To fighting the other side which partisans urge everyone to do this as one of the previous questions did, and still elevate yourself with a wider electorate. Because once you yield to those to do with your base, very difficult in terms of policy and rhetoric to elevate. Its a real puzzle and i think everybody in the country who cares about that not just any partially but because we want our country to have a functioning government should be encouraging politicians of both parties, which would change the dynamic, i think we spent enough years bemoaning the dynamic and how horrible that is in terms of our National Image as well as getting things done. I think its time to try to fix it. My question is, i was fascinated by the Romney Campaign surprise on election night, despite what a lot of analytics, and metrics were saying coming and. Why do you think he was so blindsided by the results that night, especially when they started coming in by the quickly . How much do you think a role groupthink played in that, you know, him of being surprised and his campaign being surprised . There are two big reasons. Yes, the fact that governor romney and congressman ryan along with many of the people around him thought they were going to win right up until election day. Part of it was one of the heirs that politicians sometimes succumb to an some reporters succumb to, which is the illusion of crowds to their president ial candidate, youre out on the road, the main thing you see everyday, all you do is you go from event to event. In passed in 2008 john mccain in the last days of the election would have very small crowds, a couple thousand people while president obama was getting 30,000 people at his events. Governor romney was in a different place. He was getting crowds as big as president obama. He would go to colorado and see 35,000 people. Cincinnati, ohio, a couple nights out of election night, again 30,000 people. They did one event in pennsylvania tonight before election. There were 40,000 people there. So we thought of the crowds and energy indicated to him, in his gut instinct you would win. Republican pollsters across the Republican Party were all measuring the wrong electric had convinced himself elected in 2012 would look more like electric in 2010 with an electorate in 2008. President obamas team was determined and spent a ton of money to make sure the electorate would look like 2012 more like it in 2008 with a Rising Coalition that was dominant again in 2012 and they succeeded the republicans turned out to be totally wrong. Thank you so much. Lets give our authors a round of applause. [applause] and they will be autographing on the other side of the elevators on the same floor. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, i will try it one more time. Ladies and gentlemen. You dont have to stop beating. Each team will come to the final offers night academia at 2013 the conservative University Lecturer series brought to us by a generous grant from the fresco foundation. Redo these to give you a chance to see and hear speakers and offers you may not be exposed to on campuses you are from or over on the hill the committees that you work for. Of big thing that accuracy with academia and media is that we continuously find what keeps us going from day to day just about everything we have heard from the news broadcast in the newspaper is from. You can choose is little experiment on your own to see how well and holds up. We do it day in and day out. How lot of talk focus is on Current Events in history a and it may seem odd but it fits just about everything you hear about the dangers of a football turn out to be wrong. I was astounded to learn cheerleaders are a greater risk of physical danger is a and Football Players. But said gentleman that we brought in tonight to speak on this topic is my predecessor who accomplished author. Why the left hates america america, conservative history of the left, bluecollar intellectuals and how am i doing . The war on football saving americas game. Who tries to watch at least one game on the weekend . That is what i thought. It is fairly absorbing unless you are a redskins fan. [laughter] but this is the exception to the rule. It is a compelling reid we have a compelling speaker in the man who wrote the book ladies and gentleman daniel flynn. [applause] the cure for coming in washington d. C. We could mix a little bit of americas game with a local sports of politics. Football for whatever reason is a big sport among politicians. People say the horse races this sport of skiing and if so it is a sport of president s from Theodore Roosevelt to gerald ford at the university of michigan a lot of president s have had a real interest in the sports of football and if you ask the people in this building to is your favorite football playing president dave would say ronald reagan. To play football at Eureka College later was a playbyplay man up for the hawkeyes on who radio of the biggest them from his role in who brought the allamerican . That is where reagan got his nickname and i think voter dame and College Football brought to a lot more from ronald reagan. Its a right way of living that none of us will ever forget. They were professional athletes posing as amateurs. They were paid in other sports, and, also, they were heavy gamblers, and he hung out in pool halls at night, hustled people for money, both bet on notre dame, and we know george as, you know, probably the greatest player that played at notre, and the guy reagan played in the movie, he averaged 6. 3 yards a carry. His grade point average was like 0. 0. The first two and a half years in notre dame, theres no record. Its called a transathlete, he plays, and its just to suggest the power of the mass media. The power of hollywood to shape perception. We have a perception of gorge and of george, and because of hollywood, and opposed to the reality, and hollywood has the power, to allow from time to time, and has the power to make the two selfsinners into saints on the silver screen. This is a lot like the controversy over football today. My book is about perception versus reality. We have a perception about football based on the football that the gauge is more dangerous, and if they play it for a long time, if theres an epidemic of suicide in the nfl, and what i do in the war on football is i get the science, and the story behind the game, and the reality is that the perception that has been created by the mass media with football over the last two years is almost in every instance wrong, and in some cases, you know, 180 degrees wrong. I got into the genesis of writing the war in football was a study that was put together by the National Institutes for occupational and health, federal sciences, putt together last year they looked at every nfl player who played in the league between 1959 and 1988, so guys like Lawrence Taylor and chuck and joe and Walter Peyton and dick butkis, all these guys, 3500 plays playing in the league those 30 or so years. The reason they looked at the players because theres a wide suspicion in the public that nfl players die young, that they die in their 50s, the game takes such a toll on their bodies, that their Health Outcomes are horrible. This is something that has been, you know, spread in the mainstream press. George wills is probably the most widely read columnist in america. Last year, he wrote life expect ten sigh its less than 50. The average life expect tan sigh is 50 or less years. Espn. Com says its about 75. The average life of a retired player is 5359 years old. The federal sienszs looked at the Nfl Players Association and what they found shocked a lot of people, and nfl players dont die young. They out live their peers in society. They have a longer life expectancy. This study was expecting to find an 18 death rate amongst nfl players. They found a 10 rate, almost half of what was expected in the prevailing rates in society. They looked at 17 different disease category, and in 14 of those 17 categories, the nfl had better Health Outcomes than the average joe, comparable guy in society. Things like heard disease, cancer, respiratory illness, diabetes, even suicide was much lower amongst the nfl players than it was amongst men in society. Theres a duh quality to this; right . I mean, if you run up and down a practice field for two hours every day, and you have intense diet and training, if you have access to the best medical care in the world like the nfl players do, and if you have restraint, not every nfl player is restrined, but if you are not smoking cigarettes and doing crazy drugs and that sort of thing, youll have better Health Outcomes, and its shocking to me that people were shocked by the survey. This is an example of the publics perception being shaped not by the facts on the ground, but by misinformation with regard to columnists and writers and primed to believe that, you know, the nfl takes decades off your life, when, in fact, the sciences, the nfl players outlive their peers. They have better Health Outcomes. Another one of these perception against reality, the clash between the two, involves the idea that bigger, faster, stronger means deadlier. That the nfl players are bigger than they used to be, and the game is much more dangerous, that players at the high school level, the college level, at every level, its faster game, a bigger game, so its a deadlier game. Well, not really. The nfl sorry, not the nfl, but football in general used to be a pretty deadly game. People would die on the field, and the height of the game, all levels of competition, killed by football hits. Im a fan of football, but for me, thats hard to justify for what amounts to be a kids game, the idea you have people dying on the field because of the game. Society didnt notice much in 1968 because in 1968, there were assassinations, riots in the streets, casualties in vietnam, and it was not the outrage in football that there is now, but football people noticed and made changes to the game, and thats a big point of the book. Football is not just a game of violence and ruckus, but change, always evolving and progressing, not like baseball and soccer that are status game, but evolving game, and after that 58 season, within a few years, there were rules and they they were penalized for that. Equipment changed. There usedded to be something called a web suspension helmet, a hard shelled helmet with a piece of fabric essentially keeping your head from hitting the hard shell when there was a collision. That technology was invented for right before world war ii by a guy named john ridell, and the military liked it so much, they conscripted the helmet for military use. In fact, i was a marine for years, and i wore that webbed suspension helmet into the 21st century. Football got rid of that technology in the 1970s. As twisted as it sounds, we equip the Football Players in the country than we do our soldiers and marines. Coaching got better. Heads up tackling. Coaches not, you know, no longer saying put your head between the numbers and that sort of thing. All of these things combined to bring football from a point where they had 36 deaths from collisions in 19 68 to last season with two deaths from collisions. The game got dramatically safer. At the time we gave football a pat on the back, its a kick below the belt. You know, to put it in perspective, more kids died last year getting struck by lightning playing football last season than getting struck by other players. When you, you know, the perception you glean from the news is that the game is more dangerous than ever. Its safer than ever. I think one of the ways you grasp that the game is safer than ever, its how the conversation shifted. No one talks about players killed on the field anymore. They talk about players getting concussions, and i dont want to down play the risk of concussion or danger of concussions, but i think its safe to say that a concussion is a much less permanent outcome than a death from a football hit. The symptoms regimely disappear, and, obviously, with death, they do not disappear. The fact we talk about concussions and not players getting killed, thats a sign that the football critics that the game is safer. Now, when footballs critics talk about concussions, they generally do in conjunction with the idea of cce, chronic traumatic end lop thy. Theres a number of nfl players, sau and matthews, great players with a lot of trouble causivitily in the last years. When scientists looked at their brains after they were dead, they had cte, brain disease. Now, if you were to have if you watched league of denial, a pbs documentary thats been airing, the impressions by league of denial is that football causes cte, and the nfl has known about it for years, but tried to cover it up. Thats the animating ideas behind the documentary you hear agreement, and youre bound to think this is what scientist believe. Thats not what sciencetists believe. They believe the opposite. The best scientists in sports got together last year in the International Conference on concussion and sports, and they crafted a Congress Census statement. In that statement, they had some words about ctd, and this is what they said. They said a cause and effect relationship that has not yet been demonstrated between cte and concussions or exposure to contact sports. Now, why would they say this, and the reason they have not don a ron domized study. There have been we have antedotes. We have autopsy. We essentially have junk science. People say, well, its settled science that football causes cte. Its not. Its junk science. What i mean, by junk science is that science that doesnt have any applications beyond, you know, the immediate subject studies, that you cant make sweeping generalizations made on it. If you look at an individual players brain, if you are not doing a randomized study, tell us about the individuals brain, but you cant tell us about other players or the incident rate of cte amongst people in society or people in the nfl. This is the study done with cigarettes in 18956, the districtish doctor study, to show that theres a link between cigarettes and cancer. That kind of a study has not been attempted with cte. What we have is autopsies done with admittedly a selection bias. In other words, science is going after brains they believe to have been brain damaged in their lives, and finding low and behold after an autopsy, that they have brain damage. Shocking one the big concerns scientists have, and theres article after article, and i mean, if you look in academic publications, criticizing the Boston University group and others that are doing some of the cte research, just, you know, this is just the stuff in the last, you know, few months, a looking at the one of the criticisms that they have is that two main gripes studying cte have different definitions of what ccts. They dont generally have different answers, but its so new that you have groups debating what exactly it is, and the Boston University group that was featured so prominently in league of denial, one of the crift schisms levied is the definition of cte is so elastic as to almost guarantee they are going to find what they are looking for. Theres a condition that naturally occurs in human beings that 97 of old people get in their brains, and that condition is being used to determine whether someone has cte or not, has nothing to do with trauma, so why is it being used as a determinant of whether they have cte . Thats a criticism of the bu group. To me, one of the great things about science is that, you know, even if youre not the person doing the initial study, if its science that the findings can be replicated elsewhere, and no one has been able to replicate this amazing percentage of Football Players found with cte, that this bu group has done. They find it in almost every case, and yet theres other groups, all with selection bias, all going after brains they think are brain damaged, and other groups not finding it to that level, and i think thats something that really set off a red flag, and it has set off a red flag in the scientific community. The reason why one of the main reasons why theres such a huge interest in concussions in cte has to do with the players lawsuit against the nfl that was recently settled for 765 million, so for a lot of money. I think it was shocking to a lot of people to know that about 10 ct of the players 10 of the players suing the nfl never actually played a down in an nfl game. These are guys who were cut in the preseason, guys who may have made a taxi squad, but they never actually got into the nfl game. If you look at the players who actually made an nfl team and got on the field, that went on to sue the nfl, you is kickers who played in five games, you have backup quarterbacks who barely played at all, and replacement players who played in the replacement games in 1987, and, you know, you dont have to be a particularly cynical person to look at this and say, well, gee, these guys played in pop warner, played in high school, college, and may have played in other pro leagues, but they got the brain damage from the cup of coffee they had in the nfl . You know, i really find that hard to believe, so i think for a lot of these guys, and i said the bulk of the guys suing the nfl, it was a giant money grab. Im not doubting that theres guys that were suing the league that had damage, that walked away from the game with a lot of damage, and we know theres guys thats true of, but i think for the 4500 guys suing the nfl, a lot of them thought they hit the litigation lottery, and they were right. Now, what bothers me about this is that the propaganda surrounding the professional game has been projected upon high school and pop warner. The you know, there are players who played football and came away damaged as i said, and at the nfl level, they find this confines itself to alzheimers and als generally with skill position players, have really elevated rates. To project findings upon high school players, to me, is beyond wreckless. Theyve done the siefns on this. The mayo clinic last year release a study that the incoming hypothesis was they would find elevated rates of neurodegenerative diseases among high school Football Players who played High School Football mid century. They compared these guys with members