Good afternoon. Welcome to the Richard Nixon president ial library. I am jonathan movroydis. Before we introduce our special guest today i just want to announce a few upcoming events. On september 7 we are going to have a cold war historian and member of the National Security council the Kennedy Johnson nixon and reagan and kramer and is going talk about inside the cold war from marx to reagan the roots history strategy and documents of the cold war. It should be a really interesting historical discussion. On that similar note on october 23 we are going to have historian nick looked her to talk about his book nixon and europe, reshaping the postwar atlantic world. On september 11 we are going to have at 11 00 a. M. Our annual 9 11 commemoration. Please look on our web site for that at nixon foundation. Org in november 7 we will have the daughters of president george w. Bush and first lady laura bush. Jenna bush hager and Barbara Pearce bush are going to talk about stories from our wild and wonderful life. Now on to our speaker today. Douglas schoen is the one of the most influential Democratic Campaign people for over 30 years and is a Founding Partner in principle strategist for penn strawn schoen. Corporate clients include aoltime warner Proctor Gamble and at t and you can also see him frequently a commentator on fox news as well. He is a bit of a nixon buff. Last year he wrote a book about the policies which i urge you all to pick up called nixon effect how Richard Nixons presidency fundamentally changed american politics. His new book is about another president and another presidency and the current look at politics today. Its called america in the age of trump opportunities and oppositions and an unsettled world. The fox news political analyst Juan Williams called its contents no bombast no bull feathers all Real Solutions are people of all political stripes by how President Trumps america can get back to its cando spirit. Ladies and gentlemen, douglas schoen. [applause] first of all thank you all for coming today. Im going to try to do three things, hopefully successfully. Im going to try to address the current way of the land then answer the question that probably is unanswerable but will try through what would Richard Nixon goofy face the same circumstances. Number two and number three what does the book say, what does it recommend and why is it different from whats going on in washington and countries today. Those are my parameters today and i do think to start i ought to share a little context. I was one of those, and they were in many oems of americans who did this as well who didnt vote for the president. I had worked for bill clinton as some of you may know and i just decided Hillary Clinton was a bridge too far. So on fox news i did make it very clear that i could not have would not support secretary clinton. I got a fair amount of publicity but i didnt say i would support donald trump. I worked for mr. Trump in a private capacity in this business. I knew him and my own philosophy and governance is very different from his so i said look im not going to get involved and not make a choice that speak out however i believe is necessary and appropriate. As i sit here today i am probably one of the few commentators you might hear who does not have an ax to grind. Put another way id did support donald trump didnt support secretary clinton, didnt vote for president. Im still a democrat. There is much about the leftwing of the Democratic Party that i cant associate myself with and there is much about the rightwing of the Republican Party that i also cant associate myself with so im in the middle. I tried to do that on my appearances on fox news to the centrist perspective and hopefully common sense and a logical perspective. I leave that to others to determine. But my book, america in the age of trump, tries to forge commn sense Bipartisan Solutions to the problems we are facing. I would argue that those problems are getting worse and they are being to a great degree made worse still by our Political Leadership. First of may start with the president. I have two problems. Philosophically i disagree with a lot of what he has tried to do but i think its fair to say much of what he has proposed is within the round of reason. I could disagree as they do with his health care plan. I might not support from what has been released his tax reform plan. I probably would have appointed a Different Supreme Court judge justice but lets be very clear. Lets be very clear. Everything the president has proposed is within the round of reason and can be considered and negotiated and we will get to it in the second what would Richard Nixon do. I dare say president nixon would have approached things very differently than President Trump. I think like a lot of people i was heartened by the speech on monday night. He set out clear policy for afghanistan and made it clear how he was different from president obama and outlined an approach towards afghanistan, towards pakistan and indeed toward south asia generally but to be completely candid when i saw what he said and did in phoenix yesterday my heart sank. Look, my perspective is pretty direct and pretty simple. We are all americans. We all have a common interest and if we dont pursue our common interests as americans we all lose and thats what our adversaries whether it be north korea, iran or the chinese are or the russians, thats what they are hoping for that we will in our own way divide and fight among ourselves and weaken ourselves. I think it was the case that secretary of defense mattis said our greatest enemy is here at home and i certainly share those sentiments. Because if we cannot get our own house in order and stop attacking we have a profound problem. From my point of view, to polarize like the president does and i say that with a heavy heart because i think of the bid is really unnecessary. I think what he said about charlottesville was unnecessary and unhealthy. I know the man. He is not a racist, not an antisemite but certainly to say that there were some fine people in charlottesville and to leftwing protesters however offensive with neonazis and white supremacist is on acceptable and he doubled down yet again yesterday and it is deeply deeply upsetting but its also upsetting to me and im not going to try to quantify amounts come more or less or whatever but its certainly pathetic to me that the Democratic Party is the party of resistance. My heart sank because i was brought up in the 60s where we had a bipartisan tradition. We did civil rights legislation, voting rights, medicare, medicaid all done with democratic and republican bipartisanship. Perhaps im naive enough to believe that we can still do that and i would hope we could. So far though given the way the Democratic Party has operated the chances of that are almost minimal. When i look at people like Bernie Sanders and when i look at Elizabeth Warren i say to myself look we are capitalist country. We believe in free markets. We believe in liberty. We dont believe that the answer to everything is to tax the rich or somehow believe that those who have had success in life are in some way inherently evil and need to be punished. I think thats just wrong to and it leaves me literally out in the cold with a level of sadness about what is happening to our country that makes me disappointed as possible. I was hoping that donald trump would govern like Richard Nixon. If you remember the 68 campaign and i can see at least some of you are old enough to remember that campaign, but most not, Richard Nixon had the southern strategy. He talked tough a lot and he got enough of the wallace votes, parts of the south in the midsouth era as well as much of the midwest. But the nixon rhetorical strategy if you remember watch what they do, not what i say was exactly that. Nixon i argue in my book the nixon effect govern in a bipartisan way. His agenda and make the argument and not look was actually more liberal than much of what we see today. The epa, we see that he proposed a guaranteed actual income that was more integration done in the Nixon Administration and i think in any prior time and a few ss his presidency he consciously and consistently governed in a way that was designed to if nothing else unify the country in a policy sense and for those who didnt like president nixon and certainly there were plenty of those, he did get 49 of the vote in 1972 and over 60 of the popular vote is my memory serves me right, round 60 . So this was a man who was a leader. On Foreign Policy with the opening to china, the beginnings of detente this was a man who was a visionary. Sadly we dont have that today. I hope and pray that Donald Trumps speech is the beginning of a strategy that involves a more assertive america and seeks to position ourselves with the many threats we are facing whether it the north korea or the middle east but to me the question is still unopened one. Again, speech in the right direction on monday night but what the 39002 troops will be able to accomplish and how we will it be able to get the taliban to the table as secretary tillerson said yesterday. All of these are open questions. The other thing that i think in fairness to President Trump we have to accept, we had nothing like the north korean threat back in the 60s or 70s, even the 80s or 90s. We were not facing any situation or set of circumstances where north Korea Going Nuclear was imminent. They cheated and now we are doing what they after math of that so we face Serious Problems in the middle east with iran, the sunnishiite rivalry which is taking a different shape. But again we are facing challenges again without a white house staff that in a lot of ways is as experienced as that which somebody like president nixon was able to bring to bear. We have seen a great deal of turnover in the white house in the last six or seven months. The papers in the last couple of days, i saw it in the news york times and the wall street journal as well. I think there were 10 or 12 people who had left in less than six months. Again my point is not to say this one should have stated this one should on but to say we have this kind of turnover. The loser is the United States of america because we have a government that appears in a deed may well be inherently unstable. I am saddened by what i see and im saddened by what my party the democrats are doing or not doing to cooperate because we cannot address the challenges we have with the kind of political approach we have. In the book america in the age of trump that i coauthored with jessica tarlov, we had 10 basic propositions that we addressed and what i would like to do is articulate the proposition. Give me a second to think about each one and then go back through some of the solutions we proposed in our book and let me be very clear, we make the argument both implicitly and explicitly that if there were people of goodwill getting together as happened in the 60s and 70s, we could solve the great deal and many of the issues and challenges that we facebook in the absence of that in the hyperpoliticization of our system where everything is a Campaign Event in everything involves an attack ad, sadly our challenges have gone unaddressed. So first and i think this is fair to say the American Education system is a failure at every level and we will talk about that in the second. But i would really tell you one of the experiences that ive had whenever i talk to immigrants and they say how was your Education System compared to where you came from, people who would extol the virtue of america say they are patriots, they love this country, we dont know we have and always say their educational system is superior. To be sure they have some very good universities here but i would say we have a challenge to educate people and particularly a challenge in poor communities. I would just say one thing about that. We are one nation whether you are a republican or democrat. You cant govern just to protect minorities or to protect uppermiddleclass, white. You have to be inclusive. Whatever your approach and so far again i have yet to see a politician or a Political Party take an inclusive approach to education on most issues. We have another problem that i think most of you have seen certainly as the parent of a 26yearold son trying to make his way in the world i see it myself. The economy to be sure is slow in its recovery but the middle classes hollowing out in the American Dream is on life support. I think many of us certainly grew up leaving whatever happened we would do better and i would do better than my parents. My parents were successful. Im proud of them and proud of what they were able to offer to me that there was no sense that i would face the kind of challenges i see young people facing today. Those challenges have to do with the orderable and they have to do with getting good jobs and they have to do with just a simple challenges we face in dealing with a very complicated world where our educational system is not necessarily preparing people for the challenges we face or the challenges that they face. The third proposition and it was something i alluded to before, we are approaching a National Emergency of military readiness and preparedness and a world of mounting security threats. We wrote the book i guess we finished at about six months or a year ago. We didnt anticipate precisely what has happened but again you didnt have to be a prophet to figure out the challenges the tropez going to face from the russians, the chinese and i have suggested rogue nations like north korea and iran. We also have the criminal Justice System which is our fourth that does a good job punishing people who commit serious crimes but is also a sentencing many of our young men and women guilty of less serious offenses to long sentences. Now i think we could debate the policy and approach that attorney general sessions is taking and i certainly believe president obama may well have gone too far with his pardons at the end of his second term but i think its also the case that we have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and we have very limited resources to teach and train people in prison to come out to be productive citizens. Put another way we do have an underclass in this country and one of the ways we are seeing it reflected is what has come to be called the opioid crisis. Candidly jessica and i did not write about that in any great detail but now as we watch the media and i am pleased the president declared a National Emergency, we have i think 50 odd thousand people dying every year and you run across people who are taking prescription drugs, heroin and cocaine and waking up and finding themselves addicted to some pain medication, antianxiety medication and its literally for them crippling. We dont have a handle on how to deal with it. We dont have the resources and even if we have the resources its not clear to me we know how to best handle that. I think its obvious to every wedding and again this was written before the fight over repeal and replace, we have a Health Care Crisis because while i would be the first one to criticize the republicans were having seven years to come up with an alternative plan is also the case that obamacare is a failure and changes are collapsing insurance and premiums are going up in doubledigit amounts or more. The other thing we have which we havent heard much about lately but still remains a problem is entitlement crisis. We may well have deferred that for while. We are not going to have medicare and medicaid and Social Security go bankrupt in the next couple of years but i think the actual royal report indicates that within 10 or 15 years we could face a very serious crisis. There is one other issue and this is actually my sixpoint which i think informs everything everything. Its something we were talking about at lunch today which is that there has never been a time in my memory and i think the polling bears this out but the public has had such little faith in our institutions. Why is that . We have all seen how washington our state governments have failed us. I think its fair to say that a level of skepticism is high but there are couple of things going on that exacerbate the problem which is increasingly people are deciding why would you want to serve in government . We are not getting our best people to go into government to serve. The other thing is with the internet and a very aggressive media we live in a gotcha society and in a gotcha society whatever you have done, however you have done it can be magnified and turned into a problem. To say to somebody give up your career, stepped out, leave your job going to the administration whatever administration democrat or republican, run the risk of some degree of condemnation or excoriates and for what you did or what you didnt do. Why would you do that and i asked that as a rhetorical question but i think for many many people that is also a huge, huge issue. Another issue we isolated is that there is a crisis of values. What i mean by that is basically we were brought up, at least i think virtually everyone in this room and hopefully those watching, the vast majority, with a sense of right and wrong, sense of morality, decency and integrity. That is largely gone. We live now in a transactional society where the issue