president obama's osowatomee speech is the party of evasion. i hope the 2012 election will present a clear choice between the party of reality and the evasion, but this still remains to be seen. thank you. [ applause ] >>> thank you, bill and hudson for having me and e.j. for the kind introduction and it's good to be on a panel with you all and i enjoyed your work over the progressive era over the years. i'll try to be brief to get to back and forth. one of the things i want to focus on is how boring the election of 2012 is likely to be compared to the election of 1912. i know it's maybe easy when you're reading history books, but what's most fascinating, about the 1912 election was how much of a serious challenge there was to the two-party system. we haven't really talked about that. so you have this fight for the soul of the republican party with teddy roosevelt and taft and the creation of a new party which has its own divisions which people don't acknowledge as much about the progressive era and a serious fight about issues of monopoly and

to teddy roosevelt is almost in the card, for who in this situation is copying whom by coming to osowatomee obama is originator even to be seen as outdoing that. i doubt that he succeeded and for good reason? teddy roosevelt had more time to prepare his address. he was perhaps the deeper thinker and of course, he sought consult from the likes of -- but questions of steal aside, it was address it. historians tell us that the concentration of power and wealth was in fact the central issue of his time. whatever president obama's thinking, no one, of course, can know, buttes on watt me con vase time and they wills the test of statesmanship and the massive imbalance between what now government now promitiesurce at promises. call it what you will, a sovereign debt crisis. on this depends the fate of the national security and the soundness of the entire economic system and justice for the