i mean, if we cared about facts, i mean would warren g harding have invented the cotton gin? president reagan have won the 1987 nba slam dunk contest? no! besides, may i remind everyone out there is the presidential race. and to win a race, sometimes you need to juice. ryan stretching the truth to make his speech more effective is just another form of doping. in that, if you believe him, you're a dope. and it feels good. and if they win the election it validates the strategy and it won't matter what the truth was. after all, josef goebbels once said, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. but for the purposes of my speech, i am going to say that was barack obama. it was barack obama? it was barack obama obama. it was barack obama. well, that is reason enough not to vote for this guy, because you can not trust a leader who won't tell you the truth. we will be right back. in♪ bcing b b ♪ b >> >> stephen: welcome back, everybody, thank you so much. my guest tonight is the former governor of utah, and ambassador to china, wow! that guy should run for president. p

that the three greatest presidents are washington, lincoln, fdr, and the worst of all time is warren g. hardinggree with the top three. i don't agree with harding. i have to say that i think warren g. harding has gotten a bad lot. his administration was beset by scandal as we all know. tea pot dome. nothing really bad happened to the kourpt. we had a 14% gdp growth rate in 1922 when he was president. >> who is your worst of all time? >> oh, james buchanan by far. james buchanan not only was a bad president. he was a bad man, a man of low character who lied to the american people practically upon taking the oath of office. >> one notable absence from your list there is jfk. where do you put him on your ranking of presidents? >> i've been faulted. i don't rank presidents. i talk about how historians rank them and i talk about what the voters thought of them at the time. what i say about jfk, and as i said, i've been faulted on this, is that we really can't assess jfk adequately because he didn't have an opportunity to demonstrate just what he could do. he showed signs of greatness in my view but

let's talk about warren g. harding. considered a total failure by the historians, ranked dead last in most of the polls since 1948. now, we all recall he was elected in 1920, died in office. he was a passive chief executive. viewed generally as a kind of vacuous suit of clothes whose career was fueled primarily by the fact that he looked precisely what people thought president should look like. so people, of course, within his time and later when they would read about him shake their heads at the 15-year affair he had with carrie phillips who happened to be his closest friend be's wife. -- friend's wife. and they would snicker at the sort of vision of the sexual tryst he had in a white house coat closet with a starry-eyed young woman named nan brenton who was 31 years his junior. all true. and finally, there was -- [inaudible] the scandal which e resulted after he died in office but, nevertheless, really harmed his reputation because there were all those trials, trials of the century and the next trial of the century. a

warren g. harding in 1920. >>> all eyes on hurricane isaac. look at these pictures.caps. it's officially closing in. we're going to take you there live, next. in that time there've been some good days. and some difficult ones. but, through it all, we've persevered, supporting some of the biggest ideas in modern history. so why should our anniversary matter to you? because for 200 years, we've been helping ideas move from ambition to achievement. and the next great idea could be yours. ♪ [ male announcer ] if you think even the best bed can only lie there... ask me what it's like when my tempur-pedic moves. [ male announcer ] ...talk to someone who owns an adjustable version of the most highly recommended bed in america. ask me about my tempur advanced ergo. ask me about having all the right moves. [ male announcer ] these are real tempur advanced ergo owners. find one for yourself. try your friends on facebook. see what they have to say unedited. ask me what it's like to get a massage anytime you want. [ male announcer ] tempur-pedic brand owners are more satisfied t

of course, when william mckinley or warren g. harding were running for president you didn't have things like television or twitter or facebook or anything else that today is the bread and butter of politicing. so you can deride the system for what it is right now but in part of the system is what it is because of the technology and the interlocking communication that we have right now that allows for messaging to come in just about any form that you can possibly think up. host: and if conventions are necessary any longer, the parties are becoming unnecessary as well and should be done away with. baltimore, maryland, sherry, independent caller, good morning. caller: good morning. i was looking at your show and i was thinking that everybody in america needs to wake up and realize what's going on here. barack obama -- i don't think that the senate is the problem but the congress is the problem and senators from -- >> host: what do you think about conventions? >> caller: the conventions, oh my goodness. they're spend sog much money. what abo

when you went into the convention, you often didn't know who was going to come out. 1920 with warren g. hardingolitical bosses choosing a nominee. they take warren harding aside and they say, is there anything we should know before we make you our nominee? they give him a few moments to decide and he comes back, absolutely not. there's nothing to worry about. they soon find out that he had been having a longtime affair with a woman named kerry phillips. if that were to be done in 1920, it would have been devastating. but the republican committee sent her and her husband on a trip to the orient and paid her $25,000 so that her story would never be told. that's an amazing story. just to show the split in the republican party that time in 1964, the liberal wing, the progressive wing of the republican party, was represented by george romney. and he was very much in favor of a civil rights plank and some other social issue planks. and when they weren't included, he actually left the floor and left with his son, mitt, by his side. so it just shows how the republican party has changed from that point

g gilgoff in washington. the rhetoric was pretty nasty back in 2008. is this really his reason, or is there something else going on here? >> well, don, it's really hard to tell, because rick warrent agree to an interview request today to explain his decision, and the campaigns, they don't want to talk about it. this is such a delicate matter. but what warren told the orange county register was that there's been so much uncivility, lack of civility in this campaign, that it would be silly to pretend to sit down for a couple of hours and for both presidential candidates to be civil, temporarily. but, you know, it's important to remember that going back to 2008, rick warren was somebody who, you know, supported the prop 8 campaign for gay marriage there and at the same time, was very weary about coming across as being political. and here's a situation where he's canceling this civil forum, and he's been very critical toward president obama on the issue of religious liberty. he said that the obama administration has been threatening religious liberty. and so we have all these situations with rick warren, where he's on the one hand trying to stay above the political fray, and on the