Getting the skills that they need. It makes no sense. Ladies and gentlemen, were going to have to cut it there with the questions im sorry because, again, michelle has to go on piers morgan i think you guys are going to be a little nice we are the questions than pix ers is. Before we close it out, i just want to make a couple of notes. Firstly, id really like to thank a old and dear friend for making this incredible event possible, and thats leslie cohen who anthony briefly mentioned. Also anybody that has any stake in education and if they want to get involved, its completely up to them, studentsfirst. Org is doing, according to many critics and others, is doing all types of interesting work. Also most importantly, the book i see theres a lady right h a question before, she has two or three books. The book has received incredible reviews. If you have any stake in education or if education means anything to you personally, your kids, your family, future of the country, according to many individuals its a must read. And i strongly recommend. So in that note please join me in thanking Michelle Rhee [applause] Michelle Rhee is the founder and ceo of students first. To find out more visit students first. Org. Are you interested in being a part of booktvs Online Book Club . Every month well feature a different book and author, and your invited to join. Interested . Send an email to booktv cspan. Org. Post a comment on facebook. Com booktv. Or send us a tweet booktv. Youre watching booktv. And now tom allen, former sixterm democratic congressman from maine, as he recount cans his own inability to understand his republican colleagues and vice versa during his tenure and contends that congress will remain locked on legislation until they start to understand each other. This is just over an hour. [applause] tony, thank you very much for those kind words. And thank you all for being here tonight. This is a wonderful crowd, and im very pleased to see so many of you here. I have to say its a special pleasure for me to be at the Jimmy Carter Library because my late father was one of those very early in the carter president ial campaign who went to hear this governor, former governor from georgia, was very impressed, wrote some sort of check and became a big fan of jimmy carters throughout his career. And i wish my father could see me now, because i know he would be excited. But it is, so i thank you for that. I also want to say that this is an opportunity to discuss, you know, the things weve been through as a country over the last few years and to try to figure out whats gone wrong and how we can make it right. And thats a conversation that really the more people that are involved in it, the better off we really are. First thing i will say about dangerous convictions is to give you a sense of why i wrote it. Someone has said that you write to scratch an itch or to deal with something thats bothering you, and that is certainly the case with this book. And i would say first of all there is this may come as no surprise to you a real frustration with how the media, the Mainstream Media and the partisan media, covers what politicians do in congress. A lot of frustration that you simply cant say completely what you want to say either about what the problems are or what youre trying to do. And the second thing is that there is, it was in my case, considerable confusion about my republican colleagues. And so what i confusion about what they were really thinking. So i spent the better part of four years thinking and writing about revising this book. I do, as tony said, work for the association of the american publishers, and i have to say being an advocate for the Publishing Industry for the publishers and the authors and all the people who are involved in it, being an author has given me another, an inside look at that industry. And i have to say how grateful i am to Oxford University press to its Incredible Team of people who helped make this book better than when i delivered it to them. So let me, im going to read a few selections from the book and then walk you through the chapters, a few of them not in too much detail, and then i want to conclude by some comments on the, on the president ial election. Im going to begin, first of all, if i get this right, by explaining the title. Tony, if this only worked. [laughter] that way. I can do without it. Although if theres some way to make it work for later on, that would be good. The title, dangerous conductions, comes from a statement by friedrich knee chi who wrote convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Now, we all want people elected to be people of conviction, right . Dont we . The trouble is that sometimes people hold convictions that are not supported by the weight of evidence or expertise. And when that happens, lets just say life gets very, very complicated. Im just going to jump ahead slightly. Do these guys believe what they are saying . Sitting in the chamber of the u. S. House of representatives listening to a heated debate, we asked that question of our republican colleagues. We usually thought the answer was no, but if so, they were phenomenally good actors. Their arguments made no sense to us. Such wellworn phrases such as tax cuts pay for themselves, Climate Change is improving and governmentrun health care doesnt work. They were repeated over and over again. Republican arguments along these lines seemed incomprehensible to democrats just as ours seemed misguiding to them. The evidence that mattered to us made no difference to them. The free market principles they took as given conflicted with the information that we took every day from our constituents and the economists that we consulted. News media preoccupation with lack of civility missed the point. I traveled with republican members of congress to iraq and afghanistan and enjoyed their company. We worked out together in the house gym. Still, more time socializing with each other would not have closed the chasm between our competing views of the world and the role of government. Its those world views and the lack of come prehence comprehension on both sides that cripple the capacity of congress to make bipartisan, strategic Public Policy decisions. This i came to see is our greatest institutional weaknesses, and it defies simplistic cures. Congress today is deeply divided because to each side the opinions of the other make no sense. And, therefore, cannot be honestly held. Interest Group Politics is still with us fueled by unprecedented amounts of money, but it is overlaid and often dominated by what i can only call world view politics, a clash of values and convictions much deeper than the competition of Interest Groups in washington. We need a new perspective to visualize congressional polarization. The media and political commentators typically bemoan the wide gap in views between right and left. But republicans and democrats speak past each other not because they are too far apart on the left right spectrum, but because they operate on different planes, higher and lower from the ground defined by evidence and expertise. And that, i would say, is something that has changed significantly in the last 20 years. When i came to congress in 1996, the phrase i kept hearing from the other side was fam lu values. Family values. And you can kind of, we all had a sense, probably a varied sense, of what that means. You dont hear that phrase anymore. What you hear in its place is republican principles. And it turns out that there is really one fundamentally important republican principle, and that is smaller government, lower taxes. I think its one, not two. Its really one. And that turns out to be much more difficult to deal with than the vaguer notion of family values. What ive tried to do in this book is spinning topics is pick topics to consider that are not those that are like abortion, gay marriage, even immigration. Those things that are so deeply buried in our sort of fundamental attitudes toward the world that, you know, you would expect them to be very, very difficult. So what i did was to pick, i tried to pick four topics, substantive topics where in the past we used to be able to compromise differences across the aisle. Not always easy, dont get me wrong. But, and that was of the federal budget, iraq, health care and Climate Change. So what i would like to do now is to run through the first of those, of those sectors. I served on the Budget Committee for four years, the last four years i was in congress. And paul ryan was on the committee then. We invited economists to come in, and there was this sameness to our conversations all the time. The republicans would repeat over and over again tax cuts pay for themselves. Or if they stepped back from that a little bit, they would say tax cuts pay for themselves, or at least you dont have to really think of too hard about the reduction in revenues. And yet at the same time we all realize about the first bush tax cut which was designed to be a 1. 6 trillion tax cut. The reason it was described as a 1. 6 trillion tax cut was because it reduced revenues by 1. 6 trillion or was expected to. And so wed be listening to people talking about tax cuts pay for themselves, and youd pick up the paper, or youd look at materials from the congressional budget office, and they would say, well, this tax cut is going to reduce federal revenues by 1. 6 trillion over ten years or 1. 35 trillion over ten years. These views made no sense. These two kinds of statements put side by side. They make no sense. Its crazy making for those of us who still believe the cbo. But for the republicans, most of them, they didnt believe the cbo numbers were right. Because they were mostly supply siders or that form of economic theory where the assumption is that if you reduce tax cuts, it will stimulate the economy so much that it will actually come close to, if not actually increase federal revenues. But when we heard that, it made no sense. Now, heres where it really gets, you know, i think in some withdraws even worse. In some ways even worse. Im going to find i have to say, Mitch Mcconnell does provide me with a lot of material. [laughter] in 2010 the two big tax cuts were 01 and 03. In 2010 mitch at a time when, you know, it was pretty clear that that first decade would yield revenue reductions on a scale of somewhere between two and three trillion dollars over the first ten years. Mitch mcconnell said to the press, july 2010, he confirmed the next day that what john, senator jon kyl had said a few days earlier was accurate. Mcconnell said theres no evidence whatsoever that the bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So i think what senator kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every republican on that subject. And i would say, as i say here, this is no kind word for, that you can say in response to that. Theyre making this up. They have to be making this up. But do they believe it . I think they do. I mean, the truth is i think they do. I think one of the things in the last two chapters that i spent some time with is a lot of the recent research about how we think or dont think about religion this politics and in politics and how so many of the views that we believe, all of us, are carefully reasoned and thought out are grounded in some deeper attitudes, some deeper values, some deeper life experiences, what i call world views that really shape our more specific beliefs both in religion and in politics. The essential chart for understanding the consequences of our budget conundrum. What it shows is as of may of 2011, the center for budget policy and policies and priorities, based on cbo numbers, this shows part of the annual deficits that are due to the war in iraq and afghanistan, the bush era tax cuts, recovery measures, that means primarily the bush stimulus and Obama Stimulus Program and the economic downturn, you can still make it out and you can see from where we are today in 2013 at the time this was put together the single biggest factor in the annual deficits that we will experience over the next several years, not from the economic slowdown but because of the revenues that were taken away by the bush tax cuts. As we all know now because of the legislation, some portion of that tax revenue is shown on this chart as being lost will be recovered because proper income tax payers, theyre going to go back to the clinton era tax relief. The point i am trying to make with this one chart, this is the real world and the idea tax cuts favored themselves is not the real world and when one side believes one thing and one side believes the other theres not much room for a consequence. I will come back to why and this should be how you think about this one. Why is it that the two sides believed such Different Things . Why does one depend on evidence and the other depend more on broad principles about the size of government and individual liberty and so forth and so on . Let me if i can do this, let me go back and let me move on to the experience with iraq. You all understand most people would agree the signature issue for the bush administration, the one that had the most consequence and the ones that will shape the bush administrations place in history, tax cuts and invasion of iraq. You can imagine how difficult these decisions were and with respect to iraq before going in and giving hundreds of billions of dollars you can imagine it took a lot of meetings to decide whether or not to make that decision and if so how do we do it and because that is the way it is. You can imagine those meetings of the National Security council and bushs security circle you can imagine those meetings but there was not a single meeting held by the National Security council or the george bushs top people about whether or not to invade iraq. Not one. Not one. What that tells you is the evidence, the detail, the circumstances in iraq, what would happen, what the consequences would be of putting in 150,000 american troops, should have been more, what was not taken into account. Second thing that is interesting is Donald Rumsfeld believed you go in, take over baghdad and pull out. Because, and this came out in the report written four years later, came out because Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech in february before the invasion, said we have to go in and pull our troops out and leave the iraqis to their own devices because otherwise we will create dependency among the iraqis. Think about this phrase, culture of dependency. We know it came up in the debate in the Clinton Administration with welfare reform, but to understand where republicans are coming to at least republicans in congress these days it is very important to understand how real, how important it is their view is that government in fringes on personal liberty almost no matter what it does and fosters dependency among the population. But those convictions, those views were an obstacle even to having a conversation between secretary of state and secretary of defense under george bush, a real conversation, whether or not the invasion in iraq should take place or the country should do more by way of sanctions and other forms of pressure. The interesting thing to me about what has happened in iraq, something i got completely wrong. When the president in december of 2006 basically asked lost control of congress, decided to do a surge in iraq, people like me fought this is stupid, iraq is going really badly, really, really bad knee, this is just an effort to delay the day of reckoning, we have to have a different strategy. What i didnt know and what a lot of people didnt know is the surge was not just in increase in the number of troops, it wasnt a different strategy. What is fascinating about this, see the book by tom ridge called a gamble if you want to learn more about it. Three people, retired general jack keene, in baghdad and the number 2 person in military hierarchy, and David Petraeus decided the strategy of protecting american troops in these large not bunkers but large compounds was not working at all and they had to be out among the people, had to defend the civilian population and so the surge involved that transformation and the truth is that it if it wasnt the whole reason we regained ground later in 2007, was an important part of the reason. It was an evidence based strategy. It was an evidence based strategy. I think and i described in here it was so different from the original strategy. General David Petraeus cooked up a real counterinsurgency strategy like what general David Petraeus had done before and that is one of the reasons why it got turned around. Let me step forward quickly to health care. The interesting thing about this issue, several interesting things, lets talk about obamacare for a minute. Credit incredibly controversial, passed without one single democratic vote in the house and senate. What were its origins . Lots of people in the course of hearing about this know whether mitt romney did Something Like that in massachusetts. You can go back farther, you can go back to 1989, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation came up with something called the heritage plan. What did the heritage plan include . Included regulated exchanges in which private Insurance Company would compete for beneficiary and it included an individual mandate. It was actually for more than a decade primarily a republican idea about how you could do close to universal health care. But the mid part of august of 2005, democrats were getting more interested, republicans were falling away and i think that that is the republican universal Health Care Plan but by the time it came up obama was for and no republicans were for it and even Olympia Snowe in our state him a real effort to work on a compromise position eventually bailed out in part because pressure to conform was so great. As you remember repeal and replace, repeal and replace was the mantra after it passed on the republican side. Why didnt we ever see a plan