Governor, but we didnt have it then. But i think if you look at the way you also used digital media, the white house photographer was still taking still photos in 20012003 and we didnt change that until 2004. And i still dont understand facebook. Ronald christie on twitter. And how could we utilize this technology with the staff. And you notice president obama caries a blackberry and president bush did not. President obama uses email, president bush did not. So i think by the time you get into 2006, 2007, the white house staff was a lot more sophisticated in dealing with the emerging technology but for our cousins now in the Obama Administration, it is night and day, the Technology Capabilities that they have and the tools they have at their disposal to get their message out versus what we had. Um, mike hayden, who was one of bushs cia directors gave an interesting talk earlier today about the cross roads of of change that is going on in terms of security end of all of this. And it strikes me as i was listen to ron, that the Bush Administration was really at the cross roads of an enormous generational change in the world, not just in america. You had warfare which was essentially the business of nation states for 300 or 400 years suddenly becoming the business of individual groups who could use disruption and even al qaeda, as mike said this morning, which i thought was a terrific talk, is now sort of an institution and isis is the noninstitution. It is sort of a doomsday cult, which is effective using methods that nobody even could dream of, other than people like Charlie Manson who didnt have the reach of isis. So the Bush Administration was really, i think, at a cross roads, of a lot of things that were happening in the world, not just america and generation of young people who were looking at institutions in a completely different way. And all of government, and it happened to be bush was presiding over this which i dont think made his presidency any easier. In my view, one of the fundamental misunderstandings that we base going into iraq on is that iraq was actually a country. Well it wasnt a country. It was a creation of an agreement between european powers 100 years ago and made no sense as a country in a sense what the president did was to unroof all of that and create begin the loose forces that nobody had any idea were as powerful as they were. And the same thing is true of technology. There is this Enormous Technology revolution going on around the world and particularly led in the United States and the bush people just happened to be there at the time. So to say that the bush people really dont understand technology is not really fair. That would be kind of like saying, you know, William Shakespeare didnt understand literature 300 years later. And you just caught in a historic change that effected everything. Not Just Technology or the media, but the existence of the nation state itself began to change and the fundamental beliefs of all of the people who have had been trained in the past 40 or 50 years in the post war order became unmoored during the Bush Administration. Which had nothing to do with bush or anybody he hired. The rules were changing under their feet and there was not they could do except play catchup. In discipline, in a campaign in the white house, you cant tell 100 stories. You can tell one story. Im sure the administration this week wanted to tell atory on the nuclear iran a story on the nuclear iran negotiations and we had a massive plane crash yesterday and the bombings that started to take place last night and all of a sudden, whatever the original game plan was, you are on a different track. And the hardest part today with blackberries or phones or any of the rest of it, is you see everybody sitting here with the iphone and there is a temptation to go off and respond to that. And as a press person or political strategistic or what have you, to have the discipline to say i just got this text from julie who wants an answer on this right now and so i send a text off to answer her question and i totally moved away from my agenda to her agenda. So the way to maintain this in the future is going to be extraordinarily harder and i remember my chairman and i were doing an event in iowa where he was catching momentum there. And we did a room again when you get to iowa, all of a sudden, you start out going to pizza places and you have ten people and by the end you have every major press person in the world and have major press conferences like this. We did a press conference and had probably 150 bloggers with another 500 on the phone and we made the Mainstream Media and they couldnt ask any questions and they are behind with the cameras and i said this is the future. But controlling that message is going to be very, very hard. So i i think it just should magnify a thousand times what it used to be. It is like you walk into we used to have an office on times square and you walk in and you are bombarded by billboards and lights an the whole bit. Every one of the billboards cost 5 million, 10 million, 20 million and there are hundreds of it. And i defy anyone to walk through times square and come out with a message. And in des moines iowa, people will drive 50 miles to see the billboard. Today we live with clutter. So whether it is your network or someone elses network to find how you get your message open and have a consistency in that message is an extraordinary challenge for campaigns and the white house even more so. And let me add quickly, it has just begun. It will get much worse. The number of americans who watch the evening news on the three Major Networks is not only a fraction of what it was before, but the average age is well over 50. The average cable viewer on msnbc is 62 years old. The average age of the cable viewer on fox is 68 years old. And the reason those numbers are so high and that is because there is a bell curve and it stops at 35. Howard does msnbc. I do fox. We have more viewers. But years are going to age out faster. [ laughter ] no, the truth of the matter is that these all of this stuff, the evening news, is fast the evening news, which is still the biggest single way of getting the news out, is disappearing. So were not at the end of this transition, were in the big first quarter. And so this for this problem of controls messages is only controlling messages is only going to get more and more difficulty as the hundreds of thousands of ways of people get their news. If something is on the front pages of the New York Times or the l. A. Post, but it is still a big story. Not as big as it used to be. In 15 years, that may not be true any more. If those institutions still exist. To bring this back to the white house, one of the fascinating things to track over time is how seating in the Briefing Room has changed. The white house correspondents came out with a new seating chart. It is them who decide who sits where and not the white house. And during the Bush Administration it was what we consider old media, legacy media and newspapers that dont exist any more sitting in the Briefing Room. And this week they add the buzzfeed and yahoo. So. Wow im going to ask one over question and turn it over to the audience. And ron started out talking about the conspiracy of deputies but kind of how to communicate first internally and then externally the message. And you know, it is one of the things that i think people sometimes dont understand, is that its not as if the word manipulation has come up. You would be irresponsible as a public figure if you werent spending a lot of time trying to figure out how the message youre trying to get out. Now if you are lying or deceiving an concealing important evidence that is one thing. But trying to get your message out and one of the things that i remember discovering when i went and worked in city hall in new york back in the 80s, if you were the press secretary, you had to be in the policy meetings because, in fact, it is a good thing for the public that somebody in the meeting is asking, how are we going to feel if this decision is on the front page of the daily news. So you could talk maybe starting about the way, ron, the way p. R. People are not the s implemente of the strategy but they are guiding policy at the same time as other people are, because i think that is an important thing to it is an interesting question because one of the offices that youve probably never heard of, nor should you have heard of, is called the office of the staff secretary in the white house. And i think this office largely out of public view, largely ub known, is one of the most powerful offices in the white house because the staff secretary deals with all of the paper flow that comes to and from the president. So suppose that you want to the president , you briefed him in the oval office and he said, howard dean you course he wont say howard dean. Articulate what i want to get the tax cut through in 2001. Every head of every major White House Office will look at the governors memo and say this looks good to me or theyll say paragraph three, i dont agree with this. And before something gets to the president , every Single Department head has to sign off on that document and say the president senior staff has seen this and we have gone to the Cabinet Agency if necessary and this articulates what your policy decision is. How that relates to getting into the oval office and the way that the press apparatus and the p. R. Worked, is that the policy briefing, in my last three years, i cant think of a time in the oval office that we didnt have either Ari Fleischer or Scott Mcclennan or someone from the Communications Office sitting there and the presence was not as a policy role but if they couldnt communicate what the policy or the message was, then we were off message. And going back to eds point, it was all about discipline and making sure were on the same page. And for us to stay on the same page, that meant the communicators an the policy geeks, for lack of a better word, had to find a way to work together. And the policy people obviously are saying here is exactly what the president s policies are and the communicators want to find a sexyer way of putting it out there. Well, ron, that doesnt work in a sound bite. So we really had a strong relationship with the press folks an the communicators because if they couldnt articulate the president s policy was, it didnt matter the policy the president was trying to convey. I think it is important not to think that p. R. And agree with rons premise, the press secretary is critical and always has to be in the room and know what is happening. But Public Policy and ive been in four administrations and a few others and you dont make decisions to do good p. R. You have to sell your Public Policy decisions. But it is a very complex process. And the vast majority of president s and people in the white house and around the administrations do what they think is in the best interest of the country. Then you have to sell it. And obviously these things are difficult to sell and there is always a counter point. One of the difficulties in the administration, no matter what the press secretary wants to do, reporters can go out and do their own thing and you have a bunch of agencies that obviously today and may be more interesting to talk to the faa administrator or someone in transportation or Homeland Security on the crash in the tragic crash in the alps as it is to something else. So you are always fighting to make sure whatever your best plan is, you can go out. But i think the key thing here we have to understand and one of the things that is occurring today, that never occurred before, is isis and the rest of them understand american p. R. And they are out there every day telling their story, telling their story very effectively. Chopping off a mans head or crucifying a man or setting him on fire, my people say my god, that is outrageous. That is what terrorism is about. They are doing that to create terrorism and so all of a sudden you have a guy being beheaded on Network Television that night and whatever the message of the day is in the white house is probably diminished dramatically and they want you to respond to whatever this may be. So when i come back to the point of my discipline, maybe that is not the best thing to do or the best argument you want to make. Maybe you dont want to get off of topic. So it is hard and there is conflicts on the white house and the messaging side of it. Bush called the press the filter. And he said it like that. The filter. And he always wanted to go around the press and speak directly to the American People because he felt like the filter distorted his words and intent and put it through a siv of darkness that he didnt fell like it held up well under that scrutiny. He started and i believe president obama has perfected a system of staterun media where bush when i covered bush, we thought he was terrible. No access, no accountability, no nothing. Well compared to barack obama, bush was like the most open, giving, sharing person you could possibly imagine and his press shop was much more open, much more responsive to the needs of press than the current administration. It is naturally a relationship at odds. They want to come out and tell their good, positive, upbeat story. They have their own p. R. Operation. That is not what we want to do. They control through denial. Bush was great at taking questions on the fly. To the detriment of the control of the story of the day and the message of the day. He would just sit there until you were done and be like ha and take whatever questions you had on your mind. And in that way the administration was able to move through stories quickly. Now what you see is president Obama Holding back and we wont hear from him for months and almost like this fire hose effect of this pressure building up and when you get access to him, reporters are asking 12part question and no one can remember what question three was in the long sol illock wee and you dont get to ask him because the cycle moves on and off. And im talking about photo releases. Instead of allowing photographers into the oval office for a routine bill signing of significance or something of note which president bush did do and knew it was to his advantage to do so, now we dont have that. We dont get that. We get a photo taken by a white house photographer that is handed out. Which is really no different from them writing out a press release and handing that out and expecting that to go into the paper without any scrutiny or accountability. This president doesnt like the press. Bush didnt like what the press did but he understood and respects the role that the press played. I much much more accessible in a casual way. Like the oval office encounters. Reporters lobbying questions at him. President obama doesnt like that. He doesnt do it. Through both administrations, reporters found that the best information came out from outside of the administration so you report around it. People on the hill just love to talk. And theyll come out of a meeting in the white house and tell you everything. So those people are gold. And also, you know, in the Diplomatic Corp and sometimes in the agencies, you dont go to the briefing and get your news. That is not what white house reporting is about. So ill just share with you some of the tricks of the trade here. What we used to do when i was governor and on the campaign, is we would avoid the big papers, so when i got tired of the press corp in vermont i would go out on the road and do small paper interviews and they were thrilled and they would write it mostly the way i wanted to write it. The bigger papers wont do that. When i was on the campaign trail, in defense of the big papers, they are not going to write the same story every day. But youre going to have to give the same speech every day, five times a day, because that is what you do on campaigns, if you want to stay on message. So i give the speech for the 25th on a friday and the big paper is not going to write that. They will find something else. Delve into some lead some opposition researcher gave them or some stuff. So of course it is in my interest to limit that. And that is why you have these these kind of tactics that people use. And in defense of president obama, one of the reasons he doesnt do many bill signs is congress doesnt pass many bills. I just used that as an example. He met with Hillary Clinton and it wasnt on the week and they announced it after the lid. If you were Hillary Clinton would you want to be at that meeting. It is a news worthy event. It is fun when he does it. The next president , ted cruz, will bring it to the next level. From your lips to gods ear. May he be nominated i may become a republican just to vote for ted cruz in the primary. You heard it here first. [ laughter ] so were going to start with questions and we have a couple of people here i think with microphones. I would like to go to student questions first if we can. And once again, please do a question. Right there. Yeah. Good morning. Thank you. David strack, school of communication. This question is for mr. Christie. I was wondering, what was the message being communicated after the week of 9 11 . It was a tough day for the country. It was a tough day to be in the white house and it was a tough day to advise, for me, the Vice President of the United States. Our entire focus went from what we call domestic priorities, getting no child left behind passed, to working on a tax cut, to domestic consequences. How do we reopen new york city beneath 14th street. We grounded all civil aviation. And closed most of the maritime ports in the country. And the president , a few days later, had the National Prayer celebration. And in the days after 9 11, our focus went to prayer and remembranc