oh i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture political commentator and author keli goff joins me for our first half hour in conversations with great minds the discuss her latest book which explains how the influence of actually change the dynamic of the two thousand and eight election. all bets are off the table speaker that was john boehner walks away from debt negotiations so what's to become of this republican temper tantrum and will a bipartisan deal come before the president's mandatory eleven am time tomorrow.

night's conversations of the great minds i'm joined by blogger political commentator and author keli goff you've probably seen her on several television programs are paired up are political and cultural insights on c s c n n m s n b c fox and b.e.t. and already has been featured in time magazine cosmopolitan and essence as well as the new york times and usa today her first book party crashing how the hip-hop generation to be cleared political independence received critical acclaim documenting the rise of generation obama and her most recent book just out this year a fictional work entitled the g. eight hugh candidate has been labeled a recommended summer read by the los angeles times currently she's a contributing editor and columnist to the loop twenty one dot com and a contributor to the huffington post please now welcome her from our studios in new

york keli goff keli welcome. thanks for having me tom well thanks for joining us your work is extraordinary your first book party crashing how the hip-hop generation declared political independence examine the perspectives and impact of younger. voters and members of the post civil rights generation of the political process with particular focus on the two thousand elections and one of the if he was really one of the first bush to chronicle a rising generation obama i believe it can you define for our viewers the hip hop generation and the impact that this generation is having on america today from two thousand and eight well even before then through then and into now. well yes they have a generation it's also it's used often interchangeably that term with the post civil rights generation so those are those americans born after who were born after the civil rights movement began so approximately one nine hundred sixty four to somewhere in the mid eighty's is usually the cut off that's used and so it's really

that generation who as i as i've written about before actually live began to live the dream that people like martin luther king spoke of and were fighting for you know the first generation to have no recollection of the quote unquote bad old days of legalized segregation and so that's that's considered the definition of the hip hop generation and the impact that they've had and in fact you talk about the kind of the generational divide between the hip hop generation the civil rights generation going to play out what point. well sure i mean it's hard for people to remember now even though the election wasn't really that long ago but if you're going to correctly there were a lot of articles early on particularly during the primary about older black americans being somewhat suspicious of president obama or than senator obama and it wasn't necessarily that they didn't care for him but there was there was sort of a narrative that was playing out as i chronicled in party crashing it wasn't just in the case of president obama there were a number of races as you know including cory booker's race in new jersey when he

ran for mayor the first time he got start james arthur davis as a race when he ran for congress for the first time he was actually he's actually a law school classmate of president obama's but all of these these young up and coming black elected officials were approximately around the same age although most of the personal rights generation in their early political careers they faced off against older african-american candidates who have lived through segregation lived through the civil rights movement and you sort of seem to be peddling this idea that if you had not experienced that if you hadn't figured that then you weren't going to have the right perspective politically speaking to leave african-americans effectively and so. part of why president obama's race is so important is because it firmly established that you did not have to come from that era you did not have to you can't came specifically on that to be effective and not only winning african-american voters but also winning diverse coalition of voters and that's one of the things that is really significant and younger voters played

a real role in that i mean he would not president barack obama would not be president without the strength of voters under thirty and they are by simply voters you know of the population that has the right situation simply would not have won the primary and he would not be president united states today he also seems to be trying to expand beyond just that divide. the events of today in this last week he is. it's almost those part you know the post partisan is a nice buzz phrase right now but he almost it seems like he's actually trying to embrace that trying to be a bold bet that partisan fray do you think that that plays well would be to tibet to that generation post part of that post civil rights. i know it does at least certainly for more substantial segment of that generation one of the things that you know i did in the research for my book is i teamed up with suffolk university as political research center on a poll and it was one of the few polls actually ever been done specifically on the personal rights generation of black voters we polled voters ages eighteen through

forty five and one of the things we found is that the younger you go the more the increase in the number of young black voters identifying themselves as registered independents not just identify myself as independent i think of myself as independent but i did actually registering as a dependent voters and that's something trending that's been holding voters between the ages of eighteen and thirty are significantly more likely to identify themselves as registered independents and african-american voters who are older than that who are overwhelmingly registered as democrats the poll numbers when we did our research were around a quarter of all black voters at that time ages eighteen to twenty four my research is about three and a half years ago it's even extend up to almost the age of thirty were registering as independents and the only other research that really been done among that program for the voters was about ten years ago and the numbers were at something like twenty percent a little over twenty percent which shows that it's a trend that's increasing. is

a concern that in those states where you have closed primaries and you can't vote in a democratic primary republican primary and if you're not registered as one particularly democratic primary. by registering as independents people are giving up any ability to participate in selecting who the nominee is going to be. absolutely i mean i've experienced that here in new york i have friends who run for office going to actually register independent i thought a journey of evolution actually took place while i was researching the book funnily enough and so that's absolutely a legitimate concern i actually would say it's a bigger concern for the democratic party than for voters i don't know that i would say that i feel disenfranchised but i would say that for democrats this idea that the black vote was just an automatic given has really started to change and i will say this tom that you did see a little bit of a shift in terms of an uptick in the number of black voters who are younger who registered specifically as democrats i think because president obama was in the

primary there is increased interest there is an interest in helping him quickly in a very competitive contentious primaries we all remember against senator clinton but what i deftly want to toss the democratic party on is i hate these younger voters to a little bit like some of the blue collar reagan democrats who became clinton democrats again those voters are not democratic voters they are swing voters who felt a particular loyalty and can step to bill clinton and that's why they went back and voted for him but they also at least seem to go back and swing back the other way in the next set of elections and i think that's what we can see and the thing happened with some of these younger african-american voters it's very true if you look at the numbers that there is an uptick in the number of them who registered as democrats when president obama ran i think the democratic party though needs to think long and hard about their backup plan for healing for these voters once president barack obama is no longer on the ballot especially in those states that you talk about that have those primaries and you could see in the numbers about younger black voters really made

a difference in the last couple of elections yeah absolutely your essay living the dream is featured in the collection the speech recent barack obama's a more perfect union what do you think about the obama presidency and do you think that his reelection is going to garner as much enthusiasm as his election did in two thousand and eight given that it's not you know. it won't be one of those iconic moments. well i think it will always be and i kind of turning violent the point at which our country elected our first black president i think every person will always remember where they were when they found out even the people who don't identify with us politics will always remember where they were when they found out and will probably tell their children and grandchildren that i remember where i was when i when i found out that our country made history i mean i think the fact that john mccain's speech his concession speech that was so so eloquently touched upon that very point. in terms of how i rate his presidency i am on record as giving him a solid b. plus i've been asked this question before and that's mainly because i don't think

that any president should be told that they're perfect because there's always something that they could be improving upon or working harder for us all but i but look you know this is my position he passed health care reform he oversaw the catty administration that captured osama bin laden you know i feel like if you put that up just against any other president we've had that's a pretty impressive. record of least getting something done in accomplishing something that being said you know bill cosby famously said that if you're pleasing everybody you're doing something wrong or i think that's a quote or something like i don't know the key to to to to get doing things right but the key to doing things wrong is when you're pleasing everybody something that out of bounds and so i would actually be a little concerned that every single person on this in this country was saying that they're absolutely elated with the proc obama president say you know i think so far so good in terms of actually paul and probably through on some of the campaign commitments we have the repeal of don't ask don't tell on the horizon health care reform capturing the some of them which isn't even something i believe the promise on the campaign trail so that was sort of like an extra bonus thing so all of these

people who are saying they're disappointed he's not getting anything done and not really clear on that on where that's coming from it's fair enough but they say i'm disappointed they don't agree with some of the policy maneuvers but i think this is going to so far a presidency that we will remember for actually doing something i agree and the same time. and this is. probably not so much a concern of the hip hop generation and more of the of the civil rights generation and but at the same time when he was campaigning he said john mccain is going to cut social security or try to privatized social security and i am not going to cut social security or medicare or medicaid and yet this week he's been proposing. cuts into social security medicare and medicaid and today on my radio program senator bernie sanders suggested that there should be a primary challenge against him not necessarily to take him off the ticket but to make him feel like there's some pressure from the left to to move back to that position of protecting the traditional democratic constituency i'm curious your

thoughts on. what you know here probably talking to the wrong person to have a connection before i went through a bit of an evolution and i'm no longer about just the democrats you know my position is we ought to live in a country together and whether you identify yourselves as a perk progressive or as a conservative the president should not be pleasing you on everything like this you know because there are plenty of people of country who don't agree with you on everything in life you know and i think that means that every person out there compromise and so you know that's really all i can say about that i'm sorry that that happy and i know he's not the only progressive who's not happy because they have a lot of friends who are progressives who are are often unhappy with the president but you can't please everyone is for sure you wrote a piece about religion versus race as the it was titled is religion a greater political barrier than race can refund that. sure happy to report that you know it has a lot to do with my new novel that you mentioned in the opening the g.q. candidate one of the things that i found which is about let me just say really

quickly is about what happens to a group of friends when one of them decides to run for president by sheer coincidence the candidate governor luke hooper is handsome charismatic and black and he also happens to come from a multiracial family and his case his adoptive parents are jewish and the reason that that was interesting to me and important for me to to write about and why ended up talking about this issue of religion versus racial identity in terms of which is the greater obstacle on the campaign trail is because one of the things i was absolutely captivated by during the campaign and subsequent first term of president barack obama is that you have people that made my parents who never thought they'd live to see the day where we'd have an african-american president they lived through segregation in a let's roll the war stories that people like me are blessed to have not had to endure growing up and yet we finally got a viable african-american candidate for the presidency and lo and behold it turns out that all the polling starts showing that you americans have a problem with the idea of voting for

a black candidate for president but plenty of them have a problem with the idea of voting for a muslim or someone they perceive to be a muslim and so i thought that was just fascinating and as you know the poll numbers on that have only gotten worse not better in terms of the number of americans who believe that president obama is not a practicing christian as he says he is i'm from texas where the poll numbers are as high as like fifty percent of them think that he has a practicing muslim secretly and so i wanted to tackle that issue and explore this issue of whether or not religious prejudice is the last bastion of acceptable prejudice in american society and in american politics because if you think about it even someone like michele bachmann right was on the record posing the right saying that she thinks that there is not a that some people lifestyle would be hard pressed to go on the record and say i would never vote for a person. because they are gay in the same way that you're going to find very few people who go on the record and say i will not vote for that person because they're black but you want to have a tough time i mean people would say i would never vote for tom cruise because he's

a scientologist i don't quote in the book polling about a quarter of a voters in the republican primary say they won't vote for mitt romney or or the other candidate who who are mormon talks is a practicing mormon so i want to touch upon the idea that i think it's fascinating and i also think it speaks to an interesting place in terms of how we've appalled as a country but an area which we haven't evolved right which is also interesting because our country was kind of founded on this idea of religious freedom from. it is that it's of it's and i'd like to one more question about that but first let's just take a quick break here more conversations with great minds of political commentator and author keli goff after this short break. you website twenty four seven live streaming news towns like to tell you about the ongoing financial hardship unlimited free high quality videos for download.

and stories you never find on mainstream news. media so. we believe it's interesting. to see more on our teaser. trailer. welcome back to conversations of great minds i'm speaking with blogger political commentary tator and author keli goff his most recent book is entitled the g.q.

candidate keli just following up on our conversation about religion yesterday or the day before rush limbaugh went off on this read about how the reason that president obama wants to get his deal with the republicans before august first is because that's the beginning of ramadan and it plays into and he and he didn't correct himself writing on you know it actually is the beginning of ramadan just like put it out there and he's got all these people listening and it is is religion and particularly islam becoming the new bigotry becoming the you know the superseding the the racial is the religious divide superseding the racial. why did you lie to every couple with and your question is i don't know that it's becoming the new bigotry i think that's nine eleven which was almost ten years ago it's now the you know the old accepted bigotry i mean we just have the what is it the man who's on death row for the attack post nine eleven hate attack and i've

written about you know the the rise in the n.s.a. thoughts on practicing muslims since nine eleven and i think that you're absolutely correct that it's become the accepted form of prejudice that people don't necessarily have to stand up they may not you know shout it from a bullhorn but it's not something that is considered unacceptable in the way that saying i absolutely don't like black people i absolutely don't like asian people is considered unacceptable and something that makes you a person that is not a part of civilized society and i think that that's the real issue of concern you know i'd also go back to the thing i said before about you know you're doing something wrong if you're pleasing everybody and i certainly think the white house thinks that attitude about people like rush limbaugh if you know he's happy then you're probably doing something wrong well does this also speak to some dimension of human nature there's that there's a fundamental sense of. tribalism isn't quite the right word but you know this is awesome that's the kind of sounds that just always seems to play out if

it's not being played out in nationality it's being played out race it is not being played out race it's being played out religion i mean i don't recall a time in world history i mean seven thousand years of history and there hasn't been that schism how do we you know first of all i'm curious your thoughts on that and what we might do about that if anything can be done. what is interesting you ask that because one of the things i'm really passionate about i am still coming up with ideas for my third book even though my publishers already asking or even already asking you know what do you think you know one of the things i'm really fascinated by is is the new mosque a racial society that's emerging in america and i'm sure you've seen the same numbers i have in terms of census the fasting fastest growing population in this country or children who identify themselves as biracial or multiracial as a parent is of you know a different race and so i think that that really is part of what's going on here is that people can no longer easily sort of you know put people in the the convenient

boxes we've always relied on and so you start looking for other boxes to put people away i think that's part of this conversation the other thing that i've heard i want to be very clear here in terms of writing this blog my role here in the book is not to judge it's to make us ask questions and think about things and one of the things i do keep hearing whenever i write about this type of religious prejudice and it playing on the campaign trail is this notion of you can't choose to be black you can't choose to be gay can't choose to be all these other ethnicities but people do choose their religion and so one of the things that people keep coming back and saying to me is why can't i judge someone by choice if they choose to make just as i had to judge them by any other choice or choice of spouse their choice you know business practice why is it wrong to judge someone by choice i think that's always going to be the challenge of it comes to religion. but of course you know as what we've seen with president obama it's gone a lot further than that it's not say i don't agree with some of because they're muslim it is literally becoming if you consider yourself a muslim i consider you

a bad violent human being and you're not worthy of the white house and that's i think the issue that we should be challenging ourselves as americans to be better than that because our country what we're supposed to be is better than that so very well so in your article how political correctness is killing the american dream or the dream act it seems to me a candid conversation with jose antonio vargas and me you talk about this false choice and sabotaging integration of. that we deport them all and we give them also this and ship can you talk about that and isn't that a problem in most important issues today too many black and white answers you need for simple answers short legislation you know do we not solve complex problems in america anymore. well but you know this goes back to the beginning of our conversation eight hundred some like me who evolved a consider myself a diehard have a crack to someone who identifies myself as a registered independent who votes based on the issue based on the person and it's extremely frustrating because there are actually a lot of us out there including

a lot of friends i have raised and i had some are proud to republicans but you issue wise we don't really disagree that much and they are ultimately issue by issue voters who voted for people of the other party but there are a lot of us out there who feel that for that very reason we get locked into the conversation altogether and it's extremely frustrating and i think a lot of americans are getting sick of it all the polling shows that we're a country that's trending towards a greater number of independent voters some of the research i've seen as shown that in a place like california registered independents are going to outnumber registered to mccutcheon registered republicans and i think the next five years or so it might be a little longer than happened within the decade and so absolutely i think that the tolerance and patience for this sort of black and white everyone screams each other i think of patience among americans is really waiting for that and a level of gridlock that results in the idea that nothing gets done when that happens i think americans are getting increasingly sick and tired of it i would also argue that that's part of why president barack obama is not in bigger trouble tog i mean you know you know that i wrote

a piece titled donald trump in the seven dwarfs and it was about this idea that when you have a president whose approval rating is the slow to a court of the population says i would never vote for him because he's a muslim and yet the republican party still seems to be having a tough time finding any candidate who can pull ahead of him that tells you something and i think what it tells you is something that can be found in president obama's favor ability and likability numbers well his job approval numbers have been low his likability numbers have always held pretty steady and that's even a among republican voters who when he who say things like he seems like a nice person his family seems nice i like his family i like the image that they represent of america and i think that if you read in the t.v. . there which you're also saying is exactly what you mentioned earlier tom which is that americans give him credit for seeming to try to reach across the aisle they don't always think that he's big plus for that but they give him credit for trying because they're so sick of us being a country where nothing gets done because people aren't even willing to try to work

with the other side so i absolutely think that that's the direction we're headed i'm very hopeful and if the numbers hold steady among some of the young voters i research we're going to get there we're going to become a country that's more the less partisan and more united in working together on the issues that matter for us let's hope so your new book is fiction kelly canada why fiction and why the attention to physical appearance. oh that's interesting ok so it's funny i know most traders dream of always writing a novel i was not one of them in my case what happened is i was you know i was being asked about my second book and i couldn't stall any longer and i had a couple of nonfiction ideas that didn't pan out the way we hoped to actually started researching one book that i'm still hoping one day i'll get to do the timing just didn't work this time around and so i said to my agent wiley have really one other idea or possibility the only problem is it is it's fiction i've never done fiction and she says well what's the idea and i said it's about what

happens to a group of friends when one of them decides to run for president and she says it's a great idea it's probably been done before but we've checked it happened then there's been plenty of excellent books as you know on campaigns primary colors probably being the most famous which i think is great but there had only been a book done specifically from the vantage point of the friend or family members of the candidate and i really wanted to to first of all read got my style because i just think that as someone who has worked in politics for years it's just such a fascinating experience and you know i actually found in some ways back obama and john mccain to be the least interesting people on that campaign and i was intrigued by their their spouses and their children and their circle of friends and i wondered gee i wonder what you know michelle obama said to have one. walked out that stays together after this and so there had been a book that really focused on that and so that's what that's how the book ended up . coming about in terms of the title of the title actually i don't think i'm giving too much away here to say this the title actually comes from an anecdote in the

book in which the media nicknames him this week you can't have that and it becomes a running joke with his circle of closest friends because they actually know he's not the most stylish guy but it speaks about fact that is you know as well as i do you know how the media kind of picks a narrative time and runs with it whether it's accurate or not. michelle obama has talked about house and she's become you know sort of a style icon she has people who say oh she was always stylish in college she was remembered for being stylish in college and she says that's absolutely not true but of course that's become part of the michelle obama myth and legend and so that's actually where the title of the book comes from i'm curious kelly how you got to hear what what were the what were the influences in your life that the brought you to to being a writer and being a commentator and and having the the platform. or inspired well well the first thing i have to say is i have a really terrific mom who said you're really feeling and you know i think that it's testament to you know how you can only go so far as your biggest cheering section

and i had i had a really great cheering section and that's an excellent mentors who believed in me and encouraged me to do things when i wasn't even sure i could do them myself and that made a lot of the difference the very abbreviated version though of high and that becoming a writer is a bit of a nontraditional story which is too long to tell you the ins and outs of here but the book the very abbreviated version i will say is i had an idea for the first book about generational differences among black voters because my circle of friends my circle of african-american friends who like myself who are educated members of the post civil rights generation were registering as independents and when i met the person who said oh i changed my registration i thought there's a story here and i don't hear anyone telling it and so i said if i were a writer i would tell the story. and a friend of mine at a party introduced me to an agent and that's actually hired into becoming a writer he introduced me to an agent and the agent at the party did not handle

political thoughts but i thought the idea sounded interesting and introduced me to an agent who did in the political blogs and she's the woman who became an agent and she actually handled a number of civil rights books so from her vantage point she said i think everything happens for a reason and there's a you know there's i want to hear the story and help tell the story of the next generation after the civil rights movement and that's that's actually higher than the writer that's very in the in the last minute a half or so we have here you've also written about today's most important civil rights movement and it's not what i think most people would think. and the only planning. and women it was. yes that well you know i think it's so it's so interesting the timing of us having a conversation with the possibility of having free birth control i actually do consider reproductive rights to be the most important issue on the planet and i would literally mean that people are often surprised and i'm not just talking about abortion i do mean access to reproductive services because we should be

a country we're not a third world country we should be a country that this few women as possible ever find themselves in the position of even considering abortion and so every issue you look at from the environment to war where people are fighting over resources whole stem from this idea of people not having enough resources to feed our family and if we tackle the issue of reproductive rights a lot of those other issues will become less dire and so i do consider it one of the most important on this planet going back against why i think that president obama is accomplishing a lot more than some of his predecessors if we can get quality cost effective birth control with that's accessible for every one in this country he will have left a huge imprint on the legacy that i think will be bigger than any other president has preceded him absolutely keli goff thank you so very much for being with us tonight thank you so much tom i really appreciate the thought it's been great to watch this conversation again as well as other conversations and great minds go to our web site of conversations with great minds start.