Which cannot in a very alarmist report saying the United States had fallen behind and kennedy sort of pounced on that. Yet it helped further the narrative that he was arguing and to have a sort of panel that president eisenhower had chosen and is sort of gave him an argument to advance but i dont dispute that there was a hard political aspect, and i dont know on domestic policy i do think that he was committed as a strong supporter of labor although not an on critical one. He was also very careful on civil rights as i mentioned and was very politically attuned. I dont really feel like im quite i read a lot about the presidency but the final view on what were the main Political Goals of john f. Kennedy that will be the next book but its a great question. A really is an important one. Thank you so much for the great presentation. I have more of a general question from your presentation it seems like jfk became a president through some kind of a predetermined pass rather than any success in the senate. Would you agree with that opinion . In the success and not much for the election but it was part of the ad that he was going through the final rule. I do think the senate changed him and transformed him and i do think he developed expertise in areas he had not before and he did a kind of a deep dive on some complicated issues so it was like an advanced graduate school from kennedy and i think that he did use his senate years to learn more and he kind of form a political identity in which he presented himself as both a modern male politician, the young guest candidate but also someone who was very familiar with the American History and understood its traditions and was very steep in American History. So i think that he put together a very powerful political presence that was a force, but i think it does raise profound what are the kind of ironies about the political system seems to be that the times that you are most elected may not be the times that you are most ready to be president. Whether it was jfk or president obama or another four or six years in the senate might have done them good but i think they both realize, you know, clearly that additional time would not make them more politically viable, so they had to sort of decide this is my time. Kennedy often said i looker now that everyone else that this fighting and i am just as qualified as they are and so that was sort of his assessment. So, thank you. Thats fascinating can you order them on amazon . Anno salon. Com yes. My publisher is Paul Macmillian and you can purchase it from them. Thank you. [applause] thank you. Youre watching book tv come on fiction authors and books on cspan2. Up next on book tv after words with guest host kim dixon. Policy expert michael s. Carnes the hidden class and Economic Policy making. The duke professor explores whether the socioeconomic background of legislators attacked the policy choices while in office. The program is about one hour. Thanks for joining us. Whitecollar government. One thing i found out on my kindle is that before you became an assistant professor, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and how you see your transition from working class or do you see yourself coming from working class to the white collar profession now . Definitely a textbook of being the professor in college is great and it is a lot of fun but i dont do a lot of work with my hands but there was a time in my life when i worked at a pepsi bottle plant in tulsa oklahoma and the cashier at the Worlds Largest walmart. I worked at a catfish restaurant and a dairy queen. So that was sort of a part of my life. I paid my way through college and paid my way through a little bit of high school, too. These experiences were sort of a part of the inspiration for the research that i do right now. So, you know, my last job before going to graduate school was at a pepsi bottling plant in tulsa and i sort of went from that to a ph. D. Program and Political Science at princeton and was just a night and day difference and that kind of contrast between where i came from and the support of new world that i wound up in brought a lot of the issues i talk about in this book in a sharp focus for me the difference how people have worked in manual labor jobs and industry jobs see the world and that is the question i asked in the white collar government is what about politicians . Do politicians from a different class says think differently about Economic Issues and see the problems facing this country differently . Some politicians have never had those experiences who started out their first job out of the gate was full well the law. Host so you looked at eight period for the microdata from 2008, so it is its been a slight increase over time for millionaires and the senate is in the presidency but its mostly stable; is that about right . Guest it is a rare constant in the political life. If you look at congress and 1901 less than 2 of the members came from the background and got into politics and eventually wound up in congress. Fastforward to the present day and the average number spent less than 2 of their career doing manual labor jobs and Service Industry jobs and so through lots of different aspects of the political process and cable news and the rising elections and politics and the decline of the unions and while all of this is happening, there is, you know, one of the constance during that, during the last 100 years or so is the working class people are not getting elected to the Political Office. Host one founding father that you mentioned a couple times in the book and his view that the merchant is probably going to be able to represent the worker, probably has his best interest at heart. It sounds like from your data through the studies that youve looked at you dont think that is the case. Also was there another founding father that you didnt mention . Guest i am glad you brought up the founding fathers. The question i talked about in this book is does it matter that working class people arent getting into our Political Institutions . Almost no one in the policymaking institutions has an experience in the working class and that is a debate we have been hounding since the founding since even earlier. So alexander hamilton, James Madison the way and on the federalist papers and their argument is one that stuck around ever since, and it basically boils down to this. It doesnt matter there are no workingclass people getting into politics because we all want the same thing. We all want prosperity and growth and, you know, today was a sort of modern version of that whats good for General Motors is good for the country vice versa and what is the harm of letting the Business Owners and the professionals call the shots because we all want the same thing at the end of the day. And so this is one sort of old school political fault in this country. There is another school of political thought and antifederal list founding sort of real against the perspective and we dont really all want the same thing. And if, you know, the government we showed up has only political Decision Makers that come from of whitecollar professions, that is going to seriously tilt the policies that they created and make it harder for the police is that the working people to make a difference in blowholes of power and so this is sort of a longstanding debate. The reason i wanted to write this book and got interested in the question is these debates have been going on since the founding and people have got anecdotes and speculations to these debates but what is interesting to me is there wasnt really any hard evidence on this point. One side with point to an example of whitecollar professionals who care about working people and say that proves it is doesnt matter and the other side would point to the working class candidate to say we need more like that and what i wanted to know in this book is if we still looking at individual cases and look across the large samples and look at the political will institutions as a whole, does it really matter all that much that whitecollar professionals are calling the shots and working class people were almost totally absent for the Political Institutions . So i really wanted to take this old fugate and try to bring the bring the best data to question and so that is what i tried to do in this book. Host the various Historical Data pierce 783 lawmakers from 99 to 2008 and i think that you found 13 of those, 783 or a quarter or more of the time of the bluecollar jobs and you talk a little bit more about what is the sort of findings and then i will last you to talk about laura and occupation verses and come and the socioeconomic status. One of the challenges is that there was a sort of good database that said what percentage of the average number is the career before they got into office and white collar versus bluecollar and when i started out i couldnt really find any sort of, you know, database or spread sheet that had disinformation and so the first task for me in doing this research is just back to the to create that to go through and say with the help of the research assistance, i went through all 783 of the unique men and women who served in the 106 per 110th congress is 1999 through 2008. What do you do for a living before you got into the Political Office and so for each of them and pulled together from a halfdozen different sort of almanacs and every piece of information that we can find about the job they did before they got in the office and now with this sort of an interesting project just in and of itself to find out all of these different fact. So orrin hatch i knew that he was a lawyer before he got elected to congress but in the course of doing this research i found out that he actually sent a big percentage of the time before he was a lawyer doing manual labor jobs in the Service Industry jobs he was a janitor, he was a receptionist and a doing sort of what i call workingclass jobs to pay his way through law school. The 783 and in researching the book i also can across lots of other sort of data sets that have been compiled by other people scholars, Interest Groups and i try to look at all of them and every piece of information. We look at the detailed data on the modern members of congress its called the american representation studied in 1958 and one of the two political scientists surveyed a representative sample of the u. S. House members and they got really detailed information about what they did for a living and what they thought about the issues and how they voted and what committees they were on. And once i found and got access to that data set i brought that in, too and i got the same answer every time so this was the sort of striking thing to me was from the free historical kind [cheering] period i got the same answer and that is politicians from the working class really do bring a different perspective to the Political Office and politicians who just did white collar jobs and especially politicians who only did white collar jobs in the private sector. That seems to be the dividing line in the Political Institutions and politicians who did workingclass jobs tend to be pro worker and they tend to be politicians who did sort of white collar jobs and more probusiness whether we are looking at the 1950s or the present day. Host how do you define the pro worker and probusiness . Guest i try to use a combination of lets take the roll call voting for instance. The aflcio every year they rank members of congress and give them a score of zero to 100 meaning you never go the way we wanted you to long the tbills that we determined were important to our interest and 100 means you always voted the way that we wanted you to. Whether you are looking at those scores or the chamber of commerce scores, legislators from the working class tend to be more liberal and further from of the chamber of commerce once. Legislators who spent more of their careers and whitecollar jobs especially in business are in the private sector and they are closer to what the chamber wants. Host i mentioned earlier the sanchez example that illustrates the question of why would get occupation and why not look at education and why not look at the income levels . So can you talk about that example and also just why look at occupations . Guest in the book by looking at i believe the first sisters they became the first sisters to ever simultaneously serve in congress and what makes them a sort of interesting case study is here you have a situation where the gender of the two politicians is the same, the race and ethnicity is the same and they are approximately the same age and have the same families and grew up in the same places. They represent similar though not identical districts they both represent Congressional District in california but more democrat or heavily democratic. So you have these two politicians who look about as a mother has the two members of congress could be. But the one difference between the two of them is that Linda Sanchez worked as basically as a laborer and then the Union Organizer and a lawyer and Loretta Sanchez worked in the Financial Sector and the two of them although they are pretty similar on a lot of those they do occasionally break differently so representative Linda Sanchez tends to vote with the afl fell co aflcio so they are sort of justice one case and member of congress but the difference you see between the two of them are sort of a representative of the larger differences that i see when i look across hundreds of members of congress when i look at the data from lots of different time periods and politicians, these other things better. Race, gender, constituency, all of these things are extremely important when a politician tries to decide how to vote on the bill or so of these things matter but there is an important difference over and above those things but when a politician who has real experience in working class jobs and a politician who doesnt. Among your other question what is class . This is something that political scientists and sociologists have been debating for decades and will probably go on for a long time but in the book i sort of say i come down on the side of saying the right way to think about a person sort of place in our society were placed in our economy is that the question that people always ask at cocktail parties which is what do you for a living . You know, when you meet somebody for the first time you dont see what was your income last year or you know, what is the highest degree or socioeconomic status you say what do you do and thats essentially the question i asked in my research about politicians is what did you do for a living before you got into congress . I think its interesting to know how much money they made in the process and how much formal education they had. But when you look at the data those dont seem to be defied politicians the way that the previous occupations did so what really seems to matter is its not so much about the exact dollar amount in a politicians bank account. What really seems to distinguish the politicians ideologically or in terms of how they vote or how they think about the issues it is and how much money they need but how they needed. Somebody who made it big as a law professor and then wrote a successful book. Ideologically they are going to look differently than somebody that made the same amount of money just doing investment banking. Host you talked about orrin hatch and i think in the corner of more of those times and doing something working class. Are there any other among those republicans i think there were four republicans and nine democrats. Did you study them how they compared to other republicans . We talk a little bit about orrin hatch and grassley is on that list who has also been a little unconventional over the years. Did you without quantitatively . Guest if you look at the larger group of politicians you do see the kind of similar patterns. But i think the message that you can take away from somebody like orrin hatch, hes a senior senator from one of the most conservative states in the country and very often he votes the way that you would then expect a republican from a conservative state. He votes with his party and he has lots of conservative votes. But every now and again, senator hatch will reach across the aisle in ways that you wouldnt expect if all that you knew about him is that he was a republican from a conservative state. So earlier you and i were talking about how he would reach across the aisle when ted kennedy had an important bill to give Health Insurance to lowincome people and a lot of the political observers, you know, struggled to make sense of the fact that orrin hatch who ordinarily votes republican and who is a republican from a very conservative state a lot of struggle to make sense of why he was so sympathetic to working people when it came to issues like Health Insurance. But i think that you can really understand his position on that issue if you know that he spent a lot his life doing labour manual jobs where his access to Health Insurance was by no means guaranteed. He understands what its like to not have Health Insurance and i think that helps to explain why a republican senator from a conservative state is going to reach across the aisle sometimes. That isnt by any means no one will get orrin hatch and say well, you know, hes really a progressive senator and thats important to keep in mind, too that there is still a difference between orrin hatch and if you imagine where he just had it made his whole life he never had these experiences were worked as a janitor my Research Says he probably wouldnt see him reaching across the aisle even the times he did he but probably be fervor to the right. Host you talk about manual labor. How do you to find a working class . Waitresses would qualify for t