yes, i believe osuwatame is relevant to our moment. now, in many ways it's true that president obama's speech is actually less radical than fdr's -- than theodore roosevelt's speech was. there was this wonderful moment in the osuwatame speech where t.r. talks about a -- his being accused of being socialist. and that a socialist paper in kansas took this as a great insult to socialism. and i think that president obama probably smiled when he read that part of the osuwatame speech. we can probably discuss this, as many of you know, there is a great argument between contemporary progressives and conservatives over what the progressive era was really about. and matt channeled some of this and reflected some of this. my conservative friends like to talk about progressives as being primarily about centralization of government ruled by experts and some kind of elitism. what progressives who defend that tradition would argue, they'd acknowledge, by the way, some real difficulties. some progressives were really caught up in the racism of that t

president obama's osuwatame speech is the platform for the party of evasion. i hope the 2012 election will present a clear choice between the party of reality and the party of 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. it's great to be on a panel with you all. i've enjoyed all your work on the progressive era over the past few years. i'll try and be brief so we can get to interesting back and forth on great ideas we've already heard. one of the things i want to focus on is how boring the election of 2012 is likely to be in comparison to the election of 1912. now, maybe it's easy to do when you're reading history books and things like that. what's most fascinating and you get this in sid's book 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. you have this fight for the soul of the republican party between la follett, teddy roosevelt and taft. it ends up being taft. you have