevelt, we do not people like that very often. he related to people well, and i tell you these things in context, because i think the relationship between the media and george w. bush was not a grade one, although it often is not. it is probably because of the character of the media, which i want to spend the bulk of my time on. i divide the bush presidency in terms of npr the into four. in the postelection phase, it was a disputed election, at i would argue that core actually one, and the supreme court decided to do something different.

but i do not want to antagonize ron. it has nothing to do with supreme court, it is congress. my view is that he was probably responsible for what happened because he could've just said, we appreciate the supreme court's views, but the congress that the ultimate say. 's numbers after he got to the presidency were not as good as most residents would be because it was not a coronation, it was an ugly process. then there was the post 9/11, his numbers were in the 90's for this reason reason that any president who presides over a that has been attacked, or where troops are sent in america's interest, their numbers are grade them and everybody wants

to support the president regardless of how far away they may be in their political views. then came the iraq war, and initially there was a huge surge of support from the president because he's for our troops, and everybody supports the troops and supports the president or that began to be a liability after given there for a while. and then after that was katrina. i want to reiterate this by saying i like event is seeing. i do not think he met any of the things that people accused him of meaning. i think it wasn't pr blunder and it was not his fault.

i think the press has been a failed institution in this country for at least three presidencies. i mean it in this way --the relationships between the chief executives have been on this a city, somewhat hostile for a long time. i think it is a good thing. 92 foreign policy course, and one of the things that is amazing to me, even back to eisenhower and kennedy, where people would see us numbers that would have a conversation with the president of the united states, and then on the way out, the procedure would say that was all of the record. and it would be off the record, edit never appear in print. it is not in the best interest of democracy to have that kind of relationship they since that time, it is the opposite, and it leads to all kinds of problems.

we are at the opposite because not because the modern -- reporters are people people, but you're at the opposite because of the corporatization of the media. where the owner whispers in the year of what to say it was not to say, and every show is a profit center. today, if you're not making money, you are getting your staff cut, your salary cut you cannot send foreign operations. even then a bus news or for assistance -- best news organizations do not have the coverage that they once had.

this is because the news has become a profit center and it is driving down the quality of news the pressure in the newsrooms is a norman -- in our mess. it is not get it right, it is get it first and we can fix it later. the pressure is so grave, you may do 4, 5, 6 stories in a day. in the old days used to do for stories in a week, and that was a big deal if you can get your byline out there. it is a very different industry. it is not a different industries simply because there are terrible people who are reporters, i do not believe that. it is not true. reporters are interesting, fun, and i want to do the right thing and for the right reasons. but the pressure on them to do things for the wrong reasons is enormous, and an effective president bush, edit effective president obama, ineffective president clinton. it may have started with nixon. i'm not sure when the magical

time was that it suddenly went south on us. but it is an enormous problem. all of these presidents, certainly but clinton, bush, and obama create these walls where they do not speak to the media. it is a very tough environment, and i think it did not serve president bush well, it has not served president obama well, and it certainly did not serve president clinton well. we want to have a debate about not just what happened in wenzhou administration, will have to have a debate about where the future of the media is, and with the social media means if there is no referee or editor anymore. i know a lot of reporters saying that the editor writes the story before you get the quotes, and then he put them in when you come back to the newsroom.

that is not a good model. they can fail, but what you cannot have in the press is one that does not assert freedom and judgment. the only reason democracy works is that somebody independently has to hold us accountable for what we do in the political stream. that is a very difficult task in the last three presidencies. [applause] julie mason: thanks, governor. i would add on top of it, that people expect their news for prey. they do not want to pay for it. it is a big problem. in some point today maybe we can talk about what your friend george bush never made it to vermont, the only state in the united date, where he never went. there was a warrant out for him.

there was a lot going on with vermont. for me, obviously, the major story with the bush administration is what many of us can agree as the stunning failure of the news media to provide a critical bulwark against the administration's highly effective propaganda campaign to sell the war in iraq. it is wrong to say that no one in the media asked questions the questions were asked, the questions -- answers were terrible. freedom is on the march was a regular insert. the strategy is victory, and the people one.

there were a number of factors that we forget in the atmosphere surrounds this time, that must be considered in context and we talk about press coverage of the bush administration. his approval ratings were very strong his average first term with 62%. barack obama would kill a man to get 62% right now. he went out to 52%, still incredibly good. people were terrified after 9/11, they were willing to believe anything. 70% of americans agree that iraq was responsible for 9/11, and of course even the administration was saying in the side of their mouth that they had nothing to do with it. but we were attacked, and saddam must go. while all of this was happening, the news industry was in a crisis. it has gotten better and leveled off, but as it was mentioned, still in terrible shape.

by the end of the bush administration, 17,000 journalists have lost their job because of the recession, not because of him. [laughter] these included hundreds in washington dc, including me. i got laid off in the very last day of the bush administration, and i was the white house reporter. everybody was losing their jobs it was terrible. it was a scary, depressing, miserable time in the industry. and what a lot of us forget when we hope generalists will occupy the church of truth is that it is a business. these discusses do not make money anymore. it is very tough when you read the washington post right now, which is a wonderful paper with a terrific history, it is all written very fast by kids who do not make a lot of phone calls. democrats in congress, echoing with the administration was saying about iraq is making the

same statements. there were not a lot of naysayers, they were sidelined and marginalized and made fun of there was not much of a robust opposition for journalists to cover. shortly after 9/11 we had the anthrax attack targeting washington leaders and journalists. the fbi director said that another terrorist attack was inevitable, all night long over washington dc fighter jets patrolled the skies and the d.c. sniper attacks began. all of this began all at once. it was crisis to crisis, and it is part remember that these were the days of beginner. proctor be an american -- get hurt on, proud to be an american. it seems so long ago. 35% approval job rating, it is easy to complain now why the media did not do its job. and i was stipulated that much

of that, there was some critical reporting, when a president has a 90% approval rating, they do not want to hear reading stories from the press. i wanted to put some of that in perspective. there are so many other green stories. the president's trip to graceland with the japanese prime minister, which for me was a high point. thank you. [applause] ed rollins: can you imagine every day, to get up and go to

work at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, every single day and you have world crisis ceased to deal with? economic crisis to deal with? you start a day, most of the white house staff comes in at 7:00 a.m., you try to make the decisions, all day long, and people try to interpret what you done, and they are the press corps. it is not that we tie to manipulate you, but if you look around this room this is about the size of what across core is every day. and the prosecutor he stacks out and says here's what the president did today, and here's why we did it, and what is happening. and then you try to coordinate the message. i think president bush, who am a big fan of, and his presidency was terrible in terms of the things that came into the environment.

he did not want to duplicate his dad, he wanted to do what the reagan administration did. it was a much different environment, and we want to control the story. we understood that your job to do, and you were not going to write our press releases. we wanted to drive our message, our story, and do it in a coordinated way. unfortunate for the first president bush, when he got elected, and he thought i will do it differently than president reagan, and i will not have coordinated efforts, and i will not have a story of the week and i will not have removed talking on the same page, i will go into meet the press and threw everything at me that you want to, and he did. when you do that, it each and every everyone of your writing a story, and it is not controlled story, and you ask questions, you can go 25 different

directions. to a certain extent, if not his presidency is given much higher marks than it was when he left office, to the bush people, the father had lost a good man. for the reason was they were not able to tell the story. i was an observer of the administration, and i think you will agree with me, they had an extraordinary woman in their name karen hughes. she had been the closest advisor, a newsroom anchor in texas, she came with him. she was clearly one of the real strength of the administration. karen had a greater relationship with the president and could put real discipline into it and was not afraid of karl rove.

unfortunately, she left after two years to go back home. she had a young family and the pressures were for her to go back. she later connected with jerry secretary of state. but -- deputy secretary of state. when you hear the stories, the bombings, the train centers in the pentagon and what have you, you sort of loose track of whatever you want to talk about. you want to talk about education, everyone wants to talk about something else right you can never underestimate the importance of the media today. when we were in the reagan white house, which was the beginning of the modern how to control television of the story, which we did pretty effectively, we first came into existence and the white house had to go into federal court and more networks

were a legitimate news agency, and the world changed dramatically. you did not just have cnn, you had fox, you can be seen coming that msnbc, you had other main news. it was beginning of the blog era. used to be, control your story, your job all day long twist to make sure your story did not get complicated by what they were doing, and your battle was to make sure that on network news that night going for a million people to the 40 million people watching, you have an entire day to manage your story. today, something breaks, 15 seconds later it is on a blog, 30 seconds later it is on a network.

i think, when the bush people came in, particularly after the feeding frenzy that went on during the clinton administration, and i agree he is the most gifted politicians i have seen in my lifetime, he understood politics for a well, but he did not control his message all the time very well. a lot of what the bush people wanted to do was to really control the message and make sure we thought was important, not writing a press release or your story, but what we thought was important with get out there. you can never underestimate this, george w. bush would go nuts about leaks. they had a newly policy. there was greater discipline and that white house about not leaking stories. every time there was a leak, one time bill casey came into the senior staff of the white house, to complain about cia stuff getting linked.

15 minutes after he left, the white house correspondent of the washington post said that 8 meeting people had a call about a link. i think the team was good, i think a lot of the problem, the press had dreams dramatically -- changed dramatically. we have lost a lot the greatest fears and entities that used to be. we have so many fundamental differences out there today, and the 17,000 journalists back on displaced cannot all right a blog without making sure that the editor is there. it was a lack of and ability to control an environment. you do not control war, terrorism, the economic

breakdown. as much as they attempted to do all that, and they were pretty darn good at it, the stories were just overwhelming. i give him grade credit. i think the american public never got to see the george w. bush that a lot of us saw. he was extremely personal man. he was able smart man, a lot smarter than people give him credit for. dick cheney as his vice president, he did not deal with the press, but had a very capable personality. one of his assistant senior advisers knew the media as well as anybody. and counter forces, but at the end of the day, it was more the circumstances and the changing of the environment of the national news media that have real impact on the presidency and to a certain extent, not that they did not impact the

incoming, but it was hard to sell story. he, in a different environment, with a different economy, what have been sitting here praising a president who understood the country very well. [applause] >> the first thing i would like to do is to ask the panelists to respond to anything they heard said that they would like to weigh in before i ask a question or two. julie mason: i appreciate the remarks of all the other panelists about the likable guy george w. bush was. he was smarter and meaner that he got credit for, but he also inspected the role of the press, and have us to his ranch for dinner. president obama cannot name 10 people who spent the last 10 years covering, but president bush knew everyone in the government, and their wives.

>> either question about that. howard dean: before he had a press conference, they would decide ahead of time who would do things and in what order? obama still does that, but bush was the first one to do that. i do nothing president clinton did. ron christie: paging dr. dean. [laughter] ed rollins: there was an order. people who got calm on -- called on, the major networks, and then the rest of the press, you could distinguish anymore was

important. this was a way of -- i am sure this was part of the discipline, let's not call on someone who will not ask a question but make a commentary, which show many of the dead -- so many of them did. they would make a statement and then ask the president if they wanted to comment on the statement. julie mason: if the president wanted to have a question about the automakers, they would call on the detroit news. everyone expects tv to get a question. they spread it out pretty evenly over time. >> the new york times was banned from the plane.

i might have done that if i had thought of it. [laughter] ron christie: you sure to the office at 6:30 a.m. in the morning, and you come and work an eight hour day on saturday. one thing that they first taught us was you never get out before the president. you do not talk to the press about his policies until the president announces them. you do not get around and show off to your friends and talk about this is what the president is going to do next week. when the white house press secretary makes an announcement about the present schedule or his policies, that is when it will be made. we were extraordinary discipline from the first term, from 2001-2004. that is the strong role that karen hughes had in his early years. she was the enforcer, but also a

brilliant strategic communication strategist. i think a lot of people with the passage of time forgot about that is how we approach this, a discipline first and foremost. it is the president's announcement, and the president's position. not you, not your ego of trying to get in front of the president. ron christie: some of the most powerful women became players. ed rollins: the women in the press corps, they were very strong, and they had greater influence. >> one thing i would like to ask you about, we have not talked a lot about the bush administration to was happening at a time unbelievable change in the media.

i want to lay out some things about that. to me, one of the landmark moments came in september of 1998, when the report into very's allegations against resident clinton was published, including in its entirety online. a week before that, out in california a company calls google was incorporated. there was no reference in the water -- ripples in the water, but by 2004 you have howard dean's campaign being a pioneer in the use of the web as a fund-raising mechanism. you also have the beginning of internet memes, and the year that the 60 minutes investigation into the texas international guard service

exploded by bloggers who had a greater knowledge of typography than the producers of cbs seem to have. twitter gets underway 2006. in if you want my opinion, that is the first place and a lot of them will turn when we get to breaking news. how do you think the bush administration managed that change? were the leaders, follow, or not even figuring it out? ron christie: we were literally at a crossroads. it came into play of september 11, 2001. for those of us who were evacuated at the white house that day, all cell phone towers and d.c. for our network went down. there was not a means or mechanism for us to communicate.

shortly after 9/11, the concept was introduced that we would now carry a blackberry, which most of us had never heard of before, to vacate with each other -- communicate with each other. if you look at the way which would news digital media, the white house photographer will still taking still photos in 2001, 2002, 2003. we did not digitize until 2004. when you look at the way the students communicate today, i think for us the challenge was recognizing that this new technology was out there and how do we best not only hook the president into this new technology, but how can we utilize its half -- it as staff? president obama uses e-mail, president bush did not.

by the time you get into 2006, 2007, the white house staff was a lot more sophisticated in dealing with this emerging technology. but for our cousins in the obama administration, 19 day in technological capabilities that they have the tools they have at their disposal to get the message out. howard dean: they gave an interesting talk about the cost for of change that is going on. the bush administration was really at the crossroads of an enormous generational change in the world cannot justice in america -- world, not just in america.

you had nationstates becoming individual groups, and even al qaeda, as mike said this morning, is now an institution and a doomsday cold which is incredibly effective as using methods that nobody could dream of other then someone like charlie manson. we're crossroads of a lot of things that are happening in the world, not just in america, in a generation of you people that are looking at institutions in a completely different way. it happened to be that george w. bush happened to be presiding over this, which did not make his presidency any easier. one of the fundamental and mr. standings that we went into iraq on was that iraq was a country. it is an agreement european powers of hundred years ago that

made no sense is a country. he unrooted all of that and created an analyst forces that nobody had any idea where is horrible as they were there. there was an enormous technological revolution going on around the world. the bush people just happened to be there at the time. to say that the bush people did not understand technology is not really fair. that would be like saying shakespeare did not understand literature 300 years later. he just got caught in enormous historical change that affected everything, not just technology, not just the media, but the existence of a nationstate itself that began to change and the fundamental beliefs of all the people who have been trained

in the past 40 or 50 years in the post world order became to come on board during the administration that had nothing to do with the president himself for the people he fired. the rules are changing under their feet and there was not a lot they could do about it and they tried to play catch-up. you always want to tell one story. ed rollins: you cannot tell 100 stories. you had a massive plane crash yesterday, you had bombings that started to take place last night, all of a sudden, when of the original game plan was, it is off. blackberries;, you see everybody sitting here with their iphones like this, and there is a temptation to go respond to that. as a press person or a

strategist, to have that splint to say i just got this text from julie watson answer on this right now, and i sent a text to her answer her question, i will totally move away from my agenda to her agenda. the way to maintain this in the future will be extraordinarily harder, and i remember i was mike huckabee's chairman and we were doing an event in iowa, and we had a room. he started going out to be the places with 10 people. by the end you have every major press person in the world. we did a press conference, and we had 150 bloggers, and another 500 on the phone. with the mainstream media, we did not let them ask questions. we said this is the future. it is controlling that message, and that is going to be very hard. it is just magnified 1000 times what it used to be.

we used to have an office in times square, and you'd walk into times where and you are bombarded by billboards, lies, and all of that. it will be in a extraordinary challenge for campaigns and all of that. ed rollins: and it is going to get much worse. howard dean: it is a fraction of what it was before. the average age is well over 50. the average age of if you were

on msnbc is 62 years old. on fox it is 68 years old. the bell curve stops at 35. no one over 35 watches any of this stuff. facts [inaudible] [laughter] >> the truth of the matter is that all of this stuff, the evening route -- evening news, still the biggest way of getting the news out, is disappearing.

we are in the big first quarter. for this problem of controlling messages, it's only going to get more difficult as people get their news in different ways. believe me, if something is on the front page of "the new york times," "the l a times," or one of the three big networks, it's still a big story, but not as will -- big as it used to be. in 15 years that may not be true anymore. >> one of the most fascinating things to track overtimes in the white house is the seating and how it's changed. there is a new seating chart. it is all that we would consider legacy media. newspapers that don't even exist anymore, sitting in the living room. this morning they added buzz feed and yahoo!. >> i wanted to ask one more question before turning it over to the audience. we started off talking about how to communicate internally and then externally the message. it's one of the things that i think that people don't understand.

it's not as if the word manipulation has not come up. if you are lying in, if you are concealing important evidence, that is one thing. one of the things that i discovered back in city hall, you had to be a policy meetings. it is a good thing that someone in the meeting, how would we feel it decision was somewhere in the daily news. you can talk about the way in which the pr people are not simply implementers of a strategy. ron: one of the offices that you have not heard of is the office

of the staff secretary in the white house. largely out of public view, largely unknown is one of the most powerful in the white house, the staff secretary feels with all the paper flow that comes to and from the president. let's suppose the you have briefed the president in the oval office. howard dean, of course you would not say howard dean, but howard dean, i've articulated what i need to get the tax cut through in 2001. every head of office will look at the governor's memo and say -- this looks good to me. or they will say, paragraph three, i don't agree. before something gets to the president every single major department head has to sign off on that document and say that the president and the senior staff have seen this, we have gone to the necessary cabinet agencies, this articulates your policy position. how that relates to you getting into the oval office related to

the pr apparatus, in our policy breathing for the last three years i cannot think of a time in oval office that we did not have either ari fleischer, scott mcclellan, or someone from the communications office sitting there. her presence was not as a policy role, but if they could not communicate what the policy message was, then we were off message. it was all about discipline and making sure that we are on the same page. for us to stay on the same page that meant that the communicators and policy geeks had to find a way to work together. the policy people were saying -- here is exactly the president's policy. communicators of course want to find a sex year way of -- sexier way of putting it out there. it doesn't work in a soundbite, we have a strong relationship between the press and the communicators.

if they could not articulate the president's policy, it did not matter what the president was trying to convey. >> it is important not to think that pr -- and i completely agree with the premise, the press secretary always has to know it's happening. public policy, in no administration i have been in, you don't make decisions to do good pr. you have to sell your policy decisions. the vast majority of people the vast majority of people around the administration's do what they think is in the best interest of the country. but then you have to sell it. obviously these things are difficult to sell and there is always a counterpoint. one of the difficulties of the administration, reporters go out to do their own thing. homeland security, on the tragic

crash in the alps, as with something else, you're always fighting to make sure that whatever your best plan is that you can go out. i think the key thing that we have to understand here, one of the things occurring today that never has before, as the rest of them understand american pr and they tell their story effectively as chopping off a man's head, or a man, setting them on fire, people say my god, so outrageous, that is what terrorism is about.

suddenly you have a guy being beheaded on network television that night and the message of the day from the white house is probably diminished -- diminished dramatically and they want you to respond to whatever that may be. it's very hard and there are a lot of conflicts on the messaging side of it. julie: bush always call the press the filter. he always said it like that. he thought that the filter distorted his words. that they put it through a sieve of darkness. he started and president obama i believe has perfected a system of state run media. when we covered bush we thought he was terrible. no access, no accountability. compared to obama bush is like the most open, giving, sharing person you could america that you could imagine. his press shop is much more open than the current administration. of course they want to come out and tell their good, positive up story.

they have their own pr operation, that's not what we want to do. they control through denial. which was great at taking questions on the fly, to the detriment of the message of the day area he would sit there until you are done and take whatever? that was on your mind. in that way the administration was able to move through stories quickly. now you see the president holding back, we won't hear from him for months and it is like this firehose. reporters are finally asking 12 part questions. there is so much to ask him because the cycle just moves on and on.

when i talk about state run media talking about photo releases. instead of a routine signing of note, which the president -- which president bush would do, now we don't have that. we get a photo taken by a white house photographer that is handed out, which is no different from them writing out a press release and expecting that to go in the paper without any scrutiny or accountability. this president doesn't like the press. bush didn't like what the press did, but he understood and respected the role that the press played. he was much more accessible in a casual way, like those oval office encounters with reporters just lobbying quest that lobbing questions. president obama doesn't do it. throw both administrations reporters found the most useful information comes from outside the administration. people on the hill are gold, they love to talk. also in the diplomatic corps and the agencies, but you don't go to the briefing to get your news.

dean: i will share with you some of the tricks of the trade. we would go out on the road to do small paper interviews. they were thrilled. they would usually write it the way that i wanted it to write it. bigger papers without do that. in defense of the big papers, they are not going to write the same story every day, but you have to give the saints each every day five times per day because that is what you do on a campaign to stay on message. i could do it for the 25th time on a friday and the big papers will not write that, they will find something else. they will delve into some opposition research, this kind of stuff. it is of course in my interest

to limit that. in defense of president obama, the reason he does not do many bill signings is because the house is not pass many bills. julie: i was just using that as an example. howard: if you had been hillary clinton, would you have wanted anyone else there? julie: it is just a system where the next has -- next president, ted cruz, will bring it to the next level. [laughter] moderator: you heard it here first. i have got a couple of people here with microphones. student questions first if we can. right there. yes? student: david schreck.

this question is for mr. christie. i was wondering, what was the message being communicated after the week of 9/11? ron: it was -- it was a tough day for the country. it was a tough day to be in the white house. a tough day for me to advise the vice president of the united states. our entire focus went from what we call domestic priorities to working on a tax-cut to domestic consequences. we grounded all civil aviation. we closed most of the maritime ports in the country. a few days later the president had a national prayer celebration. in the days after the

celebration the focus went to prayer and remembrance. as well as those who brought the opportunity to heal as a country. if you look at what our message was, president bush tried to reassure the country that every agency and every entity was doing everything that they could to prevent an attack on the country again and that we needed to move forward and heal and that the terrorists would win if we succumbed and set around and felt sorry for ourselves. it was very difficult for us as a country and very difficult in the white house, but ultimately -- julie mentioned this earlier, you notice that his approval ratings went up into the 90's because in the early messaging people felt that he was doing everything that he could to protect the country. >> just as an observer, there was a memorial at the national

cathedral. there have been lots of stories about the president, what was going on in the white house, the president reading to young kids and what have you. no one was sure who was going to be in charge. we had this extraordinary service televised and billy graham gave this extraordinary speech. one of the great religious leaders of this country. the president followed him and said -- i said to myself having worked for several presidents, if there's ever a time to hit a home run, it's now. he did. he gave an extraordinary speech. he went right from there, he came to new york, you got a great photograph with the firefighters. a firefighter came on the stage. those two events, it was more powerful than the message. the message was -- we are not

going to beat us, we are in charge. sometimes the activity, the flyby, like on katrina, that was a foolish effort on the part of the white house to show that the president was not in charge and the white house picture was not a deliberate effort. but the president's activities are sometimes more powerful than anything else. i think that that was the message, that he was back in charge, they were not going to get to us. that was the president at his finest because it was him and he is a man with real integrity, a man who was always underestimated and basically rose and grew in a job drink very difficult times. moderator: can we do the question two rows in front? thank you. >> this is for any of the panelists. i was wondering if you could talk about the effects of new

technology and modern media, the state that modern media has had on speechwriting. is the era of a great memorable speech over? can it be adapted to fit within 140 characters? >> i don't think that it is over. there will always be a role for that. a couple of things haven't set appeared that i think are incredibly important to remember. the first is that the president has a role and everyone looks to the president at a time of great crisis. at that time everyone is going to focus on that and anyone who does not is not paying attention. you're right, there is a lot about recipes on a day when something like that going on, fine, good luck read that is focusing on. another thing that ed said. the visual is always just more important than what we say.

if i want to find out how effective it is, i will turn the sound off. it does not matter what you say, it is how you say it. if you look confident, like a leader, like a president, you have done well. it almost doesn't matter unless you say something absolutely outrageous, which some of us on the stage have done from time to time. [laughter] ed: you are not allowed, howard. -- not alone, howard. howard: but there is always that moment of central crisis. the visual of george bush standing there with a bullhorn, he could have said that he was having spaghetti for dinner and as long as he was forceful and he meant it, he would have gotten great credit. ed: i traveled with ronald reagan every day for six years

and he asked -- how long be think i can hold an audience? i don't he was one of the greatest speech makers in the world. he said -- watch the audience. the first five minutes is adulation, it does not matter what you say. he said 220, you coast through the middle and kick in the end. he said -- watch the audience for 20 to 23 minutes. why do you think that television shows are 23 minutes, 27 with commercials? my point is, you cannot have the bill clinton speeches that go on for an hour and a half and keep adding points. you have to think in terms of in the future getting your message across in 25 minutes, making it

count, making it memorable with some lines in there. i started my life as a speechwriter and richard nixon, a guy viewed not so much as a great speech maker but a guy with great writers around him. he used to make them underlined the soundbite a lot. nine times out of 10 once you did the drill, that would be the soundbite because that is all the soundbite be. 8, 10, 12 seconds. now you have to put together a string of eight to 10 soundbites. but you have to weed that together. it is more difficult to write speeches today. sometimes some of the great speed rager -- speechwriter's -- like taking in. they write for the history books. she understood spoken word while

reagan, having been the communicator, built movies and commentary and what have you. he understood the spoken word was different from the written word. writing for the written word, you hear it differently than visually, is very important in this day and age. >> other questions? >> down there? >> thank you. building off the previous question, i wondered, how quickly will the innovation of technology affect policymaking in the future? >> you mean policymaking directly about technology or in the broadest sense?

civilians but also from a military and point. relatively speaking it tends to be slower. it in terms of the bush administration to the modern day