Andrei cherny formerly of the Democratic Party. [applause] dot everybody can say that in arizona and get applause. But the book readers are what we call the base. [laughter] dot thank you for that. Currently the ceo of aspiration. Com. Who are freezing can admire your shorts and tshirts and silently curse you. Speaking of the tucson festival of books, we have bill minor here today, one of the visionaries. Give him a round of applause. Very much a volunteerdriven effort a group of people bill and many others who made a big impact on the community. If you want to be part of that, i hope you will consider becoming a friend of the festival. A tax deductible donation that impacts this event and were moting around the country. Let me introduce the panel. David maraniss author of many books, he was won several wards prince of tennessee about al gore books about sports in the 1960s, and other political books as well. So please welcome him. [applause] if you are political aware and not living under a rock you know about mark levitch and his book this town that caused a lot of stir and conversation. Number one New York Times best seller followed up with a collection of his fantastic articles over the years called sitcitizen citizens of the green room. He is the chief correspondent for New York Times previously and we have ian lopez author of dog politics. A professor at uc berkly i feel like i am getting graded as we speak. Berkeley and a senior fellow at the progressive think tank. Lets start off with david. In the book about obama, you really look at the people behind the politics. You look at him before his first run for office as he was headed back to chicago after Harvard Law School. So i think the question given the title of the panel when we look at the politics in the age of obama how much of the politics is about obama, bill clinton, or gore and how much are the larger trends that come and go no matter the people and their biography. I think you cannot separate the two. I think my fascination the reason i wrote the books about obama and bill clinton is because i am fascinated by the forces that shape people. So that it is the person himself and their ability and character and history. But also it is all of the forces around him. I dont separate the two. I think with obama in particular it is obvious and huge the fact he is an africanamerican defines not everything but so much about the way he is viewed in this country today. My feeling, based on the books i have written, and reporting over the decades is race is still the huge scar in america. And obama, even as he ran, you know, trying to bring the country together in his rhetoric and he is biracial and there is talk about healing, obama is sort of opened the wound without trying again. He doesnt talk about it that much but there it is in a different way i think. So in this case the age of obama is both him and all of those forces around him. Mark was going to ask you the opposite question. You know i think the subsection of this town is our Politics Today is trivalizing, super superficial process that is larger than one individual. When we look at politics in the age of obama how much does one person coming in especially someone who came in with the goal of changing the tone in washington and the kind of politics you lay bear how much can one person or any group of people affect that change . As i found out, and this wasnt part of a grand plan but obama in the chronlogical order i was writing about, which was a profile in washington where everything was changing, he was the cunary coming through the coal mine. He had groundbreaking politic and i got to watch him go through it. I think to some degree he would say or has said his inability to change washington has been have single biggest disappointed of his presidency. I go back and forth on how hard he tried. I think the neverminds on the things we was promiseingpromising, especially relating to money in politics, may not have been sincere. I still think that for as little as he might have changed the politics in washington he is as transforming of a figure as we have seen in a long long time in this country. I think this is a relatively recent revelation i had but i think one of the biggest accomplishments of this presidency and people debate and will debate the merits of the Health Care Bill and what he did to get through the economic crisis the economy, leaving all of that aside, i think between getting elected and maintaining an admirable level of dignity 32 what i think has been an absolute circus in the last few years which doesnt seem to be going in any good directions has been a major accomplishment that i think over time might be something he is praised for or should be praised for. I think that leads well into ian, your writing and work as david said race is still the scar in america and you write about this permanence of racism almost as an immutable fact of society, culture and so many different aspects of our lives. We just experienced the 50th anniversary of selma and this moment of having that with a movie and Everything Else elevated into the hinge of American History and seeing john lewis there and seeing the president there, and you almost wonder when the people were marching across that bridge 50 years ago what would have surprised them more . Having an africanamerican president 50 years later or still arguing about the Voting Rights 50 years later. Can you talk about those factors and how it is dog whistle politics absolutely. I would say we have turned the Civil Rights Era into a morality tale in which of course all good people were for it and that is why the triumped and transformed the country and why we dont have to deal with it anymore. But that is not how the par participants in the movement saw themselves. They saw themselves as being courageous, fool hearty risking everything not just their bodies but their jobs, the mortgages on their home that could be foreclosed upon the futures of their children they risked everything for profound social change. And they were deeply optimistic in the way that angry people can be that if you just do this if you just fight thinks can get better. But they were almost pragmatic about what was happening and the violence was indicitive of the change they were trying to make. I think they would be surprised to see an africanamerican president and not surprised to see the resistance to the voting act. But surprisingly they might have been disappointed with that africanamerican president. They would have understood what he represents but might be disappointed obama didnt bring the fierce courage of change and didnt see himself in a period in when he was optimistically pushing profound social change. Very soon after being elected he pivoted and began to retreat. It says liberalism is about give aways. Now we have a black democrat who is also going to be a liberal . It would be like the perfect storm obama thought. So he said ill be a black democrat but i will distance myself from the minorities and i can be above the fray. Not realizing that trying to stay above the fray meant he would not be effective at changing the direction of the country which is toward increase racial polarization increased resentiment against the government and increase in hand outs by the government to the very rich. That is the process he saw but refused to intervene in. So we have this period of we are now six or seven years in the this presidency and it is only after the 2014 election when he faces no more elections that obama, who has some sense he could be a change agent, is really starting to surface. I wish we had had this obama back in january of 2009 rather than in december of 2014. [applause] ian let me stay with you and obama for a moment because you have a particular perspective, not only as a scholar, and thinker in this area but somebody who went to high school with him and then went to law school with him, and tell us about a gather you were not basketball buddies or best friends along the way not saying you have not great on the court. But tell me about a little bit about your reference of them then and talk to us more importantly about his election as the editor of the harvard law review and really the subtext of what was his First Campaign and what you saw then and what you can gather from that experience. Yeah a couple quick points. One, obama was a senior in high school and i was a very, very cool freshman. But not withstanding that apparent apparently i didnt matter. Let me tell you about growing up in hawaii. It has a lot to do with obama. I am biracial with a white father and salvidorian mother. We were more shaped as a mixed identify and hawaii as a place where people talk about race all of the time. It is part of the daily lexicon. Mainly in terms of group generalization and i dont say stereotypes because you dont allow exceptions whereas ppwhereas with a generation you say people are like this most of the time. One thing that was shocking when i came to the mainland and i would guess obama had same experiences but sharper and harder blows. One experience i had was how seg segregated society it was. The other kids on the mainland was one when was rude to acknowledge and discuss racial differences. Hawaii was more integrated i was used to talking about race and now any time i say this is really segregated people look at me and say that is racist. And i am like it is racist to talk about the racial composition of the classrooms neighbored or where the university is located . And i think that must have happened to him. He has been thinking about race, struggling to place himself racially, he comes to the mainland to la and then chicago, these are segregated places but one in which he is not able to talk about what he is seeing. Another quick story. I grew up biracial and eventually changed my name. It was ian heiney and people were not seeing me as latino. First paper i submitted under the last name lopez came back ungraded with a comment is english your first language. By becoming lopez i rendered myself not intelligent. I am pretty light skin i am latino i cannot imagine the shock to a 19yearold obama. He was africanamerican american in hawaii and there were very few and it wasnt a meaningful identify. I cannot imagine the shock of what he encountered in los angeles and chicago tin in terms of how he waw seen and demeaned. At the same time i think it is crucial he went through them at 1820 when he had a strong sense of himself and his intelligence and moral fortitude and he didnt go through them when he was three and four and five. In a way that might have in capacitated him and not let him have the ambition and drive to inspire to become president of the United States. I think that is part of this hawaii experience that protected him and allowed him to become secure in his identity before the buffeting i am sure he received on the mainland. Harvard law school. We started at Harvard Law School in the late 80s and it was a time royaled by racist behavior. There was a leading africanamerican law professor, derrick bell who was an outspoken critic of the administration because the law school had a small handful of africanamerican faculty on a total of 7080. It had no women of color on the faculty at all not teen tenure tenured or not. And derrick bell said i am going out on strike and refuse to teach here until you bring in a woman of color. This led the activism and mobile ism on part of the students. I was part of what they call the angry let. I guess i am still part of that. And there were a lot of us organizing around race angry about the way in which power expressed itself at the law school going on strike with derrick bell occupying the deans office. That is not who obama was. He completely avoided the racial controversy of the time. He was a member of the law review. They do elections. It is a threeyear program and the law review is going to be in the spring of peoples second year. At that time there was a White Conservative candidate, there was a black progressive candidate neither of those was obama. And so these two fought it out through multiple round. There was a schism among the board and many conservatives align aligned around one liberal blacks around another and only until fighting till exhausted they selected obama. He came in older than us he had organizing experience and was an imposing figure on campus. I dont mean he was a consensus candidate to belittle him. But he gets the position at Harvard Law School a position that garnered him a profile in the New York Times and gained it by staying out of the racial firm and not talking about race and seeming to be all thing do is all people and i would say that is a crucial forming moment that he learned the lesson in a divided country you succeed while staying a part of the division, wait until the fighting sides are exhausted and step in as this revolutionary figure except i think he understand what we were fighting about. It wasnt sim simple politics. In that context, either side is willing to give up and saying we will go with the consistent candidate. He tried to stay above the frame but i think he was doomed that is telling. Let me stay on that story. As he is describeing the story when you write about in your book obama was a little older. He was 20 years old. This was his first election. He had never run for Student Council or school government. He won the first election with that kind of background. Contrast that experience with another person oakland, who ran for every open office in elementary school, Junior High High School actually i think you stopped running in high school because he was told. In college. By the time he was 28 he had run for u. S. Congress and been elected attorney general of his state. What does that say about these two individuals and how they act as president of the United States . They both came from dysfunctional families without fathers. Alcoholic alcoholic stepfathersism. Obama had to figure out who me was because he was biracial. You have bill clinton from the earliest age he was singing about being president some day in second grade. In high school he went to washington with 99 other young men and bill clinton is the one who shakes john f. Kennedys hand because he was the first off the bus. In georgetown, he was freshman sophomore class president and by the time he was a junior returning for senior president the whole student body was so sick of them they defeated him. Versus obama who had no interest in politics that whole time. These two guys coming out of nowhere, in dysfunctional situations, and dealing with it in opposite ways. Bill clinton learned how to become the ultimate survivor. My whole thread of his life is lost in recovery. The loss of his father loss all of the time figure out how to recover from it. And his way of dealing with everything was to push forward. Keep going. Wake up every morning. Forgive yourself. Forgive the world. Keep going. He became better at that than anybody in the world. He had a need to be loved and not alone. He would invite friend over in high school to watch him do a cross word puzzle because he could not stand to be alone. And that need and that ability to survive and keep going made him the best politician i have watched in my career. It got him to the whitehouse and it got him in trouble in the whitehouse because he figured whatever happened he would survive it. So that loss and recovery played out in the whitehouse and will until the day he dies. He never tried to figure out and resolve the contradictions of his own life. He just kept going. With ohm obama from the time he got out of hawaii i agree with half of what ian said but i think there is another opportunity. There were not many africanamericans in hawaii and it wasnt until he got to occidental he was dealing with africanamericans and in chicago much more deeply. But from the time he was 17 until he got to harvard, that entire period he spent trying to fig re himself out. Receding from the public in a totally opposite way of bill clinton and dealing introspectively with who am i. I think he found out after being a Community Organizer after this long search and developed what i would call a confidant, unnarcissistic, integrated personality. He figured if i can figure myself out why cant the rest of the world . This confidence got them to the whitehouse. It got him in huge trouble. If i can do it if all of the contradictions can be resolved by me why not congress and the rest of the country. You have two people working in similar backgrounds in many ways except for race although maya angelo did call clinton the first black president. But different ways of getting to the first place. Our strengths are our week patience weaknesss and that played out in the whitehouse. You were talking about bill clinton not being able to be alone. It seems obama doesnt have the same problem. He is perfectly happy doing a cross word puzzle by himself and rather that is neediness or politics or whatever you call it but i think it strikes one of the tensions you talk about in your book and last night as some of you know and no doubt people know was the grid iron dinner in washington where all of these people who fight tooth and nail get together in white ties and tuxes and hang out together. You had obama and scott walker who just a few weeks ago wasnt sure if obama was from america. And terry mccullic and others yapping it up together. Talk about the washington tension between the two things that drive people crazy about washington which is one these kinds of occurrences where everybody is hanging out buddybuddy. And others saying why isnt obama inviting boehner to play golf. There seems to be a tension between the two last night at the grid iron obama made a point during the speech saying everyone says that me and the Democratic Party need to reach out to aging white voters and that is why i am here. For the president this president has a very good team of comedy writers. I will say that. He actually does seem to inact his anger through comedy quite effectively. All president s have good comedy writers at this point i would assume. And plenty of material. Plenty of material. To actually put the presidencyt president ancy inside the culture of washington these days is hard to do. The tip oneillreagan friendship is one of the great chest chestnuts of washington. Tha they were never that close. The presidency does allow you to state above that and experience this as the president rather than as a person conducting politics. And Chuck Schumme