Perspectives. Jonathan darman was a journalist before, maybe still is, before becoming a book author. He was a correspondent for newsweek, and he covered, among other things, National President ial campaigns in 2004 and in 2008. He most recently has turned his attention to another Political Campaign in the 1960s. His new book is landslide lbj and Ronald Reagan at the dawn of a new america, so jonathan will be talking about that and anything we can talk him into speaking on. On my left is chase untermeyer, who has been a practitioner of politics. He served in the president ial administrations of Ronald Reagan, george h. W. Bush, and george w. Bush. His book, when things went right, is drawn from his diary of the first years of the first Reagan Administration. Please help me give a hand to our two authors and we will get started. [applause] jonathan, since your book comes chronologically before chases, im going to ask you a question that is kind of a twofold question. Number one is, how did you find covering the campaign of 1964 in historical time after you had covered in realtime the campaigns of 2004 and 2008 . So thats part one of the question. Part two of the question is, how do you perceive that politics changed in that 40 year period . Jonathan thank you, bill. I am very happy to be here in texas. Most of the places ive been talking about the book this fall the weather is not quite this nice and i have not have need of the Charlie Crist fan which i wish we had today. Under the table. [laughter] that aside i am very happy to be here. It is a great question. I would say that stepping back from presentday political reporting to look at the 1964 campaign has, on the most basic level, made me feel a lot more charitably toward politicians, people who are willing to step forward and run for office. When you cover a president ial campaign, we are very hard on them and we talk about all these forces that they should be paying attention to in the country and how hard it is, what they need to be doing to connect with the country. Stepping back and looking 50 years back in time, what you really see is its in a lot of ways impossible to know what the country is actually dealing with in the moment. For me, that gets illustrated when you think about the 1964 president ial campaign. If you go back 50 years ago this weekend, you can see the next 50 years in american politics being laid out before you. On october 27, you had Lyndon Johnson, the sitting president of the United States, who had been president for less than a year, looking forward to the next week his landslide election in to win the presidency in his own right. He is traveling all over the country trying to get as big a margin as he possibly can and he gets really sort of carried away in a lot of the rhetoric he uses. He, on the day of october 27, goes to pittsburgh and he says it is a time of peace on earth and goodwill among men. The time is here and the place is now. Which is, you know, when we talk about managing expectations, a pretty high bar to set for yourself. Meanwhile, that same day, that same night is the National Broadcast of a underemployed, underappreciated former actor, Ronald Reagan, who is actually at that point still, people dont really think about it, a working actor, making the same case for Barry Goldwater in a speech that is sort of viewed universally as reagans launch as a National Politician and the beginning of his storied political career. It is easy for us to look back at that split screen and say, there you have it, the choice that is going to be between the two parties over the next 50 years, the sort of johnsonian set of grand promises for all the government can do to deliver, really solve all the problems of humankind, and then the reagan alternative of government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. But that is a pretty impossible standard to hold Lyndon Johnson to in the moment, of understanding that this guy Ronald Reagan, of all the possible threats out there, is in a lot of ways going to be the one who has the largest effect on his legacy. I would say that, looking at history, i hope that in my current political reporting i will be a little more charitable toward politicians and understanding and the expectation of what they should understand about the country. Remind me, im sorry, about the second half of your question. Prof. Brands how has politics itself changed in the 50 years between the 1964 election and the 2004 election . Jonathan it has changed in a lot of ways. My book deals with the thousand days after the kennedy assassination which, if you want to look at a moment in time where politicians actually got stuff done as opposed to what i think we all feel like today where they cannot get anything done, it is a fantastic moment. With Lyndon Johnson leadership in the presidency, you have the transformative legislation on civil rights with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. You have the passage of medicare, you have important legislation on poverty and education, and there really is this sense in most parties that you can Work Together and pass programs that are really going to transform peoples lives. We certainly do not have that at all today. It is also i think and you see one of the sub themes in the book is the passage from politics really being about the johnsonian speciality of managing the congress and the country and the congress being one and the same to the importance for president s of going beyond thinking about the country as a whole and beyond just the parochial political machines all over the country. The person who understands that best is Ronald Reagan. When Ronald Reagan first starts talking about running for governor of california in 1966, it is seen as a joke that this actor could be the best candidate the republicans can muster for the president the governorship that year. It is how bad the state of the Republican Party is. What people do not realize is that reagans gifts of being able to communicate and being able to sense the shift in mood in the country, which he has learned in his hollywood career, are really going to be the most important assets for any politician in the decades to come. Prof. Brands thank you. Chase, you observe politics more or less from the inside. Jonathan and i kind of look at it from the outside. When did you first sense the shift that i guess gives rise to the title of your book, when did you and i assume you mean this in a double sense, things got more conservative and i gather you approved. How did you get drawn into politics and when did you sense the shift occurring . As early as the 1960s with the emergence of reagan or was closer to the time when you joined the administration . Chase my actual origins were not with reagan but with his Vice President , george h. W. Bush. I was always interested in politics going back to junior high school, but the opportunity to get involved required working in the campaigns which in those days, the mid 60s in texas was a genuinely generally hopeless cause for republicans. Therefore it was a delight to find this young oil man named george bush running for congress on the west side of houston which drew my time as a campaign volunteer. So i did addressing envelopes and i did some Campaign Research and it was a great thrill when he got elected to congress that he invited me to be an intern on his staff. That began a relationship that 14 years later, led to going to washington with him. At the time, i was working at the head of the avenue here is a member of the texas house of representatives when the Vice President elect asked me to join his staff in the west wing of the white house, i realized that was the end of my active career in texas politics. I tortured over the decision for about 2 10 of a second before accepting, resigning my seat, going off to washington. When i arrived there, i had frankly doubts of my boss and of many people in america that the reagan program would actually work. That it was not mere hocuspocus of some sort prof. Brands or voodoo . Chase yes, that phrase, voodoo economics, was used. It was something that was deadly in the mouths and fingertips of the opposition and it got to be so sensitive for Vice President bush that at one point he actually told a National Audience he never said it. He did not say that as a conscious lie, i think at that point, he had himself become a reaganite and was in effect embarrassed by the recent memory of their very long and bitter primary campaign in 19791980. This man was now not only his boss, but his friend. In the way that elder bush has a way of looking toward the future rather than the past, to him, voodoo economics was just some press phrase, not anything he himself had said. Of course it was all on tape and he had to apologize when that was shown to a National Audience. I think what the illustrated was that it was during the course of 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration as the legislative Program Began to work its way through congress and as the country began to have a greater sense of itself, a greater sense of confidence that it changed in the mind of the Vice President of the United States as much as the rest of us. Prof. Brands jonathan has posited that the mid1960s was when the system worked. When a president with a legislative agenda could get something done. And chase has pointed to another period when the revolution was taking hold and the things did happen. I did not ask you and you have not weighed in on how you assess the situation today, but jonathan has adjusted that today it does not work very well, if at all. I suppose we could have a show of hands to see how many of you think that the political system is working really well today. [laughter] i wonder how much of this, how much of this is a matter of changing times and how much of it is either the existence then or the comparative lack now of a visionary president ial leader . Lyndon johnson had a vision for what america could be. Ronald reagan had a vision for what america could be and i think they were both successful in communicating that vision, is that what is lacking now or have there been structural changes in the american political system to make that kind of leadership much more difficult . Jonathan i think it comes down to a question of emphasis. Im sure chase gets asked a lot that question of could reagan get elected in todays Republican Party . Which people talk about a lot as this idea there are so many purists in todays Republican Party that even Ronald Reagan is not ideologically pure enough for todays Republican Party. My own feeling on that and this is something i try and describe is reagan is incredibly good at figuring out exactly where he needs to be as a conservative to get elected. I think the difference, and this is partly what made reagan an effective political leader, starting in the 1960s is at the same time as he is focused on what does he have to do to win the support of his fellow conservatives, he is always asking himself, how do we sell this to a broader and broader audience . And it starts really early in his political career. He was involved in goldwaters 1964 campaign against johnson, he was the cochair it the California Campaign and california was of course a very important state in the 1964 president ial primaries where there is this sort of final definitive showdown between goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller to be the republican nominee that year. It is a very bloody fight. After they finish that campaign, there is a Victory Party for goldwater, the Goldwater Campaign that reagan goes to and reagan stands up and says, lets go quote make love to democrats. We do not want to win a convention, we want to win an election, he gets booed in the room for saying that. But that was always where his focus is, how do we sell this message to as broad a group as possible and i think today in our fractionalizing universe, that set of questions is one that politicians do not have to ask themselves. In thinking that through, how do we bring as many people on board as possible . That will force you to come to the more important questions of how do we create broader governing coalition to actually make this stuff happen . Prof. Brands so chase how are we going to make things happen today . Chase one ways for my fellow republicans to stop saying they are admirers of Ronald Reagan and to start acting like Ronald Reagan. I mean by that is any number of politicians today will tell you with all sincerity that Ronald Reagan is their idol, their absolute model in terms of politics except insofar as what they do and say is not the least bit like Ronald Reagan. Let me identify some of those qualities i am talking about. One it is that as jonathan said, Ronald Reagan did have a positive vision for the future. It was positive, it was for creating prosperity through a reduced government footprint in the lives and businesses of people. The idea was prosperity. It was not recrimination against the enemy. Far too many of todays politicians are highly negative. It is sufficient, they think, just to be against barack obama and his policies. I believe that might help republicans win in the midterm elections this year, but the morning of wednesday, november 5, the Republican Party had better start having a positive agenda like Ronald Reagan or ed it will find itself with not much to say as people recognize barack obama is going to be out the door in january 2017 and being against him is insufficient. Another thing reagan did beautifully was to work across the aisle. His famous whiskey drinks with tip oneill and the after hours are the best example, but not the only example of his belief that you had to work with the opposition as he had to do as governor of california. Today just being seen in the proximity of the opposition is thought by either party a betrayal and worse would be reagans believe in compromise, he had his firm set of principles, but to him principle was what you built upon. What you built up from there was a matter of give and take, a matter of working with the opposition which is what he did in those sessions with oneill and others. Today the notion is that if you deviate at all from what some people consider to be the principle, the bedrock governing idea, then you a traitor to the cause. If people who believe that say they are like Ronald Reagan, then they imagine a Ronald Reagan that never was. A difference between reagan and those who are today his professed heirs is that Ronald Reagan had an immense and very effective sense of humor which he used as a very effective tool against the opposition. Todays issues are grim and serious. They were not so cheery back in the 1970s either, but reagan was able to use humor that today is somehow dismissed as trivializing serious things. Prof. Brands if i could follow up on that last point, one of the striking things about reagan is the fact that he gives conservatism a friendly, approachable face. If you read his message in the 1960s, it deviate hardly at all from Barry Goldwaters, yet Barry Goldwater did not have an observable sense of humor like that, did not draw people in. It strikes me that i do not know if it is a default setting for conservatives. It is maybe in the nature of conservatism in the United States that they tend to do righteous indignation better than they do a lot of other emotions. With Barry Goldwater, there was this sense that you were being lectured to. There is an undercurrent or explicit overcurrent of anger, but reagan took that away. Is reagan maybe the anomaly amongst conservatives . Is Barry Goldwater sort of more like the conservative mind and maybe we are returning to that where as jonathan suggested, there was blood on the floor in the convention of 1964 among republicans. It was are we going to be conservative enough . Is it too much to ask republicans or conservatives to come up with another reagan because is the personality type just really rare . Hubert humphrey does well amongst liberals, but reagan is almost the Hubert Humphrey of conservatives. Jonathan the question is interesting. It is in a lot of ways why have we not seen conservatives over the last 50 years in spite of the fact that republicans had this long streak of winning the presidency. Why have republicans not been able to put forward what everyone think of as the positive governing agenda under a conservative vision . Republicans are good at winning elections in a year when there is a strong antigovernment sentiment in the country. That is 1980, when reagan wins the presidency. That is 2010, it might be this year. What they are not able to do and particularly this is true in the last 20 years is then continue on