Good afternoon and welcome to the eighth annual tucson festival of books, one of the largest book festivals in the country. My name is ron barber. I am glad to see such a big crowd. Must be a lot of political junkies in the room. Raise your hand. I thought so. Me too. That is why i am glad to moderate. We want to thank cspan which is broadcasting this panel live. Also booktv and Cox Communications for sponsorship of the venue. The presentation will last about an hour. The last 15 or 20 minutes we will reserve for questions and answers from the panel. We ask you to hold your questions for the end and we will give that a full 20 minutes to your questions. Right after the session the panelists will be available to sign or autographed their books which will be on sale. Go to booth number 153 sponsored by the university of arizona bookstore. Books will be available in that location. If you want to meet the panelists, samara klar will do an interview with cspan following the session so she will be late to the book signing. But hold on, she will be there in due course. Because you are enjoying the festival, i assume you are. It is one of the real treasures we have here in tucson and i want to acknowledge, think he is still in the room, bill biden was here a minute ago. [applause] be change bill and brenda are the critical players in making this happen with lots of members of the steering committee. But we have to acknowledge the great work they have done. Because you are here and i hope enjoying the session and the whole event that you will be a member of the fence of the festival program, you can make a taxdeductible donation which allows the programming to go on, free of charge to the public and the next morning is turn off your cell phone. Donald trump is calling in. They decided to disrupt it. It is like meet the press or something. A strange year. But unlike meet the press we will go on with the scheduled program. Let me finish about the friends of the festival program. If you make a taxdeductible donation it allows to continue without charging the public and as you probably know, the festival donates thousands of dollars every year to local charities and that is another reason to donate. It has become you can go to the Student Union south ballroom where you can go to the website for the festival. The warning i should have given myself, out of respect for everyone in the audience, turn off your cell phone, put it on vibrate or turn it off entirely for the duration. It is my honor and pleasure to introduce our panelists can have this discussion story. Next to me is ari berman, Political Correspondent for the nation, and Investigative Journalism fellow at the nation institute. He has written articles with magazines like Rolling Stone and the new york times. You may have heard him, someone told me they heard him on npr today so he is a contributor to msnbc and npr. Next to him is john nichols who is coming back to the festival. He was here last year and i was a moderator for his panel too. John is a reporter and a writer with many publications. The one we are discussing today is john nichols. This is a very provocative book about where we are in our democracy. Last but by no means least is samara klar. Did i say it right . She coached me how to pronounce her name. Assistant professor at the university of arizona and the college i graduated from. It was a time of great excitement and being in the Political Science department was exciting. Samara klar is assistant professor and one of our three panelists today. A little about the books. People get ready the fight against a jobless economy ad a citizenless democracy is written not only by john nichols but robert chesney. It talks about where we are, the economy of our country is going, big money in politics is taking us, the potential we have, unemployment at staggering levels if we dont take steps to change the way the system works. Ari bermans book give us the ballot the modern struggle for Voting Rights in america, i love johns book and ari bermans too but this when i found particularly important. It is about what happened before and after the Voting Rights act was enacted in 1965 when lbj was president. It is a history i had never heard before. It was my honor to serve in congress with john lewis, one of the most incredible people you can ever meet. John was very modest. Everybody talks in congress about that. This book talks not only about john and all the other members of the civil rights movement, the importance of their work, also what has been happening since 1965, the attacks on the Voting Rights act, to scale it back, diminishing and so forth. That is particularly important issue to be considering, knowing that we have states across the country where restrictive laws on Voting Rights are being enacted, arizona obviously is no exception. I want to welcome you all and thank you for being here and i want to pose the first question to each of our panelists. Did i not mention thank you. Bad moderator. Independent politics, samara klar is professor here, independent politics how american disdain for parties leads to political inaction, what we know about arizona and the country is the Fastest Growing group of registered voters are people declaring no party. We call them independents but there is a wide range of views. What that means for the future of political discourse and Political Action in our country, the embarrassment people have to be described as partisan and how that plays out in conversation and how people actually vote. Thanks for that prompt. Let me start with ari berman and ask him to give you an overview of his book beyond what i said and each panelist in turn to do the same, but when they are doing it, talk about the implications of their work, their book for what is going on in our country right now. It has been an extraordinarily challenging and different kind of election period, as a student of politics i have never seen anything like it. Do you all agree . Pretty incredible what is going on. I would like these panelists to talk about their theme or perspective, what it says about where we are. Thank you for the kind introduction, great to be on this panel. Usually when we are together i cant get a word in so i have to get everything in now. Time is up. Thank you for sticking it out. The last session of the day. You have been in many panels, this is my first visit to tucson. I thoroughly enjoyed the book festival, the hiking at the tacos and everything else. It has been nice to be here. My book is the history of Voting Rights since 1965, the most important piece of civil rights legislation of the 1960s. I began covering the issue of Voting Rights after the 2010 election when many states flipped from blue to red or became a lot redder and we began to see a wave of new voting restrictions, like making it harder to register, cutting back on early voting, requiring strict forms of id that you never needed in any previous election. Purging the Voting Rights, disenfranchising half the states in the country passed new voting restrictions after the 2010 election. It wasnt getting any coverage. So the First National reporter to cover this, first for Rolling Stone and then the nation magazine. I covered this issue all the way through the 2012 election when florida eliminated voting on the sunday before the election when africanamerican church hes, we saw six our lines and president obama when he was reelected said on Election Night we have to fix that but what happened after the 2012 election, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights act, the centerpiece of the Voting Rights act that says those states with the longest histories of voting discrimination had to approve their voting changes with the federal government, that part of the law blocked 3000 discriminatory voting changes from taking effect from 1965 to 2013. It was an extremely important part of the most important civil rights law of the 1960s and at that point i decided i wanted to write my book because i knew this wasnt just dry history, wasnt just telling the stories of people like john lewis but the fact that people were living this in their lives all over again. John lewis told me he felt like history was repeating itself, he was fighting for things he thought he had won five decades later. Just to talk about where we are in 2016 because this is relevant to my book, the 2016 election is the first president ial election in 50 years without full protections of the Voting Rights act, the first president ial election since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights act. As a result, 16 states have new voting restrictions in place for the first time, very important swing states like wisconsin and ohio and North Carolina and virginia, so there has been so much coverage in the media over who people are going to vote for and what the polls are going to say but i have been asking a different question which is will every eligible voter be able to cast a ballot and i am very concerned that they will not be able to so when you talk about the direction of our democracy, the theme of this panel i dont think you can talk about the direction of democracy without talking about what is happening to Voting Rights. Last thing i will say is there have been 20 president ial debates, the issue of Voting Rights is not come up. That is a National Tragedy because i dont believe this is a fringe issue or a side issue. I believe this is one of the most fundamental issues in the 2016 election, whether you are democrat or independent or republican, you should be committed to seeing that everyone who wants to vote will be able to in 2016. [applause] lets ask john the same question, a little about your book, what it means, what what you are saying means for the 2016 president ial, and races across the country. If you dont have ari bermans book, get it. If you dont have point samara klars book, get it. I have read both and they are fabulous. You have the money, they are really vital books. Let me tell you about mine. I will modestly suggest that because we wrote a book about the 2011 campaign. We didnt know we were doing that. Three years ago, media and democracy, we were going to write the next book about the democracy. And some that up once more. Than i was over in europe, in conference because in europe they are interested in media and democracy and invite you to talk about it. And dealing with technological change, digital progress and automation and i was struck by the fact that everyone was talking about eliminating jobs, how we were going to progress, companies were going to make more money in the next stage of our digital and automation advancement by getting rid of immense numbers of workers and that can sound very esoteric so let me sum it up. How many saw Time Magazine and the cover story was on the driverless car . The driverless car worked, we have been to google and seen them. Thousands of Driverless Cars are on the road already. You can be on the road and the past by a driverless car with a blind person at the wheel or a 95yearold woman in the front seat talking to each other as the car drives by. This is working. It is an effective progression and it will go so big in the next we 10 years. The number one job for men in america is driving. They drive trucks, cabs, buses. Women do too but men, a disproportionately big job for guys. They used to do things like manufacturing and mining but we have eliminated those jobs. As a result driving is big baseline work. Starting to go through other industries we found example after example of automation changes that are going to eliminate massive numbers of jobs and interestingly enough, the media in this campaign, talk about Voting Rights not coming up, we are talking an issue that is huge, not just bells and whistles, new iphone 17, an issue that is huge, that is not discussed by our media is what everybody with immense wealth and power discusses all the time, that this will be the major issue of the next 25 years in this country, the critical issue. So we thought we were really bright, going to write a book about all this and anticipate the future and our editor, a brilliant woman said the only thing we are troubled by his you have this dystopian view and you think when the stuff starts to hit and people become conscious of it they might go to very extreme places politically, some places in the past when moments like this have come you had the possibility of fascism and things like that, rabid, horrific dangerous responses lose rather than looking at the big economic and social changes taking place you have politicians blaming others like immigrants or Something Like that and we said this is dangerous moment coming on. And our editor got a little too extreme so then we said okay, we warned you we were going to have to throw trump at you. And the fact of the matter is we did not anticipate donald trump but the truth is if you go to a Bernie Sanders rally you are going to meet 18, 19, 20yearolds who grew up marinated in this technological progression, they know all about it, they know more than some of the ceos know and they know its potential and its reality. They look at the future with immense concern, fear, uncertainty, they see a future in which they have a very hard time imagining how they will pay for their student debt, how they will get a job, how they will begin to approximate the existence of their parents or grandparents so the idea of a socialist, trying to organize a little bit more functional and rational and humane economy seems rather attractive and they are not scared by the s word. Then go to a trump rally and you see a 58yearold guy laid off from his auto plant job and retrained to work in a warehousing job and the work he was doing is being reduced because they have a robot that does it. That guy at the trump rally doesnt know it but he has got the same concerns as the kid. They are politically opposite and they wont vote the same way. That there is some parallel here, there is and where they are ideologically but there is a parallel in what draws people to very unimagined responses from a few years ago. We will talk more about this. This is either the last election of the 20th century or the first election of the 21 stoop century. We will make choices that will either end and year of not dealing with fundamental issues which will not be avoidable in a jobless future or we will begin to address this year and get ahead of them enough to have the rational, humane, decent responses that are possible. That is the edge we are on. This is the most important election of your life. I know you are told that every four years. It was a fantasy in the past and is a reality now. [applause] samara klar loves canada and tucson, you have the audacity to let this young guy with all these progressive ideas, what is wrong with you . Could you [applause] talk about your book and the implications for the 2016 election. I have lived in tucson three years so i am happy to be here and i thank you for hosting this panel. I will give you a brief description of my book. As many of you know, the largest number of people in the electorate are independents, many of you might identify yourselves as independent. We have more independents than democrats or republicans and more independents than we have ever had before so this is a big phenomenon in american politics, this drive of the independent voter. I have a coauthor on this book, we decided to investigate why so many people call themselves independent. Is there something unique about american politics that makes people want to separate themselves from the parties and are there broad consequences for the american political system . We found there is a growing negative stigma associated with the democrats and the republicans. People are ashamed to be associated with either party because of two things, this increasingly negative coverage we see of politics in the media, when you turn on your television, look at the internet news every day, you tend to see partisans yelling at each other, screaming at each other, fighting, stubbornness, aggression and most americans do not want to be associated with that. Instead of associating themselves with the negative organization a huge number of organizations are calling themselves independent. The secret among independents is they truly support a party, and all independents support a party but 80 vote for the same party year after year. When you ask if they prefer a party they will admit you either prefer democrats or republicans and generally only vote for that party. Why do they call themselves independent . It is this negative stigma associated with partisanship. The problem is this negative stigma discourages people from participating in a lot of the activities parties need to win, things like admitting who you are supporting in public, putting a yard sign on your lawn, wearing a sticker, encouraging your friends to vote. The same motivation that drives people to call themselves independent it is important to have grassroots activism. We are seeing a turn towards nonestablishment candidates. People are rejecting the establishment partisan candidate in terms of candidate to make them feel they are no longer supporting the same party they are tired of seeing on the news. What is the implication for this election . Pretty selfevident. We have seen this monumental turn toward what we think of as outsider candidates, donald trump, Bernie Sanders, even ben carson and ted cruz, candidates that are not associated with the establishment. We have argued this is because people are sick and tired of washington parties and dont want to be associated with either of them. [applause] let me start with ari berman and the implications. I encourage you to read all of the books, for me your book was particularly important because of my own involvement, and attempt in congress to change the decision the