Let me just say whether dan is discussing the goingson at the Washington Post or the ups and downs of the president ial race he has always stood out among journalists for his smart insight, good keen ability to synthesize, clear writing and ever calm and composed manner. A newspaper that has prided itself first and foremost for its political coverage, there is a reason that dan urged in recent years as they chief correspondent and its not because everyone else around him died or retired. [laughter] i worked at i worked at the post starting their about the time that dan did in 1978 and i have seen him in action many times. His thoroughness, fairness, intelligence and steadiness have long made him an unassuming star he has been a white house correspondent, political editor, National Editor and became a disciple of sorts to two of the posts great local Writers David roeder and james johnson. Dan has carried on their tradition of unbiased informed and mustread coverage. His new book, the collision 2012 obama vs. Romney and the future of elections in america is a follow on to the book dan and Haynes Johnson wrote about the 2008 campaign. And as dan says of the new book, he hadnt expected obamas second run for the presidency to turn out quite as compelling as the first groundbreaking one did but it did. The campaign did turn out to be just as compelling although in different ways. Howell raines reviewing the book in the post the other day called it quote oldfashioned in a good sense, referring to the fact that its filled with attributed quotes and closed focus reportage and thankfully lacks windy and alices. But dam also shows a modernday appreciation for the new technologies and social media the obama camp aim puts to such effective use. If you really want to understand why the election turned out as it did for americas political future read this book. We will be life tweeting tonights event speaking of modern technology and social media, so you can follow along with the conversation at hashtag balz dca. Dan will speak for a bit and we will leave time for questions. If you have a question you will notice the bright lights. We we are on cspan and we are also videoing the event for her own web site so please try to make it to this microphone here so that everybody can pick up your question. Afterwards of course dan will be happy to stay and sign copies of his book. Given the size of the audience, if you could not all rush up here at once. Take some time to fold up your chairs and place them against something solid. We would appreciate it very much. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming dan balz. [applause] is the now the windy analysis begins. Brad think you. It is a delight to be introduced by a former colleague one of whom i have so much respect and his wonderful wife when they took over politics and prose. Sorry. Is the mic there . Hello . There we go. All right i am paying tribute to read and a lissa for the great work that they have carried on here at politics and prose and as brad said we have a new owner at the Washington Post and at the risk of putting my own job in jeopardy i want to say please patronize the store. [laughter] buy your books here. [applause] whatever else you do is your business but this is one of the great bookstores in america and we want to keep it going. Haynes johnson and i, haynes said lee passed away before this book was finished but we were here four years ago i think almost on this very night and haynes said something that night that i want to repeat and that is there is nothing more gratifying for an author than to come before people who read and like books and obviously who are interested in and care about american politics. For those of us who love american politics and right hooks about it this this is itsy an audience as we ever get to see. I think all of you for coming out. Its a wonderful crowd and despite what brad said feel free to rush forward with your comments. As brad said this is a sequel to the one that haynes and i wrote in 2008 and as i started this book i did have doubts. As frankly did my publisher. About whether this campaign would produce a story that was going to be as compelling as the 2008 election. Without election as we all remember was a historic election and not only because it ended up collecting the first africanamerican present in the history of this country but also the epic struggle he went through to win the democratic nomination and the economic crisis that we went through and also in a sense because of how people felt at the end of the election. Remember attending a focus group may be a gear and a half or two years after the election. It was run by peter hart who was doing it for the Edinburgh Center at the university of pennsylvania and he asked people , put yourself back in Election Night 2008 until me what you felt and what you thought. This was a focus group of republicans democrats and people who supported obama, people who supported john mccain and any of the number of people who supported john mccain said i actually felt good after that election. Peter said why . They said i just felt good for the country. The country of done something important and significant and even though i wanted john mccain to when i felt that something important has happened we knew that this campaign in 2012 was not going to be here. This was not an uplifting campaign by any stretch of imagination. It was a totally different one and you know it was in many ways a much more sprawling story than we have dealt with in 2008. It had a much victor cast of characters and an unusual cast of characters which we will no doubt talk about tonight. It had a lot of plot twists in some bizarre moments. When the 2008 campaign ended we interviewed the president elect obama and said at the opening before we get to other questions cant cut before you became a politician you are a writer and obviously wrote the wonderful book. How would you write the story of your own election and he said, well i think it was a novel and i was not the most interesting character in it. [laughter] so i was thinking i was not able to interview the president after this election for this book but i had been thinking how would the answer that question about this election . There were times that it was a comic opera. There were times that it was as serious as we have seen and moments of tension and anger. I colleague David Maraniss said to me at one point during the campaign during the early stage of the republican race he said with all due respect to you good political writers we need Hunter Thompson right now to be able to explain whats really going on. So this was what i was dealing with as we started out this twoyear cycle from the end of the 2002 at midterms until the november election. And yet at the end of it i thought it produced a story that not only was as compelling as any other but in some ways more in portland and i say that because i think this campaign was much more of a window into where america has been, with divided america and also where it may be going and be going in this struggle we are in. And also it is more instructive at this moment in american politics than the campaign was four years ago. In some ways that campaign may have done a we thought something might happen as a result of that and it did not and i think there were no illusions about this campaign all the way through it. And as a result as i sat down to write this story it was both more challenging and the end almost more satisfying to try to be able to unpack what had happened and repackage and tell it. I called this book collision 2012 and to be honest i called it collision 2012 because i couldnt think of Something Else in the prospectus but when i got into the campaign i thought there were three reasons why that title was the apt title. The first reason was this election in 2012 was a collision between the america that elected barack obama in 2008 and the america that swept republicans into power in the house of representatives in 2010. Now they are are some simple answers to that. It was a somewhat different electorate and yet these were two americas that were coming together on the political battlefield in 2012 to try to settle the argument that was there. This was also a collision of philosophies. Economic philosophies, the role of government. These are two Political Parties who have significantly different views of what ought to be done and this was a campaign that offered at least the opportunity for a pretty grandes debate about that. And the third reason was that this was a collision of very different personalities rated if you think of where these two candidates came from and how they got to where they are, its hard to think of a greater contrast in past president ial campaigns. President obama the son of a white woman and an african father and absentee father who abandoned him and the family when he was a kid, to raise sometimes by his single mother and often by his grandparents as his mother was working on her doctorate. Grew up in a traditional family and a family of privilege and affluence and his father was a successful business person, later governor of michigan and later a president ial at least for 10 minutes or so. And their perceptions of the world were shaped by a totally different experiences. Romneys view of the economy and government shaped almost entirely by his role as a business person and obamas shaped by a world in which he grew up, the identity in which he sought and became and the role of a community organizer. If you think of those two different worlds, the two different americas and the two different philosophies, the collision 2012 turned out to be a very apt title. Now come for in a book like this there are two ways and in the retelling of any campaign there are two ways to try to do it very and one is from the inside out. One of the great challenges of doing a Campaign Book frankly is that you know in my role as a daily journalist and all my terrific colleagues who cover we cover these campaigns in such minute detail that by the time you get to the end of it you feel you know everything there is to know and yet if you write a book about it part of what your publisher wants imparted what you want to do is to be able to tell more. Much of that comes from inside come for what was really happening inside the two campaigns. What were the strategies and the arguments that were going on . And so a lot of reporting goes into that. This book is a product of several hundred interviews conducted over a twoyear. Map. Some of them done as part of my daily reporting and some done strictly for the book on the condition that the contents of the interview not be revealed until the book was out. This is a tricky thing if you are writing daily journalism because the people you are interviewing know you are doing that and so i have always tried to say lets talk about events of the past not of the moment. I have always felt it important to try to get people to talk honestly about things at the moment is as its easy for Campaign Operatives afterwards to revise and extend into shape a story in a different way. And i was pleased in this book that there actually is quite a lot of material in part to cause i was able to get a number for people who ran for president to sit down either in the course of the campaign to talk about what they were seeing and feeling or to sit down afterwards. I did a long interview with governor romney in late january. It was a week after being the inoculation and i spent 90 minutes with him in his home just outside of boston. It was a fascinating interview. It was interesting in a number of ways. One is there was nobody else there. Normally i was used to seeing surrounded by secret service and family and staff and advance people in all of that. I knocked on his door and he greeted me at the door and there was nobody else there. I have the only recorders that were running. I used to recorders. When you lose an interview you feel like you have lost half of your vital organs. Ive i put them down between us and asked questions. He was not defensive. He was gracious. Its not easy frankly for somebody who has just poured what he put into that campaign as people running for president do to sit down and have a reporter ask a lot of questions. Why did you do this are why did you do that . But he was good about it and there were some interesting things that came out of it or ticket really some of the doubts that he had about whether he should run at the beginning of the campaign, whether he was the right person to run and take on president obama, why he ultimately changed his mind on that and felt that he was the right person in the strongest republican and why he was so confident on election day. I said you thought you were going to win and he said i did. I was quite confident. He said not 90 confident that he said i had written a victory speech and i had have not written a concession speech. We later learned learned that paul ryan on that election day was talking to people about resigning immediately of chair of the House Budget Committee and become Vice President. He also talked about some of the difficult moments. He talked about self deportation , perhaps one of the most damaging utterances we have seen it did a debate beyond and more consequential because this was a person who is about to become the nominee and not a person who was on the stage. He has a totally different view of this and its interesting to hear him explain his view as if this was not a harsh expression but a more benign way of talking about people going back and leaving the country. He said in my view deportation is a harsh policy and he said this president has deported a lot of people and he said my view is self deportation with the idea that if there are Jobs Available people will go back. But he still was wrestling with why that had come so controversial. We talked at the end about the 47 comment. This is one in which he was still digesting and he got up and got his ipad out and try to read me some of the things that he thought he had said. He still said he didnt say what he actually said. I didnt really say that but he said that became the perception. In fact it was both a reality in the perception but nonetheless he said i knew it was damaging. It was a very bad moment for him and in the end i said to him often are do you think we are in an environment, we were in an environment in which someone took your life experience, that your wealth, the kind of life you have led that in an environment in which most of the country particularly the middle class thinks the rich are doing great and they are being left behind that it will always be impossible for someone like you to get elected . He said any that was a problem. I knew that my profile is a problem and i thought i could overcome it and obviously he couldnt. I wont go into all the interesting stuff that came out of the post election and during election interviews. The Chris Christie stuff frankly is fascinating. He is a character do we will continue to see on the public stage. I went up to see him in trenton and just to tell me about september of last year. Tell me about you know the decision and the process he went through and deciding not to run. We were scheduled to talk for about 45 minutes in an hour and a half later he was still telling me the story. Its a fascinating story and hes a fascinating story teller. I just give you one anecdote. He was invited to a breakfast in new york in the summer of 2007. The campaign was well underway at that point and there were a group of money people in new york who were urging him to run. One of them invited him to breakfast and he said i thought this would he a relatively small gathering. I walked in the room and there were 60 people there and i thought it would be informal. There were chairs like this line that. There was a speaker phone on the table in the front, some heavy hitters were calling in and urging him to run. He said the last person to speak was henry kissinger. He had some conversations with kissinger and kissinger came to a friend using his cane and he said i have known expresident s in my life but being president is about two things, courage and character. He said you have both in your country needs you. I said what did you say . He said he was as close to speechless as Chris Christie ever is. [laughter] so he wasnt speechless. As he said i said to the group i dont think im going to run but i owe to all of you to think about it and he then laid out for me to process which he went through and it is a really interesting moment in the campaign. Because he is going to be around we will hear more from him. The rick perry interview is interesting in part because when we talked about that iconic moment if you will fit dupes moment. He was very funny about it. He said i went into that debate feeling more confident and relaxed than any debate up to that point. He said you know i was doing good and then i have this brain lapse. That is not a word he used but if you read the book you will see what he said. But he said you know i thought okay this happens to people and its not going to be that bad. He said they did some immediate repair work nonetheless but he said i went that and slept fine that night. But he said the truth is and these are my words per praising him my campaign was already over at that point. He said i didnt lose the election or the nomination because of what happened in that sub light debate. He said i had lost it earlier because of my performance in the earlier debates and he said the thing i learned was you cant going to president ial campaign late if you are not fully prepared and he said i was not prepared for it. There is fresh material on the denver debate. Again i wont dwell on all the details but this was one the highpoint for governor romney as he said. He said i had a lousy september and that was 47 in the survey had a great and that was denver. Day before the debate he got a call from george w. Bush and the former president said to mitt romney dont worry about the debate. You are going to do fine. I know from my own experience the president is not going to be fully prepared. This is in fact a truism. And, in president to run for reelection often you lose the first debate that they have. There are a lot of reasons. One is they havent been spoken to for four years in the way they are about to be spoken to by their opponent traded their aides are somewhat more respectful than their opponents on the debate stage. Second, they think theyre prepared because they have dealing with these issues and they dont feel like they need to freshen up three of he didnt have a good mock debate in his mock debates were from mediocre to really bad. The day of the debate i ran into one of his people