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Us 49, Israel 31, Syria 30, Egypt 27, U.s. 24, Iran 24, Tunisia 13, Dennis 11, Washington 10, Afghanistan 10, United States 9, Iraq 9, America 9, Morsi 8, Paul Ryan 7, Obama 7, California 7, Florida 6, Romney 6, Libya 5,
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  CSPAN    U.S. Senate    News/Business.  

    November 9, 2012
    12:00 - 5:00pm EST  

maybe these other don't apply particularly, because the lack of resources that are available from the outside. this overarching on the part of international community to move forward at this point. .. your ligon and across the arab spring countries to face very different challenges and you have a militia kind of
problem, building institutions from scratch. in tunisia that is in the case. it isn't the military. you are seeing across these countries some very different kinds of challenges. if we expand that out on yemen or syria you will see that in each of these cases there are significant cases funding and model was hard to do. people like to fight the eastern european case because it was successful. the problem there is there wasn't a nato membership in the e.u. but helped to really drive that political role and meet the commitment of the government to undertake the reform. certainly for a country like tunisia. what they're looking at interestingly enough are the cases of south korea, taiwan and south africa as examples of places that have undergone a similar authoritarian transitions to the space rule, particular emphasis on the
police and internal capability. >> i'm very glad you mentioned those last few cases that may in fact pulled out some opportunities from learning because if we hadn't integrated that possibility into the way this group responded to the question i would have underscored just how potentially significance the absence of prior model is for the securities sector reform in the arab world because it causes a great deal about the limited validity of what we often think about as best practice in this field but a limited validity of what we often think about in the lessons learned that are affordable across the cases from one instance to another. if we have to approach both of those points with former skepticism in these cases and then some others we may be writing though will look all over again for these cases in
ways that hold up significant challenges in trying to move these process fees' for word on the basis of expertise and experience that may be followed a settlement and fight have been assumed a couple of years ago when these transitions began. so there is a lot to think about in this notion we may not have models and we should be aware of that. i want to ask of the sort of problem that is often perceived attention strengthening them and how this plays into the sort of how some of the new political actors are viewing their own success in putting electoral success for example in egypt the brotherhood may be very reluctant on certain aspects of the security sector they're dealing with the military privileges of the military but other areas, for example,
assumption that you are necessarily going after the leaders inside the security sector or security sector reform i think is a misconception. it is a wide misconception that it is a misconception because if you look for example at the initiative that has been proposed as i mentioned earlier by the members of the e egyptian civil society and the members of, you know, stakeholders from within the security establishment, they include a lot of measures that would strengthen the position of the security services, for example it gets some of the proposals to the spenders living on the wages. they include the rights of the officers to unionize for greater rights and they also have to keep in mind the absence of this level of empowerment as an
i would -- you know, i would question the assumption that the securities sector reform is necessarily aimed at, you know, disempowering are dismantling the securities sector, and i would actually say that there are a lot of measures, a lot of proposals in the case of egypt that would strengthen the status of the living conditions and the working conditions of the egyptian police. >> we think that this idea of the reform versus strengthening. when we talk about strengthening, are we talking about more weapons, more capabilities that they can get out, for example the argument being the balance on the embassy or because there wasn't inappropriate amount available or in the case of the two nations many of the police officers that fled the embassy where the brand new hires that have come on board in the last year and none of the treynor none of the rules of engagement have changed and they were
unprepared is the example of the case for the embassy was an issue of incompetence. a lack of the police. so that with the element of fear and authorized force and if we use force it would be targeted for doing their job and so all of that together created the situation which they just weren't prepared for that particular event. but more broadly it is about the issue of competence. it's are they capable, do they have the rules of engagement, do they know what they are authorized to do to have that kind of equipment, are they protected? to the have a stake in the state that they are protecting? all of these things are very important and that is where the security sector reform is essential because as you all are reforming and rebuilding and restructuring the oversight and accountability of the institutions we have also remember that we want these places to be competent. there is a job they have to do to provide security and other state, the police military. they have to be the will to do certain things and have to be
yclept to handle that security either external or internal in the case of police. so yes to reform is accountability and oversight but it's also the competence to be able to do the job on the security of the population and the government in the case of the military security against internal threats. >> this is a question that comes up every time. it came up in the balkans and it's come up in afghanistan and that is is there a trade-off between the offer to in policing and democratic policing. many people would say if we go to the democratic policing they will become soft and they will not be given to control the situation. but in fact, that is really not the case because it is effective in the control in general is based on consent and to the extent the police forces are brutal and anti-democratic and that they don't respect the
population, you get them a lack of support from the public and in fact outlining opposition. >> i had a book on this topic called police in war and it is of the police are going to be really effective need to do three things. you need to be available and responsive. they need to be fair. if they do those three things, it is much more important than how technically skilled they are, how well they take the report or use their weapons. if they can perform their duties in a way that attracts public support so that people in society will support the policing and protect the police, then you are going to get real social reform. but the form we make in the book is the automatic response of government through violence is greater violence and this is something we have to i think all keep in mind and try to defend against. >> server?
>> [inaudible] >> i think more important is the so culture which consider which is just punishing kids and children and citizens and consider this attitude for an acceptable means to educate them, they should and as reflected in the popular committee that would be thrown on the streets to protect and
make checkpoints and at first it seems it was very clear it's a culture of the society and the institutional culture, so my question after the decades of militarizing and securitized in the public mind to make it ready to accept help the reform strategist may be developed to address the public consciousness not just of the institution. i think more important in the
institution. >> was your question suggesting that the public is largely viewed as the securitization of the police and intelligence forces as culturally acceptable >> the security is -- society is securitized. the way of securitized in every single issue any means of around us are ready to attack the institutions. it is not acceptable so to protect the industry with this culture which starts from the
house and from the family for the kids and they just fire in the areas where they are justified in to the citizens but as a way to educate people to reach people. >> let me take a crack at a very different question. you're level of generalization may be a little too why but i definitely think that in terms of egypt the authoritarian regime is effective for some time using this issue and the domestic threats have that kind of mechanism to sustain the rule and there are certainly many
parts of the society better still susceptible to that kind of appeal particularly on the conditions of growing insecurity and how you address this is a matter of the public education for the state and then the government would have to engage in the human rights education to sort of diffuse the different view of these issues in the population through the public schools and if there is a political will to do that that is another question that i thought you were getting at the related issue of the education within the police, within the security apparatus itself giving them a different perspective on their role and having them go about so that is a double kind of challenge. that is the whole issue that was talked about in terms of political will but he may want to elaborate on this in terms of egypt is well as an interesting one. >> i would say i think the securitizations of a lot of the
egyptian social life which is a very important thing and i think you for mentioning that is also partly institutional. wanting to remember is that it wasn't a long time ago when the security was basically involved in almost every aspect of every public and in some cases a lot of private institutions and their affairs if you have to get to the university you basically have to get some kind of an approval for the person signing off. most of them have to get some kind of an approval from the office in the ministry of interior organizations as the security investigation services that exist until this day. but also, you know, i also thank you for bringing a lot of attention to the fact that this discussion talks about changing the securities sector to a very high level of policy discussion,
but there are -- there have been some really good work that, you know, has started, has taken off led by the egyptian civil society organizations which also features the involvement of the university of california san diego. working with the local communities to rethink and refrain the perceptions and understanding of neighborhood security so there are a lot of bottom-up approach is in changing the securities sector. in addition to the high level of policies that we have been discussing such as the initiatives for the police.
considerations around that and for egypt and tunisia if you are looking at the eastern european model as you can, how do you -- which of course may not be the case, how do you modify that with the fact that there aren't hundreds or thousands of europeans or americans on the ground sort of helping drive this forward? what is the possibility of success without that very presence motivation to do so? >> this is an interesting question. thank you very much. you know, i was thinking about the mention of south africa as a model. i was doing affairs of the end of the transition when nelson mandela became president, and went through this experience with them and offered solutions
and they basically couldn't deal with the advice they were given and to make judgments on which was the best, so they ended up not doing anything. which is maybe the problem here. it's very hard to see. in the situation like lydia -- and i will just give you an example meeting with a person that is in charge of the procurement and the donor assistance for the foreign ministry and after the conversation the brigadier-general said what you need? i need somebody that understands the personnel database and understand i have 300,000 people on the roles of the ministry and i have no idea who these people are. the old regime put out tens of thousands of people because they just wanted people to get a paycheck and they had been in the field industrious. as we have people that may be
policemen 40, 40,000, but we don't know. maybe 15 of those show up for work, 15,000 but who knows. than 80,000 people would sign up and now they are as well. you can see them on the second floor they are very boisterous. they wear the uniforms we give them but we don't know who they are either. so what i need is somebody on a personal databases and find out who live on the rules and that's where i need to start. so that's a good answer but it's an answer of the realities are not people who do ssr think the globally understand the context but look for a place you can actually have access and in this case in libya it was to help this man sort out this basic problem. if you do that than you can get everything else. >> anything quite on tunisia on this score?
november 5th we have an election but beyond we are approaching these in which one of the most prominent rituals associated with the new year begins to rear its head and that is inviting experts to make predictions about where we will be at the end of the coming year, not 2012, but 2013. this is often done with respect to where we can anticipate the accuracy rates of these predictions are abysmal. so, we have to be careful about how we will hold our predictors' to the accuracy of their projections. but given everything that we have discussed about where these prophecies are headed about the obstacles that they confront and
the possibilities for intervention, about the degree of influence the outside doctors might have if you would have to speculate in an informed way about where you think we will be with the securities sector reform and egypt and tunisia in particular and said libya aside come give me a sense of that. where do you think we will be? >> that is a tremendous question. i feel like i am on a sunday morning talk show. >> for me when i think about where the process these are going and i compare egypt and tunisia there is a kind of conversion going on. i can see real possibilities in the breakdown of tunisia from the domestic violence and this process coming to a halt. in the case of egypt, the great
asset as well as liability in the authoritarian system is the numerous points of power and the leverett negotiations you have to go through and then the checking process and that checking process has been a hindrance but it may create a context to push the process forward without a break down so i would predict the possibility of the breakdown and the possibility of the slow and grudging success and the relative success of egypt. >> and just to push that a low but further, what does the breakdown mean? what does it look like in tunisia? >> i could look like a violent episode that compels or invites the government to look to the security apparatus as an element to provide direct involvement in politics. it's a very tough question. >> some sort of the potential re-emergence of the security state on the condition of the declining public order?
>> i guess there's a tradition here in washington, d.c. when anybody is asked about making a position, they always make one of those nice predictions like the next 18 months are going to be critical or something along those lines. [laughter] >> so true. >> i won't do it on the sunday morning talk shows. >> but what i am going to say is i think one thing our discussion has alluded to is the relationship between the presidency and egypt and a variety of bureaucratic interests not just the military but each state is would be critical. the question of whether morsi is going to call what the states or the states are going to coopt morsi it's going to be extremely important. but what i would also say is it is not just the question of the confrontation that we have been waiting for written the
president between the very spirit of the policies to the president and the deep states particularly in the military and the security service, but we are also looking at the relationship between the president into the bureau of the muslim brotherhood. there are enough sufficient room for the tension between the two sides in such a way where an independent presidency could converge. i think it that actually happened sunday that is a new ball game and the situation in which you could have and the egyptian presidency have some wiggle room to and respond positively to the pressures for the transfer of the change in the security and elsewhere. thank you. >> i think that i'm going to use your statement about the next period it is in fact the case. i think the next eight to ten months will give us a better sense about whether the prediction is an optimistic take
but -- said it's not a prediction is just a scenario. >> to see what it will hold. in the next eight to ten months or so we are going to find out what the constitution will look like. it will be the first election held, the second set of elections and the first where we don't have a caretaker government anymore but we actually have the ruling government for tunisia. and that will tell us quite a bit about where it is going. and those are going to be enormous accomplishments that you have the transition of the elections and the constitution which provides the framework in one can seriously begin to think about the ssr reform. in terms of the balance and debate over the islamists and the moderates and the secularists, a lot will determine how these elections go if the progress comes.
i was talking to someone in tunisia recently and i said how are you feeling about the security context? because what we are seeing in the reports is the daily incident now between the police in which protesters and police have been killed or injured my biggest concern right now is a traffic that is what i really worry about continued as it normally does and that is the perception i find interesting is someone that is involved in the securities sector reform and engaged in these ministries that have a vision of it that is probably different from those of us here. who very much have the biggest concern in terms of security as the traffic in tunisia and it's very crazy certainly. ..
a year of very rocky times in which there's a test of strength is going to take place between the forces that are in each of these societies which are now beginning to emerge. when we all, the three of us,
four of us, we're traveling together a couple of times in the spring i think we all came back overly optimistic about the potential here. we were so struck with the talent and spirit of the people and available resources and the feeling of optimism that we struck saw that that i think we overlooked the fact the argument isn't over. now the argument is being formed. i think it will get a little bit worse before it gets better. by the end of the day we may be in a process where we will have in fact, in place, legitimate authorities that we can then go to and say, okay, now it is time to begin reform the they will say yes it is, we have legitimacy to do this and let me tell you what we want to do first and we can begin to move. >> very interesting. i think that was a really helpful set of concluding comments. bob, qerine, michelle,
wherever you are, thanks so many for your contributions. thanks for joining us. a round of applause for our panelists. [applause] >> coming up in just about 30 minutes from now we'll have live coverage as president obama delivers a statement from the white house east room about the economy and reducing the deficit. live coverage for you on our cam pan yonnet work c-span at 1:05 eastern today. >> if there is a mandate in yesterday's results there is mandate for to us find a way to work together on the solutions on the challenges we all face as a nation. my message is not juan of confrontation but one of conviction. in the weeks and months ahead we face a serious of tremendous challenges and great opportunity. >> the american people want us to work together. republicans want us to work together.
democrats want us to work together. they want a balanced approach to everything but especially this situation that we have dealing with the huge deficit and taxes that are part of that. >> the newly-elected congress starts work in january but the current congress still has work to do through the end of the year what is typically referred to as a lame-duck session. work is expected on the impending fiscal cliff including expiration of bush-era tax cuts, federal deficit, raising the debt ceiling and by how much and planned cuts to domestic and military spending known as sequestration. follow all the floor debates starting tuesday with live house coverage on c-span and the senate on c-span2. c-span invites middle and high school students to send a message to the president. through a short video, let president obama know what is the most important issue he should consider for 2013 for a chance to win the grand prize of $5,000.
the c-span student competition is open to grades six through 12 and the deadline is january for details go on line to studentcam.org. two advisors discuss the challenges that president obama will face in second term. dennis ross and george w. bush advisor james jeffrey, addressed iran's nuclear ambitions, the unrest in syria and their concerns about egypt's new government. this is an hour and a half. >> good afternoon. good afternoon and welcome to the washington institute. i'm rob satloff, the executive director and i'm delighted to see all of you here today. i think the interest in foreign policy in the wake of other presidential election is certainly
evident by the standing room only crowd that we have here today. we are now already into the process of transition. transition even with the same president. transitions are the most fluid and receptive moments in the presidential cycle to have an impact on the policy process. and so i'm, i take it, as a good sign there is so much interest in the foreign policy process by your presence here today. now i think that the transition from a first to a second obama administration may of course begin the day after an election but it doesn't end on inauguration day. this process is going to continue for some time. as the president's new or old team takes shape and where necessary seeks confirmation. as the new old team goes through the inevitable period of reassessment and redefinition of priorities and opportunities, and as other issues, domestic issues, fiscal cliff, for
example, impacts foreign policy, and let's not forget as the world recalibrates to the changes, or as some people say, the lack of changes here in washington. at the same time as we begin to talk about foreign policy and a second obama administration let's not forget that history doesn't stop or even slow down in the middle east. elections are coming up in israel, in jordan, in egypt, iran and elsewhere. we're seeing in front of our eyes more violent change happening in syria. the reverberations of which are being felt on everyone of that country's borders. elsewhere from beirut to bahrain domestic politics is at a low boil ready to burst out in a way that can affect our interests in very fundamental ways. there are two problems at the far ends of the threat spectrum. the iran nuclear challenge
on the one hand and the spread of al qaeda and affiliated terrorism on the other that will continue to dominate and lest we forget within a year of taking office both presidents obama and bush, his predecessor, were faced with previously unforeseen events that fundamentally challenged their middle east policies. 9/11 for president bush and the arab spring for president obama. so there's a lot on the agenda. today we're going to take a early look at what will be and what should be the foreign policy of a second obama administration in the middle east. now we at the washington institute, for us this is just the beginning of quite a number of events and, and undertakings. we'll produce a series of transition papers on key issues, sometimes by our sterling institute research staff.
sometimes by outside scholars and practitioners that we have commissioned to take a look at specific topics. so over the next several weeks we'll come together with some frequency, both here and in person and in the cyber world to focus on discrete individual topics. but today we begin this process with a more general discussion in which i and my two distinguished colleagues will examine the broader issues at stake in the middle east for a second obama administration. at this moment, if i can, just remind people, if you could please turn your cell phones off, not just to silent but totally off. we are broadcasting live on c-span and we have other esteemed members of the, of the journalist world here with us filming and recording. now each of my colleagues has special experience dealing with second terms.
my colleague den necessary ross who will lead off first came to the white house at the beginning of a second term, the second reagan administration. in fact his first publication at the washington institute just before going into the second reagan administration, you didn't think he was that old, did you, the second reagan administration was our first ever publication titled, middle east policy planning for a second reagan administration. so dennis has great experience in dealing with second administrations. he did it not just with ronald reagan but he also did it on the other side of the aisle with president bill clinton which he saw up close from the inside. now both of those administrations had fascinating initiatives in the middle east. dennis wasn't involved in the second reagan administration's most noteworthy initiative,
iran's arms for hostages but he was involved in, in the most noteworthy middle east initiative of the second clinton administration which of course was a major push for middle east peace in the final year of president clinton's second term. on my left is jim jeffrey. jim is a visiting fellow at the washington institute, just retired from diplomatic service after completing his tour as u.s. ambassador in iraq. prior to that posting jim served as u.s. ambassador to turkey. so he was on the front lines of two of iran's neighbors andless we forget, also on the front lines of two of syria's neighbors. so jim had a fascinating perch in recent time to look at two of the most important issues on the administration's adenda. jim knows about second materials from his experience as deputy security advisor in the bush administration. of course in that second
term we saw at least two major middle east initiatives. the iraq surge and the annapolis process. so we have two second term experts to open our discussion on what we will look for and what we should look for in the second term of president obama's administration and then i will come back and offer some remarks of my own. first turn to dennis ross. dennis. >> thank you. thank you for reminding me of my age. for all of you i was a child prodigy. that is one of the reasons i was assuming that role during the rage gan administration. it is too i've had the experience working through thebeginnings of second terms although one of themost important things to keep in mind is precisely because it's a second term you have an administration that already has an established approach to the world. you may well have different personnel who come in but if
in fact it's the president who has been shaping the policy and is the decisionmaker, you have a certain orientation. so i think the orientation is not something that is necessarily going it change but you can see a set of challenges that have to be confronted in. if you look at the obama administration and you look at the greater middle east right now the reality is that the three of us don't really have sufficient time to go through all the things that they're going to confront but let me just do a quick thumbnail sketch and then focus on a couple issues i think are going to be most prominent in the early going. iran almost by definition. it has been an issue that has preoccupied the president from the very beginning of the administration. it will become even more important in 2013. i will explain why i believe twernt 13 will probably be a decisive year one way or the other. the arab awakening. i use the term awakening as opposed to spring because i think it has been an awakening. spring implied this would be
a quick transformation. it would be early flowering. we were all going to see that wonderful re-establishment of a entirely new kind of middle east and it would going to happen in a linear fashion and we would all be thrilled by it. that isn't to say at some point this arab awakening may not in fact produce a really genuine change that could be for the better but what's worth noting it will take a long time before that actually materializes if it does. that will obviously be on the agenda and shape what the president does. syria is one manifestation of the awakening but unfortunately it is a manifestation that has gone in a direction that is profoundly bad and increasingly looks like syria could become a failed state unless something more is done. there is the ongoing challenges of al qaeda in north africa. there are other challenges throughout the region to be sure.
there is a whole question of peace and is a, is an approach to two states going to be sustainable over time? so there are a series of broad challenges in the middle east and i haven't even mentioned one other one that could obviously be something that confronts the administration. that could be succession in saudi arabia which in and of itself could raise a series of interesting kinds of questions. now if you think that these are the only challenges in foreign policy that the president is going to face, obviously that is not the case but we're here primarily to talk more broadly about the the middle east. what happens in terms of political change in china? its implications for our orientation not only generally but how it affects economy but something in the middle east has to be thought about. there is also a question of the future of the european union which will have an impact again not only on the economy but could-haves also have impact in terms of what happens in the middle east. we can reserve some of those questions for the q&a.
what i would like to focus on are a few of the key issues that i think are most immediate, and most prominent. let me start with iran. i do think that 2013 will be a decisive year. for many people who have long memories, i say, gee, they have been hearing a lot of people talk about iran for a long time and every year is supposed to be the decisive year. why do i say this should be the decisive year? for two reasons. one i think actually the impact of sanctions is profound. for the first time it is truly profound in the case of iran. we have the supreme leader two weeks ago referring to sanctions as being brutal, his word, the sanctions are brutal. this is someone who has said on an ongoing basis, look, we lived with sanctions since the beginning of the islamic republic. the sanctions make us stronger. the sanctions make us self-sufficient. he has a long litany describing how the sanctions in effect something ultimately will turn iran into its benefit. now he is is saying the
sanctions are brutal and the truth is, they are brutal. you look what is happening in the iranian energy area, not only the fact that they're able to sell, you know, less than 50% of what they were selling before. it is that their production, their output is down from over 4 million barrels a day to 2.6 million barrels a day. part of the reason for that is precisely because of the sanctions, the inability to continue to invest in the energy infrastructure, the inability to continue to pump and store oil as they shut down oil fields that may not be so easy for them to recoup. you look what is happening to the currency, the devaluation. there are some estimates that the currency is being devalued by half every two months. think about what that means. it means that what you're buying, when you go and you buy something it costs you twice as much. it means what you have in the bank is worth half as much. if this is continuing to happen, it is bound to have an effect on the society as a whole whole.
look at what the supreme leader has been saying over the last couple weeks. on more than one occasion he has explicitly called for officials to stop fighting each other. this is not the first time that's happened but it is interesting when you look at some of what the criticisms are. when the head of the revolutionary guard is criticizing the head of the central bank for the currency problem that says something interesting. why is the revolutionary guard commenting on the currency? not just that the speaker of their parliament is attacking the iranian president. so the head of the military attacking the iranian president for the mismanagement. the focus on their economic problems has become more acute and in a sense what that suggests to me again they may well be increasing their interest in looking for a way out. you look at some of their commentary today that's emerging. you know when you have the ministry of intelligence website offering a kind of analysis where it even suggests that diplomacy could make sense. as obviously better than saying the use of force.
these are not the kind of commentaries you necessary see in the past. it doesn't mean that diplomacy is necessarily to produce an outcome we want. but in my mind the chance of diplomacy working and producing something may be greater now than it was before. that is not necessarily the only reason or necessarily the most important reason why i say this year could be the decisive year. the reason is even though they're under great economic strain and penalty their nuclear programs continues and the problem from our standpoint is that the president has made very clear that our objective is prevention, not containment. preventing them from having a nuclear weapon, not living with it after the fact. the problem is by the end of 2013 if the pace of the current development of the nuclear program continues we may no longer be in a position it know that we could actually prevent them from presenting the world with a fait accompli. so that means to me if your objective is prevention and by the end of 2013 you may
not know whether in fact you can prevent them from actually presenting the world with a nuclear fait accompli then that increases the sense of urgency about getting something done. the combination of what the impact of sanctions have been, the reality that prevention, if it is going to have meaning we may have to act on it before the end of 2013 leads me to conclude we will see some kind of significant diplomatic initiative by the president, by the obama administration, on the, on the nuclear issue with the iranians because no president is going to end up using force without having demonstrated unmess takeably to the world and to the american public that we exhausted every possibility before we ended up resorting to the use of force. what i'm suggesting to you the combination of the pressure on the one hand, the pace of the program on the other and likelihood they will be at least given a way out means we will see
this come to a head. either we'll find a diplomatic way out during the course of this year or the prospect of using force goes up dramatically. to me 2013 is likely to be decisive on iran. the second issue i want to raise is syria. what we're seeing happen with syria is obviously a trend that increasingly looks like syria could well become a failed state. now the prospect of syria becoming a failed state given who its neighbors are, iraq, turkey, jordan, lebanon, israel, the prospect of it becoming a failed state and the conflict on the inside radiating outward and we're seeing more and more examples of that, all of that creates increasing pressure to try to do more to affect the situation there. it is not an accident in my mind the secretary of state has focused on trying to do more to create an alternative to the syrian national council and produce a more coherent syrian opposition. my own feeling is that that's one step that will be taken.
i think there will be more steps that will need to be taken and i think in this regard one of the things to keep focused on is not just this emerging idea that has come out of turkey about a new way to produce a no-fly zone, meaning use patriots as a more interesting innovative, creative way of possibly creating no-fly zones. that may or may not be something that gets ex-lord. i do believe the prospect of us providing lethal assistance to syrian opposition will also go up and i say that because the balance of forces in the syrian opposition is such that as time goes by and the radicalists, once who always seem to have the money and always seem to have the weapons, they will become much more dom month in that terms of that opposition. doesn't serve the american interest and doesn't serve the interests of the stability in the region. here again i think the prospect of the administration seeing the need to do more is going to go up. i think the focus on the opposition is one
manifestation of that. but i think that i think won't be the only one. the third area that i would like to focus on briefly is the whole issue of the arab awakening but principally with an eye toward egypt. what we see in egypt is what i call a interesting duality of realities. on the one hand we find the muslim brotherhood, president morsi, is no longer a member of the muslim brotherhood but clearly he surrounds himself with people who are, and reality is today the muslim brotherhood controls the institutions of the state with the exception of the judiciary. one can assume they will make more and more effort to gain control over that as well. but the muslim brotherhood continues to have a very clear ideology. anybody who thinks that the ideology will somehow disappear i think is kidding themselves. when i talk about dual reality that seems to exist, you see on the one hand a reality where president morsi sends a letter to
shimon peres and after shimon peres's office releases the letter, and there's a backlash from the muslim brotherhood, president morsi comes out and denies that he sent the letter. it is never a really good sign when you deny a fact. either in a sense your politics or your ideology don't permit you to acknowledge a fact. when the, when 16 egyptian soldiers killed in the sinai, the muslim brotherhood's first response was to accuse the mossad of doing it obviously not true. obviously having to create a reality that is an alternative reality. not a good sign. it's true president morsi didn't say that but the muslim brotherhood did say that. a couple weeks ago the supreme guide of the muslim brotherhood body called all jews are corrupt and called for jihad and only thing israelis understand is violence. when there was backlash from the other side, the muslim brother came out and said he didn't say it. when you have to deny reality says something about
the durability of your belief system. says something about your inability to adjust to the real world and that is not a good sign. there is another reality that seems also to exist at the same time. and that is a recognition somehow if the muslim brotherhood and if president morsi are going to have credibility and build legitimacy in egypt they have to deliver and that means addressing the economy and that requires a certain set of imperatives. here it i interesting when the muslim brotherhood was not in power, the muslim brotherhood was the against the imf standby enlo because of the, one of the reasons at least the conditionality that was going to be imposed. now president morsi is in favor of it and not only is prepared to accept the conditionality but wants the loan not to be 3.2 billion but 4.8 billion again recognizing there is an economic need and there's a need to respond to it. you had maybe the largest delegation of american business people go about six weeks ago to egypt led by
the american chamber of commerce. they met with president morsi and met all the leaders of the muslim brotherhood and everyone they spoke to said we want to do business with you. we want to partner with you. we want to create a climate and environment to invest. we know we need this. the renaissance plan itself is governed by a certain economic logic and rationality. so here are two different interesting realities. the economic imperatives seem to be understood by the egyptian leadership. the recognition that somehow they actually have a public that they have to respond to. this is not simply the egypt of mubarak -- where you could seem to discount the public seems to affect their thinking and that has implications for what the administration will do. it means if we stand by certain principles which in my mind reflect practicalities we have an ability to affect their behavior. what does it mean in terms of principles? well it means first and
foremost respect minority rights. that's a principle for us but also a practicality for them. if you see large numbers of the cop tick christians leaving egypt, that's not exactly going to be a source of encouragement for people on the outside to invest. if they exclude half their population and 56% of the egyptian women are illiterate, this is not a prescription for a successful society. it is our principle but also their practicality. you look at the draft constitution you see some language about equality that is quite reassuring. you see other language about principles of sharia, depending how they're interpreted may not be as encouraging. if they maintain political pluralism which something again ultimately if they want to succeed they will need to, something fits that irpracticality but fits our principles it ought to guide us. lastly they have to fulfill their international obligations. first and foremost living up to the peace treaty with
israel. now here again it may be our prescription pill but also their practicality. who is going to invest in egypt if they look like they're trying to invite a confrontation or conflict with is ral? the answer is nobody. and the extent to which they are very much governed by the need to address their economic needs and imperatives suggests to me that there is an approach we can have and that the administration will have and i will just note, in the first 24 hours after our embassy was under assault and nothing was done, when the president called president morsi and said, you don't protect our people you get nothing from us, lo and behold all the inhibitions that were there for the first 24 hours, not wanting to look like the mubarak regime, not wanting to look like they weren't standing up with other islamists on the street, giving front to islam embodied in the video, suddenly all that disappeared and they provided protection. it means if we are governed
by principles and practicalities, so much for turning off cell phones, one thing i know for sure, it is not from me. you know, then i think that, we have a chance, i think, to try to shape what can happen in egypt with full humility. this is story being written by them. it is not going to be written by us but the extent to which in fact they need help from the outside we should be prepared to provide it. we don't want a failed state in egypt but there should be ground rules for it and i think that will also be something that is very prominent for the administration and i think the administration will act on it. i have two more minutes? okay. two more minutes. the peace issue. you know, one of the realities of the arab awakening it has had a chilling effect on both sides. abu mazen looks at the growth of political islam, the rise of the muslim brotherhood, the impact that
may have no the only with regard to hamas but whole area around him and if he thinks about making compromise, what he sees is the high likelihood this is going to produce a backlash. he gives a, he gives an interview with channel 2 in israel where he speaks that he is personally not going back to -- and see him burning in effigy and demonstrations against him in gas salt he can assume what the consequences are if in fact he takes these kind of steps. so it had a chilling effect on him. also given what you see with the arab awakening it made him perhaps not for surprising reasons act more as a populist. on the flipside within israel. same thing. you're going to do a deal with abu mazen. is it going to be durable? you know, what are you going to face right after it? this is a time where rather thinking about taking big leaps forward there is tendency to sort of think about what are the risks and
not what are the opportunities. i would say it's understandable that both side have that view but i would also say something else. you know, the status quo won't remain at that time tick. demographic clock will keep ticking. . .
with the greatest single problem which in my mind is this belief on each side. the israeli public believes today that the palestinians are not interested in the to stay out, and as they talk about the two states, it is part of a phased approach or a palestinian state and national state and palestinians look at the israelis and say they are not interested in two states and will not surrender control. why do they build and what should be part of our state? so neither one has a belief that the other is committed to two states. and the challenge at this point is how do you change that dynamic? as i said i have two more minutes. i do have a proposal which actually i do have a 14-point proposal and i could do it in about three minutes by want to wait until the -- okay. i know there's a lot of rumors about me that i never took
guidance and that isn't true. i took at times. anyway, the point is if you look at iran, syria, the weakening and the peace issue, that is a huge agenda for the administration in the middle east and i haven't made a reference to the transition talking about the great men least i haven't made a reference to the transition and afghanistan which by definition this is a critical year for the administration on that, and obviously it's a signature issue for the president, so that will obviously have to be part of what is done, and then there is the one last sort of wild card which is there are always wild cards in the middle east. every administration always faces a surprise. so, one of the things you are trying to do as you think about at the beginning of any term whether it is a first term or transition to the second term, do try to think about what can you do to shape the landscape so that you are in a much better position to deal with surprises when they come? i will stop there. >> thank you. [applause]
>> thank you it's not fun following dennis, but a couple of initial points. first of all, i agree very much with him about this administration's follow-on second term will probably be similar to the first, perhaps not quite as prudent, and that is probably a good thing but i will say from my own experience the second to bush party three administration was different probably defeat could probably different but everything is possible out there. and so, let's begin. i will talk a little bit about some of the same issues dennis raised and then go forward on some of the other issues that we are going to be looking at. first of all, job one in our
diplomacy for the middle east has to be continuing to rebuild our economic and financial strength here at home. it is vitally important. we see this not only in the ability to maintain our military strength upon which so much rests, but also we see this as important for something like the iran sanctions thanks to the financial strength of our system that we can put banks around the world under pressure dealing with iran with. it's because of the relations that we have come a diplomatic and energy with companies to the countries like iraq to saudi arabia that we can count on the additional production to balance the loss of the iranian oil and it's because of our own growth and hydrocarbon production here at home that we are able to absorb some of this and move forward so this is very important and i think that we should focus on that and i know that the obama administration
will. but nonetheless, there is a famous quote that may be miss attributed to leon platts ki that says you may not be interested in law the law is interested in you. we may not be interested as we focus on the economy in the middle east but believed the the middle east including the laws are interested in us. as dennis said not only in afghanistan that the transition of iraq has led to the perception in some circles. i was in the field that the united states is withdrawing from the region. this isn't true because of the same time we are building up just on the military side. so the defense and other support for israel. the missile defense systems in turkey very strong development of coalition military defense capabilities in the gulf and in continued operations against al qaeda. but nonetheless that is one of the first things the obama administration has to do is deal with this perception that on the
military side we are pulling out. the presumption is out there. as dennis said, iran is critical. he went through the main reasons why iran is so focused on our attention and why we have so much attention on it. i would like to add looking at the pratt as well as the depth in the problem of iran, its problem on the nonproliferation, regional stability, oil markets, the world economy, which is dependent upon the price of oil, our relations with israel, the role of the security council and in the city council in the u.n. almost everything important is at stake in this. this is the most critical and most dangerous situation that the administration will be facing in the next year. looking at in the wind while this year is critical we have to realize this isn't all about
some misunderstanding or fixable problem with iran not to getting about its civil nuclear program or even its nuclear weapons program colliding with the international community. these are all manifestations of the long term confrontation that we and the rest of the region has with iran at least since the 1970's and this confrontation will go on regardless of whether we get a nuclear deal or have a strike to prevent iran from moving to that nuclear weapons capability. we are going to have to deal with this problem over the longer term just as we have the last 30 years because it flows from kuran's view of its role in the region and the inconsistency of the view with the view of the other countries in the region, our values and our role both in the region had has the leading power throughout the world. a couple of issues related to
this that we need to look at, first of all, the obama administration has done i think a very good job first of all reaching out a hand to iran and that didn't work. then a very tough set of policies ranging from the sanctions to the military deployment in the region that are basically beef up our capability to withstand an eye iranian action to threaten it if it comes to that. in addition, the president in taking the position making clear this includes military force, and while they avoided a grid lines going a little bit closer to that in the debates, talking about breakthrough capacities, breakout capacities. he's basically laid down a very important market. this is a very serious thing. because if iran were ever to move to that point and we were not to react, we would lose an
awful lot of not just face in the region but an awful lot of support i would predict. so we have to be ready to carry that out. i sympathize with the president on the issue of the grid lines so that can be debated either way. it is a lot of arguments, one way or the other but certainly no administration likes to be tied down but there is one potential red line fact we have to deal with in any profession scenario we don't say when we would strike and that is as he alluded to if iran gets a nuclear weapon what do we do then whacks one argument would be if the of a nuclear device or nuclear capability or enough uranium to free quickly enriched uranium to develop one of these things and it can be done very quickly in that case, a strong argument can be made that we make it clear that we will strike under those circumstances. that's more dangerous but believe me, iran with nuclear capability that everybody recognizes is going to be very,
very hard to contain. and looking at the military side, one of the things we do want to avoid of course is a military clash with iran from the conventional side be it in the aftermath of the strike, be it through an accident or some other incident such as we had from 1986 to 1988 with iran to read it is very, very important that if possible we avoid this and the iranians avoid this because of the risk of the actions breading. the uncontrolled nature of this and military engagements and the impact of course on the oil markets and the streets of hormuz and all these other things in here everybody knows. but we have to be prepared to face this eventuality. this means that we have to be in a position militarily to detour in almost any condition and iranians detention and we have
to deal to win decisively. this is absolutely critical. it's what we did in 1988, and it had a very sandlin affect on the iranians reaction to last for a decade to come. as a, that is something the will require continued american attention and continued american deployments. beginning with the january 22 of defense policy guidance paper, which people referred to as the pivot, the emphasis seems to be on asia including the military emphasis. i would urge that we would ensure that maintaining the air, naval and air and missile defense system in the gulf region to determine the necessary defeat iran should remain our number one military priority at least through this dangerous period coming up in the year ahead. finally on iran, given the
complexity, and dennis and i have both worked on the white house and we know how extraordinarily difficult it is to coordinate various agencies and activities with iran we have energy policy, we have financial policy, overall economic policy, we have intelligence policy including the covert operations, obviously the military wing of the operations, and we have diplomacy in putting the nuclear account. it's very important that this would be closely coordinated on a daily level at least at the subcabinet level and we took the administration will look at how that can best be done. it cannot be business as usual with iran in the year ahead. there are models. david mikulski from the institute in the new yorker wrote about the way the u.s. combat organized itself at that level to deal with the reactor in syria on a daily high level
basis. the bush administration organized its iraq policy with the general in another way. there are several models out there. but again, it's important that iran not be seen as one of ten or 15 problems we have to do with on a daily basis. iran is problem number one and is going to stay problem number one for a while. the duty of the middle east there are plenty of the problems of the don't compete with iran and they can compete with each other. let me touch on a couple. first, syria. i concur with anything that dennis said that a couple points we have to focus on. first of all, for the longest time many people felt that the fall of the saud was inevitable so therefore we wouldn't have to do that much to provoke get. i'm not so sure. not because i don't think that this insurgency is effective. i've been on the receiving end and this is a very powerful one. it's a very effective one.
the problem is that iran has committed a powerful friends that appear to be rather syria has committed powerful friends that appear to be ready to go to mass to make sure that the regime will stay in power and maintain control over at least part of syria and that of course is russia and iran and the result would be al-assad steven pour and the victory which is not going to be good for our simultaneous efforts to try to move iran to the negotiating table to seize the nuclear weapons, and in white portions of syria, a no-man's land rather like the fata of somalia where the militants perhaps probably associated with al qaeda would find a new home. we already see some of this. this is another reason why the administration needs to engage in putting in beijing through military means if necessary the merkley or indirectly through providing weapons and things like no-fly zones.
we need to do more and we need to do more urgently or this is great to slip out of control. at best -- and it isn't very good at sifry at salles -- at worst we are going to see any emerging sunni shia fisher across the middle east would be followed by violence and fighting in iraq and elsewhere. let me touch on iraq. it hasn't received too much commentary either in the debates in the campaign or even some of the discussions about the post election foreign policy. it needs to be a priority for several reasons. first of all iraq is a success. it is a success because of the efforts of the united states and our allies and of the iraqi people. and it is an important success because it is right in the middle of the middle east. it ties into every of the problem from iran to the cltv to shia sunni relations to the kurds and turkey and above all,
to energy. it is a space state with a lot of flaws but it is a functioning democracy and that is a good thing. and something that we need to do our best to try to continue to encourage. the administration is putting a lot of effort into this. this needs to continue for several serious risks. the biggest is of course that syria will pull iraq under as the various groups with different directions. the kurds in one direction and sunni in another and supporting iran and the al assad government. so far that hasn't happened, the longer the situation in syria is allowed to continue, the more likely that that very bad a scenario will occur and one of the main reasons we kept our troops in iraq and the last was to maintain the unity of iraq to read that unity depends on the floor of the end democracy. that is what we have now with all it needs to be supported. the other major threat to it is the debate, struggles and
disputes between the kurds and the central government under the prime minister maliki. that is a complicated issue, but one of the factors playing a huge role is oil either the glue that will hold iraq together with kurdistan contributing to some degree to the massive increase in the iraqi exports that we will see by the end of this decade. all new crude oil that will come on the international market is predicted to come out of iraq mainly from the south but some from the north if all goes well. that is a big if and that is something we have to play a huge role. we are the administration has been engaged since the summer on working the deal that is currently in place to get the kurdish oil in the 200 barrels a day into turkey out of the pipelines controlled by the central government but it's a
very difficult balance being pulled in different directions. the iranians are potential players in this they are not too happy of the increase in the iraqi oil exports so this is an area where the administration needs to continue its focus. finally, al qaeda dennis touched on that and i touched on a double bed with syria but this remains a very, very dangerous threat not only to us but to the stability in the region and there is a new factor that we saw in iraq and didn't think we would see elsewhere and that is al qaeda monitoring itself as the champion of the sunni muslims against the shia muslims. back in 2005, 2006 when zarqawi was pushing this, he was under criticism from the headquarters of you will in the fattah at doing that at times it should be the americans rather than the shia muslims. in fact by the time i was iraq, al qaeda was basically leaving as a loan and that was partly because we were heavily armed.
but the of the reason was their targets of preference was the shia. we are seeing this again and syria. this is a very, very bad development and it continues. we went to war twice in the bosnian -- in the balkans in bosnia and kosovo to prevent such a split along religious lines in the balkans and the middle east it is far more important and far more dangerous than the balkans. so we need to watch this. finally, on al qaeda for various legal reasons as well as politically and domestic reasons and diplomatic reasons we see this as a war. but we haven't done a good job recently explaining to the american people the implications of that. if it is a war y then do we put these people on trial? there are answers to that as the legal enemy combatants. but the this is a complex issue that is crystallized in the criticism of the drones. we don't want to do is have a
lack of clarity about our goals and our tools to lead to a situation as we saw before 9/11 that we were afraid to go after these people because we don't think that we have enough legitimacy, we don't think that we have enough support from the american people. right now, as well as the middle east and all of the areas where there isn't effective government control from the fattah to mali although the situation is in better to yemen, previously in fallujah and other places, al qaeda or the al qaeda group's popup. they are a threat to the stability of the region and to us and the need to be kept under the highest pressure. i will stop there. thank you very much. [applause] let's imagine for a minute that there is a courageous national security council staff member who is writing a memo to the president outlining the middle
east policy for a second term. or maybe he's not such a courageous staffer and he already has a job lined up outside of government for think-tank like this. he may offer the following remarks to the president. first, the four broad lessons i urge you to take from your first term experience. one, as much as we would like to wish it away it is a mistake to think one can put it away from the middle east towards asia as though we have a fixed amount of bandwidth and the luxury of reapportioning it based on our preference. for the foreseeable future we can't avoid dealing with threats and challenges emanating from this region. number two, middle east politics, mr. president, revolves around two main threats. one, the ambitions of the hegemonic iran, and number two, the spread of radical sunni extremism. this is what defines middle east
politics in the early years of the 21st century. other issues such as the israeli-palestinian conflict or important, especially important to the israelis and palestinians. but have little impact on the larger scheme of things. three, in this part of the world, perhaps elsewhere, there are few happily ever after spivvy it with starts with remarkable hope and inspiration it rarely ends that way. look at the bloodless revolution, the spirit of terrie square, the peaceful protests in dorah. anybody that followed the oslo process learned this lesson a long time ago. but you, mr. president, like everyone else in the new administration learns it for the first time. at last come as an overall lesson, as much as words matter, whether it is the cairo speech
today is the 70th anniversary of the landing on north africa and prisoner agreed jihad of american freedom once again but we don't remember that because words matter so much less than actions. if those are three broad lessons were the three most urgent issues on your agenda here won't repeat the words of my colleagues because the iran nuclear negotiations dealing with iran more generally, number one bringing down assad as quickly as possible. number two, with the third i would add this the following. preventing the collapse of one or more additional pro-western regimes. especially the pro-western monarchies. the three are the top of the list. bahrain, jordan and morocco. morocco has figured out a recipe for survival and bahrain has the
big brother saudi arabia looking out for it. jordan, however, is the most vulnerable and the one that is lost would undermine the u.s. interests in the multiple and immediate ways. now, for the life of me, i have not heard a good explanation as to why the saudis are providing virtually no assistance to jordan. and as a corollary, i can't understand why the saudis are providing virtually no assistance to aid to egypt. just think of what is going on in jordan and egypt today. these two countries, each of whom borders the world's most resources rich energy part of the world, today are undergoing rather draconian restrictions on the uses of energy. the lights are out in cairo every night at 10:00 and jordan has gas rationing and they live virtually right next door to saudi arabia. those are the most urgent issues. who are the three leaders who
deserve their special attention, mr. president. well, first let's start with the prime minister of israel. if he gets another term as prime minister, she will be with you throughout your presidency locked at the hip or perhaps another part of the anatomy. [laughter] your interests state to state are confident and complementary. you don't have to love each other, but you have to have -- but you have a big agenda with each other. a big agenda that requires you to work together. it is very important for mr. benjamin netanyahu to work together with you, you of course are the great power, israel is the small power. but you have a role to play in building a new relationship with him as well. secondly, and here i will echo in a certain fashion what jim
jeffries said. the second that i would put on this list is the prime minister of iraq iraq is the third real of the middle east diplomacy no one must talk about it in public because it conjures of such bad memories from the last decade. but iraq is important. geography is destiny and the geography between iran and syria is critical to the future of the middle east and to our interest in this part of the world. we have an important role to play against the prime minister of the democratically elected government we need to find a way to work with him better. the third leader i would focus on isn't a particular person, it is the next generation of saudi leaders. as my colleague noted earlier this week, there's already been the beginning the jump to the next generation with the employment of a new interior
minister from the next generation of the saudi principles. the sons of the founders may see their demise political as well as actuarial and quick succession during your next term as president. now is the time before that happens to build deeper understandings on strategy and reform with the leaders that will come to take their place. so, what then are the three calamities we can prevent? and we have to think about preventing. i referred a moment ago to the demise of the kingdom of jordan. i won't go on about that. but secondly would be the collapse of the palestinian authority. it is of course a bit of a luxury to think about resolving the israeli-palestinian conflict over the last four years. would be important and vital interest to the united states to prevent moving backwards in the
relationship, and the most dangerous backward move would be the collapse of the palestinian authority. there are important measures the united states can do to help the israelis and palestinians build on the less well-known but important achievements that are under way, economic relationship, security relationships, and to help ensure that the palestinian authority stays intact at least to continue to provide the potential for the new diplomacy in the future. the third calamity that we can prevent the emergence of the enclave. we shouldn't overlook the possibility that sinai, that buffer zone that make peace possible, a generation ago becomes the source of renewed conflict in the years ahead. we have an important role to play working especially with the government of egypt and with egypt and israel together both
militarily and in terms of civilian investment to make sure that sinai doesn't become busbee eight or doesn't become somalia or the source that exports with instability throughout the area. what are the three big initiatives that we can undertake? pure i can repeat one that dennis referred to which is rethinking our relationship with egypt under the islamist rule. our current approach towards egypt if you look at the mechanics and the tools that we use is essentially a holdover from the mubarak era with a few band-aids on at. we haven't really thought through a strategy, policy, the tools and methods of implementation of the new relationship with with of a new relationship and the civil society, the whole range of items. second, and more specifically an initiative that is related to
egypt, there won't be a u.s. egypt free trade agreement given all the uncertainty in egypt with in the foreseeable future. but if it is serious, egypt can read many of the benefits of free trade through the expansion of the system with israel. israel would do this in a heartbeat and with even lower the amount of an israeli continent to be required as part of the deal. but that would require the islamist president of egypt to recognize the benefits of broadened relationship and to in fact utter the word publicly israel, something which he hasn't yet done in his official capacity. a third initiative, repairing turkish israel ties. it's overdue, it's in our interests and in the interest of both of these countries i know mr. president you try once to do
this and we did not succeed the the times have changed. syria has happened, it's weaker today than before and should he get reelected he will be after his election than he was after the last time we tried to do this after the politics is clarified it's time to try this again. one last set of items were the game changers what are the unknowns as dennis referred to every administration has to deal with at some point in this part of the world i'm sure that i will succumb to a lack of adequate creativity, but here at least for a handful of game changers that may occur on your watch for which we need to be prepared the next wave of mass and potentially violent protests
already i mentioned the possibility of jordan and about rain what's not allowed in saudi arabia after the events of 2011 who can say with 100% certainty that the recent signs of some unrest of some rioting and protests may not catch fire even in saudi arabia. second, terrorism. affirming what jim said a moment ago. this of course happened to president bush from an unforeseen way and 9/11 and almost again with president obama with the attacks in benghazi. we shouldn't rule out the entire range of potential terrorist attacks and what would do to america's relations and to america's set of priorities in the middle east taking down an airplane blowing of the series
of embassies and attacking civilians, foreign governments as was tried in washington with the attack on the saudi ambassador and the foreign governments using terrorism even on our soil. it is a whole range of possibilities. let's not for close dealing with them. third, a sinai clash on steroids. we saw in august of 2011, how the attempt by terrorists, the effort by the terrorists to kill the israelis triggered the reaction that ended up with the egypt and israel peace treaty being this far away from total collapse. i measured this as being the thickness on the door of the israeli embassy in cairo outside of which the protesters were banding down the door to attack the american -- the diplomats on the other side of the door. and that is when the military controlled egypt. today there is a different situation. another clash triggered by
terrorists seeking to promote egypt, israel, eminently possible. we have to prepare now to prevent a spiral of escalation. fourth, we have warned about this but the potential for the u.s. and syria and the deployment as we have promised massive numbers of american soldiers and perhaps in concert with the troops from other nations into the conflict and syria this would be a dramatic change on the ground, and would transform not just the cerium conflict but transform your hopes for keeping american boots off the ground in the middle east tour route your second term. fifth, perhaps a moment of opportunity. the green movement. let us not rule out the possibility that as elections approach in iran or some other triggered event there's a resurgence of popular call for
change on the streets of tehran. let's be prepared this time differently than we were prepared last time particularly for taking advantage and hopefully moving iran into a different direction and something dennis referred to the potential for supplies and iranian break out. this means to be prevented at all cost, mr. president. so far as you've noticed, i have avoided in this memo using the word legacy not once but remember this if you try to resolve all the other issues on this list or try to fix the palestinian conflict for example people may never remember it would be the sixth president in a row to try to fail to solve the israeli conflict but if on your watch iran breaks up and achieves a nuclear weapon capability this is what the on
your epitaph you are the first president to be on his watch when iran got the ball. so these are my suggestions. i am going to take a vacation. [laughter] >> thank you very much. [applause] >> we will open the floor for your questions. if you can please identify to whom you are making the question coming and i will ask my colleagues to come up here to respond. all the way in the far back. there are microphones around. please. >> [inaudible] >> my question [inaudible] if they are working on -- [inaudible]
the leading negotiations with the regime on the grand bargain [inaudible] >> i have no idea whether that's true. i would be very surprised for that to be the case. the administration has plenty of highly skilled people who know the issue and are immersed in it, so if it's going to be a negotiation as an employee and will include those people. i think there will be a negotiation as i've said there be a diplomatic initiative to test the proposition that the iranians want only would they say they want. they say they want civil nuclear power. and i can envision a kind of proposal that would allow them to have the civil nuclear power with restrictions the would prevent them from being able to convert that into a nuclear weapons capability.
number two, i am quite convinced that the president very seriously would like to achieve this for diplomatic means the plan also persuaded that there was a debate within the administration that the president thought about very carefully, and the debate was between the prevention and the containment and he made it very conscious decision for the prevention. and i think when he made the decision he also understood that there were implications of the diplomacy feels it leads you down the path on the use of force raided right think that he would act on it? absolutely he would act on it, but like anyone, he would like to achieve this in the diplomatic means. i think for this chance of achieving the diplomatic means is continuing to have the pressure felt which is being felt, making it clear that when it comes to the diplomacy we want to succeed but they have much more to lose than anyone else.
>> thank you. my question is [inaudible] he suggested that the newly elective president concluding peace between the israelis and palestinians of a two-stage solution is no longer a priority while maintaining. what in your opinion could happen to give it some priority? >> well as i said i had a 14-point proposal and now that you've asked me for it -- [laughter] look, i think the key is how do you preserve the possibility of the two stayed out come when you have such this belief on the part of the public and specifically what i was trying to get out is its this belief about the commitment on the other side to two states. and the idea that somehow you are going to be able to make peace in the context of this belief is a complete illusion.
you have to try to restore the for at least try to find some way to give them a reason to take a second look. and that's why i would like -- malae suggest when i outlined these 14 points i don't want them to be doing it unilaterally because what we have seen in the unilateralism the only thing that breeds is the worst kind of unilateralism. when you need to restore is the faith in peacemaking. that's not -- there hasn't been a loss of confidence. that is trivial. confidence you rebuild. you restore. when you lose faith it is fundamental, and that has to be somehow that really does you have to work very hard to to rebuild that. so i would like the 14 points that are more designed to be an agenda for the conversations because the conversations degette today are mostly conversations where the top past each other. as a the kind of agenda items that i would like to see them be prepared to discuss with the palestinians would be first to
be prepared to offer compensation to any settler who would be prepared to leave. the logic either leave or go back to the locks and the logic is again if the oversight is convinced that all you are about is preserving your control or continuing to build on what is their state they are saying no that is in the case. second, start to building houses within israel that would accommodate those the would leave. again it sends the same kind of message but also to the iran settlers. those that are forced out feel that they were not taken care of. third build only on the blocks. the israeli definition of the blocks is 8% of the west of the barrier, same definition of the blocs would be significantly smaller. but that's what they should negotiate about. when you build on the blocks to send a message. we are building blocks, in that part of the west bank what we consider will be a part of israel and we aren't doing the part that wouldn't be.
fourth, 60.1% where they retain civil and security responsibility. the palestinians have very little access there. and yet to give you an example of the significance, not just in terms of land mass of all of the rock werries in the west bank. one of the biggest industries for the palestinians in the west bank is stone masonry but they don't have any brock quaries. it doesn't threaten security, but it sends to messages. one, israel means what it says on the premises we want to rule the palestinians. it is a way to signal you mean what you say. second, at the time the palestinians economically need much more underpinning to enhance their economic position, this will also be some de bebb help them economically.
fifth, 21.7% of the west bank proving i haven't spent any time on this issue at all. [laughter] and you know, they're the palestinians have some responsibility and they are responsible for the law and order but they are not responsible for securing against terror. they have a police presence and i would like to see the police presence which is already coordinated already a bit like for the presence to be built more. expand. again it sends the same message about the palestinians will shape their own future and have control of their own future. sixth, area a as for the the west indians have the civil and security responsibilities. the israelis still go back into area a. they don't go to make a point, they go for security reasons. this is an issue that was raised with the prime minister. would you agree to sit with the israelis to come up with an idea
of criteria if they don't come back to have a justification to come back in. those are the steps for israel. there are 14. there's a second step that is a mutual one, so i want to stay for the palestinian side. on the palestinian side there are steps. you can't find israel on the map in any palestinian textbook or any palestinian website. you can find palestinian maps settlements but you don't find israel on the map. so, i would like to see them put israel on the map. second step, stop the incitement. you know, the idea that when the square is named in the local town, the local city council that is doing the decision, you know, they send a message we are not about that. when you name the square sunday that killed israelis, we are not going to celebrate that. sir, start talking about the two states for the two people. and acknowledge that there is a jewish connection to the land
start rebuilding the camps. they represent 8% of the population of west bank. start rebuilding the with permanent housing and allow those them live in the camps to move out if they want to move out. sixth step, something actually palestinians do for themselves but it sends a message to the israelis, and that is continue to build your own state and the rules. in keeping with the demand, you know the demonstrations that took place about four weeks ago. they were over the rising prices in the economic and corruption. more of the palestinians build the rule of law the better it is for them that this sends a message about the kind of state they are going to be. the seventh step is a mutual staff for each side. the only israelis and palestinians are the soldiers. so it is very easy to dehumanize the those are the only ones that you see. and obviously the relationship between them and the soldiers is in the perfect relationship to put it mildly.
but on this side we know about two months ago we saw the lynch take place in jerusalem. you look at facebook page and they said very all of things. now the government from every leader condemned what happened. but what you have is that they've never seen them at all basically. and what i would like to do is i would like to see starting in third or fourth grade and exchange of classrooms or exchange of kids. not bringing people here but there. i want the kids to start seeing each other because they will see each other as people coming and if we are going to change the dynamic, there's a dynamic of disbelief about each side is going to be able to have two states and this is where we start. if they sit down and this is an agenda for them, you know, they can have other ideas. but if they were to say if you take that step we will take this step then you begin to create a
virtuous cycle and that can change the dynamic. anyone as i have said that thinks it you are going to go ahead this point and suddenly you are going to create an outcome where there is completed this belief on the part of the public and you see it by the way in what is happening to the polling. the pulling up until about a year ago still showed very strong majority on each side in terms of the two states but also at the same time, not believing that would take place. now those numbers are dropping on each side and that is symptomatic of the belief, and political leaders are operating in the context of this belief and are not able to take the dramatic steps for peace. anything you create an environment. >> in the far back. yes. >> [inaudible] i want to follow-up on what you were saying because it seems to me like this 14-point plan
obviously you've had these ideas for a while to form the basis for some kind of a u.s. presentation of possible steps and ultimately leading. between you and the ambassador, the middle east peace process obviously while important doesn't seem to be the first priority when you look at what is going on in the middle east right now. and i am wondering if that is because there is fatigue, if it's because we have so many more pressing interests between iran, syria and the growing islamist threat or is it because the parties are not ready. what is holding this up considering on the second day of president obama's first term he pledged to make this a priority. thank you. >> welcome obviously an effort
was made and it didn't materialize. but then it did get swamped by a lot of other things. but as one of the most frustrating reality is for them today? no one is paying attention to them. it's not just look at the region itself. the gulf states are focused on iran, syria primarily. the emergence of the muslim brotherhood in egypt. they are focused whatever they say they are focused primarily domestically. so, you have all these other issues. you have the arab awakening, this powerful new reality that is unfolding in the region but nobody knows exactly what it's going to mean. and it's consumed everybody's attention. but, you know the reason i have been thinking about this is because the issue isn't going away. and we have an interest in not
just letting it reached a point where the this believe become so powerful that it becomes difficult to do anything at all. and i think there is a huge challenge throughout the region, but i think it's a mistake to lose sight of this one. >> dr. kumar on my left. >> thank you so much for the excellent presentations. i have two questions. first, with regard to the conflicts in with the death of al qaeda and what we have seen in libya and north africa and so forth, when will this realization really sink in, and when will these pronouncements be made that we still have the war to fight with al qaeda? that is one question. second, the muslim brotherhood dominated the government in egypt with the u.s.. what implications does it have for the relationship with israel
and for the concerns that the bilateral relationship of egypt with the u.s. will not impact the relationship which i think is most important relationship in the region. thank you. >> i will try the first one. there is no doubt that al qaeda is much more on the ropes now than it was five for ten years ago. this has been a success of both the bush and obama administration and the death of bin laden was the conclusion of the campaign that began about a decade ago of targeting senior leaders the bush administration got zarqawi and the province in iraq in 2000, and i think then bin laden and many of the other leaders have been basically the
movement has been decapitated. the problem is that the movement has morphed into a different direction. probably is no where else near dangerous where it was then. but as we have seen in yemen and some of these areas, these on governor areas where it can set up a presence, people come in and in that case the direct its threats not just to the local government and that is one of the problems but also to get on airplanes and kill americans here in the homeland, so therefore there's still a direct threat. it's not the same level as right after 9/11 but it's still something we have to watch for but secondly at the same time, it is a threat to the region as it always was in particular it is a threat to the shia sunni divide that can take the region under and give it a role and this is what we don't want and this is a movement that keeps
looking for some kind of cause that it can attach itself to to allow its three extreme form with violence to capture the masses to capture territorial space and that's what we have to watch against. i think we have a good set of policies against it but those policies themselves are controversy because it requires using a mix from a legal standpoint in some degree in the military means against the problem that also involves the criminal activities. and normally there is a division and a rule of state between the two. the problem with illegal enemy combatants of which the terrorists is exactly that there is a blurred line between the two. therefore we change that line, we can't really change fundamentally the policies.
we have to explain why we have to lock these people up. guantanamo, both presidents bush and president obama wanted to close it but i was frankly for propaganda purposes because we were getting a black eye because people didn't understand the problem. that is like a p.o.w. camp. in addition many of those people also can be charged either in a military commission or the u.s. court and both have been tried. those are very important distinctions but nonetheless we have to explain a very complicated issue to the american people into our allies around the world. if we can do so, we can continue the sophisticated but somewhat controversial tactics working with our allies to keep the organization under pressure. if we find that our basic tools are being eroded because of concerns, because of diplomatic pressure and such, these guys are going to start up all over the place. thank you.
>> there's no doubt that the government of israel is concerned about the development and egypt. i think if you look at the event of the last several months, they've seen everything going on in the region and they've decided to try to keep their powder dry about certain things the government of egypt has done or has not done with the peace treaty because it knows that they are even more urgent issues and want to distract attention from those issues to their concern about egypt about israel is quite concerned about the development and egypt. point number one. point number two, there is an assessment that for the foreseeable future the islamist government of egypt is here to stay so one cannot merely wish away the existence of this government and the president morsi showed a rather impressive
degree of bureaucratic and political agility and putting his own people in place in the military leadership when that time came in august. now there was deep concern inside israel not just because of the change and the removal of people that had a relationship with israel but for about ten days the israelis had no one to talk to. the only channels that exist today between egypt and israel are the military and intelligence channels and for ten days as this was being sorted out and they have no one to call and that in and of itself was a huge red warning sign going off. now all of this being said, it really does come down to the fundamental question of whether not whether the egyptian leadership is going to give up
its ideologies but whether the objective of political success will trump the objective of an ideological purity and with his political success? political success is making sure you are not having a war on your orders and making sure the international community sends billions of fbi success and making sure that the people see results for their elections, and political success is making sure that hamas and gaza doesn't govern the relationship with egypt but that egypt governs the relationship with a hamas. if this is the root of the government of egypt pursues, then the potential for the working relationship with israel is possible. if it tries to achieve political success in the it the logical
frantically trying to buy stinger missiles in bosnia should probably gotten there from afghanistan. the question i have come is if we do consider legal support to the syria and freedom fighters, how do we manage especially when it comes to no presence at all, how do we manage to control where those go and how they might get used? >> when i made a reference to seeing the need to provide assistance, i said that, i didn't say stinger missiles. it seems in one of the things we need to do is we have too not just identify but test those who we would be prepared to support. it shouldn't be -- who is prepared to make what promises, lives up to those promises they make, do they keep an inventory of what we provide them? we can create and
accountability. if they can't account for what we provide and then don't keep providing to them. so i wouldn't start by providing them manpads. but i would prepared prepared to provide them, you know, antitank missiles. by the way, one of the things it had in the tank missiles they would probably find it easier to take over some of the airbases, which case that would be another way to prevent having to contend with the airpower. but also think these new ways of looking at how you could do no fly without actually having to operate over syrian airspace, it's also worth looking at. but i think there's a way, i mean obvious or there's been a process underway now, but i think we can identify those who are prepared to make certain kinds of commitments. we can see how well they live up to their commitments. we can create our own measures of what they have to do, and what we provide them is going to be a function of their responsiveness in their delivery. >> if i could jump in on that
for just a second. the asterisk i would put where ip the drafter of the report to the president would pick up on this point and say, also picking up on dennis is risk and opportunity come to sides of the same going. there's always going to be downsized to any horse of action you take. being in government, boy, you didn't don't you. if there's one thing bureaucracy can chart out is why not do something. but i will take on two of the biggest downsides and ask you a question. as one who flies running airplanes we don't like to have stingers out there, and a lot of bad things came from afghanistan, posted 1989, but the soviet union was driven out and that led to the collapse of the soviet union and that is change the entire world and liberated hundreds of millions of people. with iraq, a little more complicated but nonetheless, as rob said, as i alluded to, we have a democratic country in the
middle, very core of the middle east. no longer exporting missile attacks, invasions and general insecurity of the entire region. now, the number two opec oil exporter. sure, that things have happened because we didn't get things right in 2003, but does that mean going in 2003 whatever we discussed was such a bad thing? so that's what any policymaker has to look at it. there's an upside is was a downside to everything. >> think you. right here. [inaudible] >> this is for ambassador jeffrey and it's relating to what he just talked about and what also ambassador ross was talking to, and that is syria. ambassador jeffrey was advocating the u.s. intervened militarily in syria, and i'm thinking now in this new administration there is really no appetite on the part of the american people for possibly another war. but if we did get involved merit
-- militarily can have i'd go to support? this looks like to me a hydra headed monster which new heads are being eaten up by other heads among these oppositions, leaders, with those in quotes. how do we decide to support on this and be on the right side? thank you. >> how are you doing. the d.c. again. thanks for the question. a tough one to answer. again, you're right about the american people, but we need to look at this because i've been through this now twice in the four years i've been in government after vietnam and now after the ventures of the first decade of this century. and i would make a distinction and i think there was a pupil the other day that made that distinction. when given the choice between dealing powerfully with iran's nuclear threat, or uploading and all cost military action, the american people in october went
from i think 50 or 51, 56% to take action, and from avoid military from 46 to roughly 40%. so that's the spread open from six to 12%. what's going on here? i would submit, and i think this was a mistake we made in libya to some degree, although at least the turnout halfway well. what the american people don't want is hundreds of thousands of ground troops committed to a nationbuilding, with the shooting exercise with no exit strategy and with the argument being we have to be here until they kind of look like norway and resolve their problems. and i'm with the american people on that one. but every day, the american people through their elected leadership are conducting a war as we said against al qaeda, and we do here other than people are concerned about some of the
legal things on the policy margins of this, any complaint from the american people. i'm not advocating ground troops. i'm not advocating gain and there. i'm advocating delivering weapons and delivering one or another form of airpower or other military power that can be done off site to let the ground troops who are the insurgents, do the fighting. that's what we did in bosnia successfully and 95. that's what we did successfully in kosovo in 1990. that's a model that works. that's what we did in afghanistan in the 1980s. and all those places you are dealing with people that are unpleasant to everyone says i can -- or i can pick the ones who don't, forget it. it's going to be confusing. we're going to make mistakes, but at the end of the data you want to see iran scoring a huge victory? do you want to see assad and power and do you want to see much of syria turn into another falluja? i don't. there's no other way than
america playing an active role, carried period. >> with regard to iran, everyone seems to be relying on ratcheting up sanctions. congress has been ahead of the administration on sanctions continuously. there's been at least 11 waivers given to reporters. we're still not going into the central bank of iran. so is the administration really going to be serious about making sanctions really hurt? because they're dealing with a regime which i don't think cares that much about how the people will be feeling. >> the administration was given the right to waive sanctions on countries, actually sanctions on banks specific or, if those countries reduced significantly their oil imports from iran. because of the sanctions, specifically, and affected administration had, thanks to
the congress didn't get to the administration, that flexibility, iran's exports have dropped from well over 2.2 or 2.4 million barrels a day, to less than roughly 800,000 barrels. that is a huge success. and it's a success because the administration was given the tools to deal in this real world. and so, i think that that's okay. and i think that the administration has used it effectively. in terms of the central bank, the central bank is sanctioned. any dealings with the central bank on oil trade or on a friday of other trade, can lead to sanctions, absolutely. >> very good at. dennis, jim, thank you very much. friends, as i said we will be back before long talking about more specific issues and the transition. tank you for joining us for today's event. [applause]
>> on thursday, cq roll call hosted its election impact conference. to open to all the conference, and discuss the presidential race and the role demographics played in president obama's reelection. >> good morning. thank you all for being here, for what is amazingly the 16th biennial postelection conference hosted by cq roll call, previously only by cq, but as many of you know, in 2009 cq was acquired by the economist group, which owns, already owned roll call so we are not cq roll call. pretty the way it is the 16th time we've done that. thursday after every election since ronald reagan won in 1980. i'm david hawkings, and i have
been at cq roll call since my first day of work there was the day newt gingrich became speaker in 1995. a day of outnumber very well. and i now the editor of the cq roll call daily briefing. which is one of few things we give away for free. so i encourage you to go on a website and sign up. what it is is an e-mail that i send right every morning and sent out right before noon the trust to offer a window into the politics and policy of the day, how the day is unfolding, what's sort of the analytical construct of the afternoon, both in the house and the senate and in the campaigns, and i hope it's a good read, and maybe you will learn something from it and i encourage you to check it out. and i also a handful of our best stories from both cq and roll call, and starting on monday as i think you are aware when you check in, the newly relaunched roll call.
which will be, i can't wait to see. i can't wait to be a part of the it's going to be a must read daily newspapers monday through friday that will combine the best of what was cq today, including all of those legendary schedules that cq today did, and the best reporting of uphold the policy, politics and people of capital. so that's my plug for that. starts next week. i want to think before we get started, i want to get started quickly, our partners, the public affairs council, ahead of them is one of our panelists in the opening panel. they are great people to work with. they are real pros and we hope that that vibe comes across you i'd also like to just make a special shout out, i'm the host today, but the real person and put this together is my colleague at cq roll call, making the cost become so i'd like a little -- upon. >> and what i think we should just dive right in the you know the first panel is about. you probably know who some of these people are because they
all have public faces in one way or another. two of them are former colleagues of mine. on my far right, carroll doherty of the pew center used to actually he and i helped to cover the clinton impeachment together a long time ago. doug pinkham from the public affairs council, to his left come into his left, christina bellantoni formally of cq roll call, now at "the pbs newshour" and they know much more than 90 of the topic topic at hand so stand back and let them speak. >> i will go first. and what we do the pew research center is polling but we also do a great deal of demographic analysis and kelly which, the patterns that are going to be shipping this country in the electorate for years to come, and this election was a real interesting one from that perspective. maybe it's the way that americans learn about the changing demographics of the country.
it takes an election like this. there really wasn't a huge change in the demographics of the electorate 2012 compared to 2008, but it changed just enough and it changed in a certain direction that it mattered a great deal. you know, we saw, you know, hispanics and minorities generally are still underrepresented in the electorate compared to the general public. but in key states we saw the hispanic turnout pickup if we saw the black turnout pickup in a few key states. and this mattered a great deal for the election. i mean, what it caused us to do was to take a broader look at some of the changes in this country. 1960, when jfk was elected president, the country was 85% white.
today, that figure is down to 63%, and we estimate by the middle of this century, when we're having this conference in 2056, we will be talking about the minority white voter. that that's pretty clear based on current trends. the data points, a lot of data points show does, but if you look at the overall romney vote, nearly nine in 10 were white non-hispanics. 56% of obama voters were white non-hispanics. this gives you the dimension of this change. there really wasn't an overall influx of hispanics, minority's general in the polls this year but in key states in the hematocrit in ohio, percentage of blocks up, rose 15% from 11% in 2008, a big shift. in florida, percentage of
a lot of democrats to look at that poll. there were other polls that showed the same thing. romney really made gains among women after that first debate, in party was seen as a little bit more moderate. the issues that came up i in the debate were not necessarily, very few social issues if you recall coming up in that debate. but by election day the gender gap has not only gone back to normal, probably went bigger than normal. you know, women favored obama by 11 points, men favored romney by seven. that's one of the biggest gender gaps we've ever seen to a big fact in a big way and another important factor obama election. so let's think about short-term and long-term implications of this. you're going to be hearing a lot about the republicans struggle with his changing face of america, and a lot of talk about what they're going to be doing about immigration reform and
some other issues. but i think in a lot of ways this is a challenge for both parties. i mean, in 2014, the next election, the midterms in 2014, ironically the electorate is probably going to be a lot lighter and a lot more, and a lot older than the election of two state. and so the democrats have the challenge of trying to face an electorate alike that. you can see from the composition of the house, they are not doing so well in that regard, 2010 was a terrible election, and that it is very different demographic makeup than the one on tuesday. but the republicans really do face a long-term problem with the demographic changes in the country, and especially in presidential elections. and it goes way deeper than immigration obviously. i mean, you know, in some ways the republican strategy issue is somewhat predictable, and it
almost worked and i think it's going to get criticized a lot but it actually for one more election probably as a result in a strategy, but it's the last time if it half worked, if romney had been elected, it would've been the last time it could have worked because of the demographic changes. so as the party faced its future net is going to do a lot of soul-searching. there already is, what to do about reaching out to minorities, reaching out to try to address these demographic changes. but, you know, the focal point will be on immigration reform i think. there'll be some some attempt to moderate the party's position on it. at our polling shows it goes much deeper than that. young people, minority's take fundamentally different views on the role of government, size of government. issues like that that are coming to the forefront now then do,
you know, these are very liberal positions that hispanics take on the role of government, the size of the, that are in opposition to a lot of the republicans positions. so that's the main challenge for the party as it goes forward. you know, we will be seeing, you know, it was only eight years ago that george bush won 44% of hispanic vote. demographics is not officially destiny for either political party, but i think that that showed that but i think when you go forward and you see the republican underperformance with key groups, young people, i think that that represents probably the biggest challenge republicans face going forward. >> christina? >> i everyone. thanks for having me, this is great for just a couple things i
would walk through. one, the president's reelection team very early on, they wanted to make their strategy about getting their their people to show up here and they argued because of the demographic changes that we have just been talking about, there were more of their people to begin with. he started with a big advantage when you look at the electoral college and all the states he was able to win over john mccain in 2008. so they wanted to lay out a strategy, get all the people to the polls. and so with the deepest is they invested very early on, a lot of money in state offices. the republicans scoffed at that at the very beginning, saying it was a waste of money and just wait until the end. and that is one of the big reasons the president was able to win. talk to multiple people who went and did fieldwork in ohio on the ground operating as volunteers who work in washington and work out for the final weeks. they said they were able, because they didn't have to drive so far between the
fatalities to the offices to get, whether that was registration forms or getting people their checklist or whatever technology they were using, that made him a difference because they could talk to more people. these are hundreds of thousands of door knobs and phone calls they were able to do. so that's a big thing. then when you look at the exit polls, there's a couple things beyond the changing face of the nation, a changing attitude of the nation. when you think about what happened on election night, wisconsin elected the nation's first open lesbian senator to gay marriage approved in four states. marijuana would be legal in colorado. this is a country where people are becoming more socially liberal, while the republicans are doing this soul-searching between what type of social policies they want to promote. that trip to a lot of senate candidates. we will talk more about that i'm sure. and so this is where young voters are a big part of this
demographic key as well. they actually turned out in bigger numbers in 2012 than he did in 2008 despite her not being an overall. the democrats talked a lot in 2008 about wanting to capture younger voters for the party for the future because studies show if you get a person to vote for the same party three major collections in a row, you have them for life. so that was a bit concerned for the democrats in 2010 when the tea party movement started up and republicans were able to win back the house. so that's something everyone is looking very closely for 2014. can you get young people interested in a midterm election? can you get congress connected young people because most people of them will say not only that they hate congress generally, very unpopular, but also does or will really affect them. so these are all sort of the big laying the groundwork for what's ahead. and when you look at the obama strategy and the romney strategy, made romney actually won independence and suburban voters a narrow margin, but still on them. on tuesday night.
and that was what his strategy was. he wanted to focus on that but it showed there were purely more types of people that the obama campaign was targeting. another really interesting element what you think about the money, all the money that was spent on not just the presidential race by the senate contest and house contests, we can evaluate whether it was effective or not. i liked using the example of virginia where you at $51.5 million of outside spending in the senate contest compared to 30 million for the two candidates for the parties combined. the campaign was able to win. the majority of that was republican spending. but it was pretty evenly spit. so the question is, is effective? are people just looking at saturation? or you can't match organization on the ground. that's one element. or is it possible that the president is a republican outside groups were trying to tie the campaign to pretty effectively, for the entire campaign, just as unpopular as appeared to be nationally.
the final thing is when you look at the exit polls, 70% of people made up their mind and the presidential contest before october, before that debate were made romney performed much better than the president. and that says a lot about this early organization. >> thank you. doug? >> thanks, david. i thought what i might do this morning is, since my colleagues here our journalism and more fact-based that i think a lot of people are in this town, i thought not to focus on fiction but to focus on narratives, and think about the fact a political campaign is a story. and in many ways they are stories. when they take three years from beginning to end the are really more of a novel than a short story. but they have heroes and villains, ironing, unicom rising action and climax and plot twists. and is often we hear what is the media narrative this week, or what are the campaign to narratives. so i thought why reduce talk
about some of the narratives that came out of the campaigns, about political campaigns in general and about the nature of the electorate, what do americans believe and not really. which was turned out to be true, which was perhaps turned out not to be true. entrance is on the narratives that a thinker validated, this first one we always root against i think it is true. the fact that negative campaigning does work. we don't like seeing the ads, but negative ads especially when they are placed before october come especially before labor day, really can have an impact. there's an old adage in business and politics that if you don't just find yourself, someone will define you for your key audiences. and i think that's largely what happened when the obama campaign and supporters came out early defining mitt romney as a 1% or, as the rich business executive. now, romney did not help himself with that leaked video, to say the least said for the purpose of the campaign he didn't care about 47% of the electorate.
what he meant to say doesn't really matter. the reason it resonated so strongly is people had already heard that message to the obama campaign ads. had they not done that they would've perhaps listen to this side of the story a little more. the corollary to this lady of negative campaigning is i think the negative ads that are placed late in the game are not nearly as effective. and when they are not done well and they come off as just nasty, i think they can be counterproductive. if you're like me and you live in a swing state like virginia, you know by the time october came along, i have my thibault out and was just going through those commercials as fast as it could because i didn't want to see anymore. when it opened my mail and saw all these flyers from both campaigns and from all the outside groups, i really didn't look very closely. some of the ones from the outside groups were pretty brutal. to the point where it's hard to imagine convincing someone.
that's one of the unintended consequences of all this greater participation in campaigns. the fact the candidates and the parties can control some passage o-- message. a second narrative i think is true. again, if a campaign is a story, you have a rising and falling action, it is possible to make a comeback. people root for the underdog. clearly, as a challenger, romney was the underdog. he wasn't doing terribly but he wasn't doing great in the middle of september. and as we all know, if you're a challenger your three opportunities to change the king. one is the political convention. the second is the selection of your vp, the third is the debates. the convention didn't go so great, especially the clint eastwood episode. did not change a lot of minds. the selection of paul ryan was a pretty strong selection. he turned out to be a very strong campaigner. i think he certainly please the
it was looking forward and didn't have that hopeful
message. the final narrative that cannot be true is the idea of american inclusiveness the we are part of one big community as the president said peter knight we are not red or blue, we are the united states of america. the coalition that the president needed to put together in order to win, women, young people, african-americans, hispanics and others also served to sort of fit the theme. the republicans' strength was also their weakness. the strength of the republican party is the devotee to have some solidarity around key issues to keep the president from moving forward on some areas on his agenda in terms of tax increases and spending and even on some social issues there's been remarkable solidarities of the obama campaign used that against the republicans so that when a few senate candidates and a few others in the republican side said some inappropriate things, they were able to paint the whole party with that brush. you know, will mitt romney disavow what was said in the
senate campaign and things like that. so, that approach was a pretty good counterpunch to the republican solidarity. in terms of some of the narratives that i think we have now debunked at least for the time being, the first -- and this is one of the interesting ones when the supreme court ruled in the citizens united case and all this new money was coming in the campaign, there was a lot of concern for obvious reasons. there was a lot of hyperbole as well and one of the main conclusions this clearly loses the white house and means those that support them will take over the senate especially given how many seats were vulnerable to the democratic party. neither one happened and a lot of money was spent. i saw a little over $600 million was spent by supertax and something like a billion dollars of outside money was spent altogether. sheldon adelson, the casino billionaire did not have a good week. he spent over $50 million of his
own funds on something like eight races in the last i heard he lost all of them, so it shows that money can't buy happiness and it can't necessarily by elections either. the money clearly has an influence. i'm not trying to go too far in the interaction but it didn't have quite the influence a lot of people thought it would in some ways it might have created a certain result on the other side. we are going to fight these outsiders getting involved in these elections. another interesting narrative that you hear over and over again coming and i work for an organization that works for a lot of big companies and this is an interesting point for that reason it's the ideas that they make good political candidates. i'm not sure that that's true. let's see, steve forbes, ross perot, made a wittman and now linda mcmahon and i'm sure there are others who have spent large fortunes of their personal money to use the message that i know
how to run a business and incompetent, smart and i know how to get things done all of which are true. very strong business people, but in the public affairs council we did a survey earlier this year on public attitudes on business and government and one of the questions we asked about honesty of small-business owners and the government and ceos, they didn't do terribly well. only 8% of the public were willing to say that ceos have high levels of ethics and honesty. so your mitt romney, you're extremely competent, capable ceo and top business executives before the campaign gets started you get started at a deficit to prove that you are worthy of trust. not everyone is in that same position and second, ceos are used to making decisions of barking out orders and having would consider capable of getting things done and being very weisel oriented. that isn't what politics is. politics is trying to cajole people who are a lower ranking
than you, dealing with opponents, being patient because things may take years when they should take weeks is a very different skill set. so i think it kind of makes you really think about whether a ceo should be a presidential candidate. finally, and christina already touched on this point made on the conservative talk radio and fox and so forth is that america is a center-right country. and as evidence of this, you look at the polls and we know that a majority of americans don't trust the federal government, don't have faith in the federal government to solve a lot of our problems and a majority do want to cut the deficit and then americans russell with the tough social issues like abortion and so forth. but it's not necessarily evidence america is center-right for a couple of reasons. one is that -- and carroll and depue's groups and others of us to this question, what do you want to cut from the federal government and, you know, what should be protected, people want to protect funding for education, defense, human services and social security. what are they willing to cut?
foreign aid pretty much, not a large part of the federal budget. so it isn't all one way and the last point i think is when the pollsters ask people to self identify are you a liberal, are you a moderate, are you a conservative a lot of people say i am a conservative and proud. i'm a moderate. not a lot of people want to say i'm a liberal because liberal has become a pejorative term in our society. it's like being a lobbyist. you may be a competent lobbyist. that's always the last line, isn't it? i know, no lobbyists. some are my best friends. [laughter] and the liberals, too. when you see is a lot of people who will set off identify as a liberal are actually pretty moderate. and -- i'm sorry, people who identify as a moderate on actually pretty liberal, and a lot of people who maybe are somewhat liberal will even self identify as conservatives. because when you look among -- and some of the exit polls of people who said they were conservative, a certain percentage actually voted for obama. so you can't always believe the
labels. so as a result, riding where we are as a society where the kind of silent majority that comes out every four years or people in the middle who are perhaps fiscally conservative to some degree, but on social issues, our moderate to the left of center come and ask christina said, that is an issue that the republican party is going to have to deal with. >> thank you. i asked our three panelists to only share the first half an hour we have for this panel so that all of you could ask questions, especially want to get off to a lively start because i want to remind you that the first break is when the ultimate party favor for this conference will be delivered which is seeking ball roll calls guide to the new congress, which always has people of this second panel looking down and poring over it which is kind of what we want. , so there is nothing to read right now. ask good questions. these guys have done a good job of cleaning detail. there are people with microphones in the nile, and
since this is being recorded for posterity please come to get vantage of those microphones. and ask away. the microphone walker has to come all the way down to the front for the first question. go ahead. >> if necessary, we can repeat the question. go ahead. >> [inaudible] >> the impact of hurricane sandy on the election; great question. >> well, our polling showed that there was an impact -- our final poll showed obama with 57% and romney with 47%. we had a dead tie a week earlier. so, the only intervening event at that time was sandy come and obama about 70% approval for his handling of the situation. a plurality of romney supporters also approved. i think in the end it was
modest. i don't think it really ticked one way or the other. i think obama had been edging a little bit ahead even prior to the hurricane. i think the last two debates obviously not as important as the first. it never is. but, you know obama had not only stemmed the momentum following the first debate, but also i think had developed slightly a little bit of his own. i think in the end it probably helped him. certainly the atmospherics and the symbols of chris christi embracing him on a well-known republican helped him i think was on the margin pretty much. might have felt in the popular vote of northeast. we did see a big swing for obama in the northeast. he was already ahead, but in the final poll he was ahead even more. >> i will just add to that that whenever a president can appear presidential it is generally pretty good.
particularly early in the campaign the president was good at that with flying overseas to make his surprise trip to afghanistan and multiple other things. and so this did help him. in addition to chris christie and the famous comments he made at the president, mike bloomberg's endorsement, which technically wasn't exactly toward the crestor related but coupled with that he said he told the president would be better on climate change and thinking about that because the storm -- that made a big difference. for people were just may be on the margins and these independents that is the romney campaign believed. >> question here. >> i'm interested in the impact of health care and the discussion are not medicare. you didn't really talk much about that, but there was a conversation when ryan was appointed as the president and people talked about health care what was the impact you see about those conversations and how was the position on the fiscal cliff going forward? >> well, you know, it's very interesting that i think
medicare didn't play as big a role in obama's victory as it might have given his position on the issue. you know, i think the republicans did a pretty good job. when you hear paul ryan talk about medicare through the campaign, the number that he remembered his 716 billion which was the cut in medicare that the republicans said that obamacare would make. it wasn't about vouchers or premium support so much, it wasn't about ryan's own plan to be even a state like florida, romney ran pretty well. he had a deficit on the issue, but i think was about seven points. but not -- not huge. i really don't think the medicare issue heard from me all that much of the end of the day. >> at the end of the exit poll the question was who was better handled the issue of medicare, 52 period 45 in favor of the
president but it wasn't a motivating factor. what was interesting for me is looking at the house races where several of the candidates that had made the budget an issue in their own races whether they were primaries or special elections they actually all lost. i think there were four candidates that lost on the issue including cathy in new york and mark kristen pennsylvania. and then on the issue of health care and repealing it, what should happen to the 2010 health care law, 49% said repeal some or all of it, 44% said expand or leave it as it is. that it didn't seem like it was as much of a decisive issue. >> one more tiny bit of news. this may be not news to anybody but paul ryan said to me he was elected to the house seat of course with ease. and he did assert that he would be returning next year as the chairman of the house budget committee which is actually against the house republican rules they are not going to stand in his way.
>> what is the election mean for the tea party going forward? >> that's a really good question okay. that's for me. [inaudible] but of. no, i think the tea party will be around but not necessarily by that name or movement. smaller government is good and will be around for quite some time. but if you are the republican national committee right now and you are starting to count the number of senate races that were lost in not just the selection of the last one because of a tea party pressure, you've got to start to wonder, you know, what have we unleashed. but the movement will be influential. i mean -- and the movement is one of a smaller government that does resonate with quite a few americans. i think we're the tea party gets into trouble is where they go
beyond the sort of economic conservatism. and there isn't just one tea party. there are like a tea parties and that makes it very, very difficult for the republican party to try to negotiate and strike deals. >> and i think they did provide the energy and the enthusiasm that helped the republicans when the house in 2010. i think that is pretty clear. i think many of those house members, the same house members that were elected in 2010 are going to be the primary obstacle to the deal on the fiscal cliff as we go forward. those haven't been mentioned in this conference ship i'm sure people will be asking about it and there will be the focus going forward, and those tea party members or whatever they call themselves the conservative members of the house are still there and are still conservative, and holding the same views. >> don't forget the senate leadership elections are going to be pretty interesting on the republican side, and the election of ted cruce, not a
question that he was going to become century lacked, what he ends up doing push in that caucus to the right if possible the strength of rand paul. you don't forget republicans have a lot of ability to stop what is happening in the senate and that could be a factor. as an excellent point. rand, ted cruz and the other team party aligned the new incoming senator jeff fischer of nebraska most people have paid attention to the 2t party that lost because of the comments about rape but they were to-4. they didn't do badly. and only on carroll's point, ten, maybe 11 fallin west had to be count but ten or even members of the tea party freshman class were defeated this week's that's actually not in that ratio -- a data ratio. >> there was concern going into this election and that the effect of citizens united. do you think the results will just make the big checkbook
snapshot or is that too easy? >> that is a narrative question. we can categorize this. no, it won't make a big checkbook snapshot. i think first of all it's been interesting when citizens united case came forward for the supreme court, i think was early in 2010, there was the assumption that the big corporations would be jumping into the game. in fact i can't remember who it was when one democrat said it's going to be like nascar where the drivers have patches on them and big brands on them as they go through politics. at the time this is what i said and i still feel this is true, if you are a brand company, a big corporation, why would he want to risk so much damage to your corporation by getting that engaged at that level of financial contribution? because first of all, there's a good chance a lot of your own employees may not agree come a lot of your customers may not agree. you might lose, and it's really expensive. so, but so what you have
generally seen as you've seen billionaires' and millionaires, you've seen privately held companies and you've seen unions with emphasis on the millionaires and billionaires. so, i think some of them will absolutely continue to do this. if i were them, i would be asking tough questions of people who ran some of these organizations about, you know, what kind of strategy did you use and what would you do differently next time i think it will be harder to raise money because of the fact the success rate was so low but it's not going away and also keep in mind as we have alluded to if this isn't about the public's attitudes the electorate and in an off-year midterm election the potential for outside money and for the tea party and all kind of other groups as they to be far greater for success than it was this time around. >> i will add the jargon to be one of the moderators for this event today and i think it is in the afternoon. she has an excellent story and will call today looking at what exactly the impact had come and
don't forget the big influence a lot of the house races and the might be where a lot more attention gets focused in the future. >> it was largely on the presidential race and that is the least likely place to have an impact where money really makes a difference as the talk of the negative campaigning earlier it is to define a candidate and that candidates doesn't have any money because they're just getting started if you come in really strong with a lot of cash it can make a difference in the house race and in some cases the senate race but less so in a presidential race where the candidates already have fairly good name recognition. >> just to echo that point, there was one superpac that got rid of its own targeted investment by surprise three or maybe for incumbents early in the year and then mike bloomberg's gun control super pak decided last weekend to make a very targeted investment and one total long-shot candidate
out of los angeles a woman whose name i still haven't memorized, but she won. she defeated joe baca just on that one single issue. he invested very targeted sort of a surprise attack and one so that echoes his point. >> excuse me, looking around the room i see everybody with their ipad and iphone and everything. a quick question you mentioned the young vote being increased selling curious on the effect of the social media on the ability to get the vote out as well as the messaging of the candidates and how effective that was. >> it's a good question that has been evaluated in a lot of different ways and i think we should be careful in the way that we define social media. the social media meaning twitter where there are a lot of partisans going back and forth and making it from the jokes or does it mean facebook where you see 88 friends posting i just voted for barack obama and i really happy about it or do you
mean the actual data campaign the president's campaign invested in heavily to be able to understand who the voters were, what made them take and whether or not they had shown up or is it just the fact the president campaigns and 87 million e-mails asking if you have voted or donated and that just pressured you enough to do it? i'm not sure the answers of those but i would say the data and particular i will give a shout out to this dhaka the victory lab on a the president was able to do in 2008 and how they built on those techniques. it made it enormous difference from just knowing not only where the voters were, but where their attitudes were and all of the information that you put out there on the internet just by buying a book on amazon or putting your marital status on facebook or any of those things it does matter, and also to the issue of women and their reproductive rights, what that says to me this year is when
susan g. komen decided to stop funding planned parenthood, but became one of the biggest social media stories if you're looking at facebook. people that are not politically active or necessarily engaged in issues like that for more exercised on that issue than anything else and that goes a lot to the women and to the young voters point, i think it was pure research that did this study after the first debate showing the second screen voters, people that watched the delete. you might know the numbers. >> i have to be clear about this. it's difficult to pull on this issue because as chris dena said, the complications. we try to get all the implications of the social media it's very difficult in the public opinion. we did a contact survey. if romney supporters were about as likely as obama supporters to say they had been reached out to buy the social media text come e-mails, a level that surprising
there. one of the things we found in getting at christina's point on the game is when it came to personal visits on the battleground states or of the supporters said that they had a significant difference and actually may be even telling finding. but in terms of their own media use that's where you see it and you do see this phenomena a quarter of young people are watching the first debate with and i had in hand or a cell phone or some sort of digital device dual screening as we like to say 10% of all adults. small numbers, but significant we also put out a survey. we have been tracking media news consumption habits for 25 years or so and the newspaper people always say here it comes again.
if you research is going to put out another survey that we have lost readers. the headline this year wasn't about newspapers, it was about television. and the first sign that in this new media environment television may be vulnerable. now, look, everybody was watching even if they had another screen ready they were watching will 14 were john fox -- >> or pps. >> or pps. [laughter] >> most of the people in this room. >> but, you know, we have seen the first sign in this most recent survey that we did this year that young people in particular are turning out of television news and moving on to getting their news on the social media and the internet. so it is no longer just a bad news for newspapers. >> but wasn't it like 17% or something of people get their news from social media?
is a growing number. >> no, no when you take the under 30 or under 25 demographic given how little they do other things, relatively large. >> that makes for an increasingly parsed media if you're only turning on your phone and looking at the twitter feed you will be following people but are more like your people you are interested in savitt is less diversified. >> a last point on that, one thing about the social media, the social media isn't political media. and just because people are using something doesn't mean that it necessarily creates behavior. it may or may not depending on the person. and, you know a lot of people are starting to use platforms on youtube and facebook and so forth for getting issues out and trying to get support, but so far it hasn't been an overwhelmingly game changing the hickel for changing opinion. it's great for getting out the vote for keeping your friends and formed with what you are
doing or saying what movie you just saw or where you are going to go for dinner so for building that sense of community which is a part of the political campaign it's extremely valuable, but we always have to be careful we don't mix up the activity and usage with actually changing behavior. >> i think the flip side to the susan komen issue is joseph cony -- you may not remember who he is, he was an internet sensation from about 24 hours or maybe about a week. he has the child soldiers in ugonda and there was a protest campaign on the social media against this use of child poachers. but it turned out very quickly. it wasn't a game changer by any means. >> some states had early voting opportunities and others opposed additional voter i.d. requirements. i understand in florida my mother did vote early.
the penalties, did any of these have an impact on the election either on the outcome or lengthening the lines of the polls. maybe about a week and a half ago reminding people that a lot of the voter i.d. laws at pastore predators >> restrictive by a lot of the republican legislators in particular were either suspended or postponed before this election. now these are all issues that a lot of lawyers are evaluating now how can you curve this or what type of consequences will be had leader but it ended up not being that big of a factor. what is interesting about fraud and this becomes a partisan issue and if the election result is and that you never hear about it again for the next two years at least. and finding examples of it is something that both parties are trying to do not just for fraud or abuse or any sort of a voter
intimidation because then that we can actually hang it on the narrative and you are not seeing that happen. i think it definitely contributed because people just wanted to make sure they were going to get to vote. >> one thing i haven't seen commentary on and that is the age demographic. so, the older you get the more likely you are to vote republican. we are going to have the baby boom retiring so the over 65 group is going to get larger and larger and larger as a percentage of the population that is the most republican group. is there any hope for the republican party in that demographic? >> i think there is. it's a major generational study about a year ago ahead of the election and they are kind of across the pressure some of the social issues and the changes are a little uncomfortable with
those changes, but they are a group that is deeply concerned as you might expect of the future of the retirement programs they want a very generous retirement program so they are across pressure i think in that way. the striking thing is the next generation and how just consistent on to state just how consistently the 65 and older kind of post boomers, what everyone to call that people in the 70's and 80's and the eisenhower administration these are people that have gotten very republican probably one of the most important parts of the republican base now come and it's not a growing demographic and the sense of other things. as we said recently, when you look at the demographic change in this country, you can almost quantify it this way. 3 million people may be that figure is a little high or
leaving the electorate each year and that is a euphemism i guess. and they're mostly white and pretty republican and 3 million people are coming in to the electorate every year and much of a minority, higher percentage of minority, and these 3 million are much bigger targets for the democrats than the republicans at this point and that is the shift that is undergoing at this point. >> when you look at the exit polls you have mitt romney winning 56% of the 65 or over and the president only winning 43%. but when you look the little further into those demographics the one over 65 to 62% of the latino voters over 65. >> i have a demographic and narrative question related to the vote. i keep hearing that well, you
know, hispanics should be the natural constituency of republicans, and so i think from what carroll indicated that may not necessarily be true anymore. what sort of, you know, what sort of outreach you think republicans can do to increase the latino vote if they are in fact natural constituency? is that believe wrong, and how do you kind of overcome -- at least i'm reading believe in america for believing must alter this kind of between the lines believe in america that is 83% white and 1960. ..
>> and as you recall what happened with immigration reform, it was blocked mostly by republicans, not democrats. so i think immigration is part of the story but i think there also has to be, you know, kind of a more moderate stance on the role of government and you know, government activism, if the republicans are truly interested in trying to build support among hispanics. >> it's going to be tough, too, because i think i remember antigovernment feelings are not nearly as strong amongst hispanics. so there's a greater assumption that government can play a positive and needs of a positive role in society. so that kind of tea party mantra, government is the problem and we need to shrink,
get rid of government isn't going to go over well with large hispanic populations. >> probably have time for one or maybe two more. >> i wanted to go back to the youth vote question. i have young family members, 20, 30, in austin, texas, and minnesota. and i would say they are very, they tend to be more libertarian than liberal, very entrepreneurial oriented. but they detest the social value of the republican party. i think the democratic party may have a bit of an issue with this population as well as a ron paul factor. >> yeah. you saw a little bit of it in 2008, and particularly with the gary johnson, the libertarian candidate. it's about having somebody for your calls. ron paul isn't necessary, even
though he did have used support, a lot of the youth support were not voters, but if there's a candidate who can sort of galvanized that energy around social issues. and don't forget also, civil liberty issues. this is where you see in congress this weird coalition between some super liberals and some very right-leaning conservatives on civil liberties, on some of the issues regarding war and spending abroad. so there's definitely something the republican party will have to be grappling with their, and it's an opportunity, maybe not necessary in the libertarian party but it's a movement within the party to push in one direction. >> i absolutely think that's right. we do our political type every couple of years and it's kind of an art but we segment the electric into cool sounding, with cool sounding names and things like that, but we actually had libertarians in that come and ambiguous you
expect but we also have these postmoderns were sort of part of the democratic coalition. a lot of them were independent but they voted democrat. these are people who didn't take the old democratic line on the role of government for, and even on race. very interestingly, that we are very liberal on social issues. there's a tension there, no question. >> the watercooler effect i think it's gary johnson ended up with 1.1 billion boats which was double what ron paul got when he was a libertarian nominee in 1988 spent and always a question of how much of ron paul's youth support is related to one issue. >> right. >> i have a question. first of all, thank you very, thank you very much wrenching our questions we have. i'd like to sway further to the budget. with respect to making all these deep cuts, sequestration. what is it and who's idea was it?
>> that's -- i think -- >> i think that's the subject of another panel. >> let me try to do in one and we'll take a break. sequestration is the authorship of it is in some dispute, oppression and 1.9 on republicans by i think is probably more evidence that this was actually an idea that the white house pulled out of the bag at the last minute during the debt fight. very simply and as we'll explain in more detail later in the morning, it is an across the board cut that would affect 50% domestic programs and 50% military programs indiscriminately. and the idea politically for the president during the debt talks was to force the republicans to swallow that, or to accept that, which would be a poison pill over the long term for the republicans because of the wouldn't want defense cuts, on hope that would get him to come
back later that fall and agree to some sort of revenue increase but it didn't work and that's why we're approaching the fiscal cliff now, and after the break year a perfect segue, so thanks to the question and we will be back in a few minutes. thank you. [applause] >> i want mine to be intensely journalistic. because unless you get out and look at what's going on, these days, you're going to miss the things that are influencing yourself and everybody else spirit best selling author and journalist tom wolfe is like sunday for this year's opening night at miami book fair international. he will discuss his latest novel and its take on the city of miami. plus will answer questions from a miami audience sunday at 6 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2.
>> next, more on tuesday's election with a discussion focusing on the house and senate results. this is part of the "national journal"'s conference posted on wednesday. it's 45 minutes. >> can i do one thing after panel like that? everyone get up and stretch for two seconds. there you go. want to make sure nobody is asleep. we're going to try not to put you to see. thank you very much. i want to make sure everybody got a chance to stretch. i'm really happy to be here. this has been a really fun election to watch, battled on the presidential level but i think the things we've learned over the last few years is that a presidential, a president's agenda is only as good as the congress that can't or will or won't work with them. and last night we saw a pretty tumultuous environment. let's do a quick top line. and democrats picked up three republican house seats, we're calling and his team in maine a democrat. indiana, joe donnelly picked up
dick lugar's old seat. and in maine -- sorry, in massachusetts a list by the warm beats scott frederick republicans only managed to pick up one seat so far. that's the nebraska see that ben nelson left. we have still got out and north dakota and montana yet to be called. jack, i will start with you. give us your labor land, what happened last night in the senate? >> first thing you want to do is make a call for a little bit of humidity. i was driving home last night trying to avoid the deer and raccoons. and listening to c-span of course because i just could not turn off the story. a woman called in on republican line from missouri. and she went on and on about how awful it was, what's happening with the courage was increasing the number of proportions and how horrible gay rights was and we need to go back to biblical
values. that's what we need in this country, and the moderator said well okay, how do you feel about how they can stick the. she said i voted for mccaskill. [laughter] so you have to be very careful when you interpret election results. i think to me, then it would take away that i can way from when i look at the big cosmic picture was going to affect my life, which would affect your life, was going to the lobbying life and the congressional life on capitol hill, obamacare has got the latest succession of bullets. i talked to a republican think tank guy last night and this is what he said. obamacare now gets an opportunity to work. if it works, universal health care could actually be something in this country somewhere down the road. it might take us 10 more years of fighting to get there, but there's an lot of details that have to be solved. states have to decide whether
they would do exchanges or the federal government would exchange. the supreme court, the whole medicaid part of it. but you don't have republican senator they can't his affiliation to yank it out. so to me that was the one big possible historic change that was done. >> get your head around what happened in the senate. is a lot harder to do with what's got did last night, without the and 435 races in the house. so scott, we know sort of a net changes some point or take us where the house stands right now. >> right now we're standing democrats and picked up one seat, i believe although that might have changed since we arrived. but there are a lot of races that are still up including a bunch on the west coast that are very, very tight right now. what we really saw though is there almost two different house elections going on.
last night. in the south we basically had a sequel to 2010. republicans kind of running rampant, taking up a lot of seats in north carolina, consolidating their hold. and providing an even larger foundation for the majority they're going to have. in the northeast you had kind of the opposite going on. there were democratic incumbents their, david in rhode island, john tierney in massachusetts, with extraordinary vulnerabilities who nevertheless survived, thanks to the partisan lean of their areas. and you saw similar things happening on the west coast. both parties and the other found just finished talking about both parties sort of themselves also further out in different parts of the country. both geographically and
ideologically. >> instead resting to see it didn't happen in congressional races. it also happened farther down the ballot or the arkansas states in has gone republican for the first time since reconstruction. it looks like the state house has gone republican for the first time since reconstruction. leaving the democrats without a single house chamber, single legislation and the old confederacy for the first time since the civil war. not just in the house, not just innocent but you're right there is that sort of migration you. it happened in the senate were you've got, the incumbents who lost, the one incumbent we have lost so far, scott brown, in a state that obama won with 60%. and, of course, the two most notable democrats were jon tester and claire mccaskill. we saw the same thing in the senate. >> one thing when you talk about mccaskill and you talk about on donnelly in indiana can a large part of the is republican
candidate. since i was a very young reporter, wiseguy, the candidates election is a big important for of the game. i think that if you took the two things, if you went back to last january, if a candidate, election and money, what's going to route the coming election and everyone would say super pacs. they threw so much money at this race and yet at the end democrats and an excellent team of candidates and republicans had a few losers are various reasons, and it showed on election night. that was one big lesson that i took away. it has nothing to do with philosophy, or geography or demography. just how pros can change the view by doing their jobs right. >> like a state like north dakota where heidi heitkamp did an excellent job from start to finish the jon tester and montana, republicans were not happy with the race that denny was running up until about the last month of the election.
even in arizona where richard carmona came up short against congressman jeff flake. they had a recruiting class of one to get they didn't come on in that race democrats were not going to touch the state. and yet republicans had end up spending four or 5 million bucks to save jeff flake. >> north dakota is the one state, had to go to because i find north dakota fascinating because kent conrad and now heidi heitkamp, there's no reason, there's a reason why they should be elected democrats. if you've ever talked to grover norquist, this is what he said. north dakota will come back to where it's supposed to be. i've got to go out there and find out what's in the water speak you do a pretty good grover impression. >> scott, talk about some of the candidates you been most impressed by. there were some democrats who survived last night he really shouldn't. >> we talked about basically the sequel to the republican wave going on in the house. one candidate who survived that is john barrow in georgia who
was also the beneficiary of a fairly inept republican challenger, but probably ran the best tv ad campaign of any other candidate in the country. the southern democrats have to run this gambit of appealing to the black liberal base that makes up a fair portion of the population in the district, while also appealing to the meeting voted against the white and fairly conservative. and barrow ran these ads touting that you have to watch. of simultaneous appealed to in a city block rural white governors. in a really brilliantly. he managed to completely outperform the republican who was given a district where mitt romney probably 150% last night, yet tricky one country.
mac and -- mike mcintyre enough to line is deadlocked right now but ran a really stellar campaign. republican strategist said in october 51 houma and i could run for chairman of the republican committee. is done such a good job. >> the advertisement scott talked about with john barrow features him with his gun talk about how nobody's are going to take it away from him, and his grandfather, right, settled in the area and used his gun to stop a lynching. so a really fascinating way to sort of thread that needle. one of the better ads of the year. it's funny by the way that as look at the outside groups, and by the by, go read hotline today. we have scorecards for every major group. you can see everything in their endorsement and how they did in the candidates they were picking. the chamber of commerce of the
nra didn't do all that great for the two races they called with two democrats they endorsed the both of them indoors, john barrow and jim matheson. >> the chamber spent over $4 billion trying to defeat tim kaine. another comment on the limit of money, the outside money. >> here's another fun fact. the chamber spent north of 3 million i think on the hawaii senate race where linda lingle lost by a score of 63%-37%. it was a wider margin that dan a a 13 years ago. so that hawaii race probably wasn't a race to begin with. jack, let's go back to the obamacare for second. second. i think you made an interesting point. what was at stake in this election, and how did the democrats dodge the bullet? >> aside from obamacare i think as the previous panel said,
you've got three supreme court justices that could come up. ginsburg 79. kennedy and scalia 74. they try to time things as best they can, that they retire during a president of their philosophical alignment. but that could possibly give obama to more, and that's for. that's a lot. that goes back to ronald reagan's territory when you start talking about for. i think the senate is going to be slightly more liberal, slightly more radical, a lot more female. my sister once made me read a book by a harvard professor called carroll gilligan called women's way, suggest an academic way that women are better i should a negotiating and cutting deals than men, who tend to get more excited about abstract principles. and if that's 2120 women in the senate we have a little bit
array of optimism that thinks make it and you will also have a lot of, a dozen new senators. so there's a big scramble up there. it's very hard to say what's going to happen on the fiscal cliff in the senate. my overriding rule is that if you think about the fiscal cliff right now, whether you're in the white house or your mitch mcconnell, which are trying to devise a some kind of cover for john boehner. the voters last night in the exit polls said that they're willing to take higher taxes but they think the government is too big. that's the deal that banner and obama almost got two years ago. so it's there. is within reach but dana has to be given some kind of cover that he can bring, 140 republican votes with him. it's going to be very difficult to do. obama will have to decide whether he wants to go off the cliff to give it up that
preoccupation that we have with bush tax cuts, or whether he's going, the better passers, try to cloak into something big and mushy and do we like tax reform, and stretch it out and let the deal be massaged in such a way to increase revenue and more money for growth. anything to avoid that horrible road called a tax increase. but this is the hard work that is ahead. obama has got to make that decision. >> we heard the last panel toggle bit redistricting and its impact on partisanship, especially in the house. jack, you made the point backstage at the senate has got more ideological itself, after last night. spent it's interesting. if the democrats coming in, included the gamut from elizabeth warren to heidi heitkamp and tester, if he survives. the republicans, there aren't many of them coming in, but jeff flake is on that other site. >> jeff flake is from a pro-vote
for when it comes to climate change. elizabeth warren was a registered republican voting republican candidate through the clinton years. and i want to read to you a resume right now. this is a b.a. from princeton, after of the harvard law review, clark to william rehnquist, director of the office of policy planning at the federal trade commission but this one person the solicitor general for the state of texas. attorney general at the department of justice, domestic policy adviser to president george w. bush, adjunct professor of law at the university of texas, his father fought with castro in the mountains. i'm talking about that great tea party rebel. so you cannot automatically look at the scorecard and say, imac, this is what's going to happen to marco rubio, ted cruz, governor martinez are going to have come republicans are going to have that in the if they want to take it.
they will have to think they. jeb bush will argue, grover norquist will argue that there's a clear path that they have to start giving senate votes that. they share our values. you know, there is a lot more chance for i think progress than we, looking back the last two years. >> so, scott, the senate did get a little more ideological and redistricting. this bogeyman that makes everybody in the house so ideological. did that happen last night? first election after redistricting cycle. what was the impact on the health? >> i think it had an impact. i get into a lot of arguments of whether we're seeing an anti-incumbent your. a lot of people said no, because very few incumbents were losing outside the primaries are again, there were a lot of members who lost the primaries.
but the number who finished under 60% in the primary, close to that, was even hired a cycle that was 2010. in 2010, it was double what was in 2008. so this is, the pressure from the flame is building and building and building the cycle, and this is, we're going to see a continuation of some of what we saw in 2010 with a tea party in a lot of the freshman you are coming in 2012. this freshman class is going to be about the same time perhaps even larger by the way. and a lot of it is guys like ted yoho in florida, cliff stearns who was leading the solyndra investigation. pretty good conservative, but couldn't make it happen. wasn't enough.
so now you've got a large animal veterinarian who wants to see term limits and doesn't want to see debt ceiling hikes and so on and so forth. on the other side, you've got longtime democratic members retiring and being replaced by people who are little more delicate. >> and yet you had in the last two years, all the important big fiscal vote. boehner managed to round up 100 plus republicans from the other side of the caucus, joined with nancy pelosi who gave him over 100 democrats, and the government kept running. more recently to the budget control act. you put together a bipartisan coalition. nobody wanted to take credit for because it was sort of embarrassing so the republicans go by, say in the end we are running the government on a bipartisan way.
so yes there's going to be, there are going to be ideological items what is going to be awful lot among those freshman, when they start feeling the pressure, coaching from the big factory, a law firms back on thing look, you're going to run us into recession again. is that what you want? i pretty believe there is a chance to get it done. >> that goes back to what you just talking about with the dream act. it seems to me there were two factions of the republican party that are battling for some kind of supremacy. it's the guys who are in the beltway, john boehner, mitch mcconnell, the leaders, versus the guys were outside the beltway, the guys, the folks in iowa who handed the iowa caucuses to rick santorum. folks in south carolina to get a primary to newt gingrich. >> i don't mean it at all -- [inaudible] not general
elections. >> beyond that though, i feel like the last couple, ever since george w. bush's second term there's been an antiestablishment reaction within the republican party. they were embarrassed, angry at the bush administration. they want small government conservatism. so you get more and more, for lack of a better term, tea party ties but i think everybody lumps too many people into the tea party, sort of coulter and. but you get these types who are determined to come here and do something against leadership. i sat down with john boehner on sunday on a bus going come in ohio, rural ohio. like to sit there and watch the road as you go over bonds and whatnot. he likes the fact a lot of sirens around. but he mentioned that he liked the traffic, if you will. he mentioned this to me. i said, you know, how much
leadership can you exert? how much control can you exert over your own conference? and given the freshman. he said well, it's not the freshman who are the problem. if some of the older ministry he wouldn't come you specifically they were. i've really would have liked it if he did what he said it's the older members who are trying to make their own mark, trying to avoid own primary, trying to be perfect scores on some of these outside groups. and they are the problem because anti-leadership is good for them. and it's not necessarily good for the whole. so there's a fascinating battle that we will see now that mitt romney has lost. the activist clash and i have an entry in south carolina is going to scream at the establishment class for having dominated the guy who lost the. >> the last two presidential candidates, republicans that came through republicans
nomination process were two guys who would been called republican moderate, john mccain and mitt romney. they are the ones who survived. but the conservative side was splintered. so you can sort of see to project way farther than what i said about being humble, but you can see somebody like a chris christie still winning the nomination if he's the only moderate for the voters in michigan, iowa and illinois. and the other side is splintered. or you can see somebody like marco rubio doing richard nixon and coming from the angry side of the party and thinking into the more moderate and expanding the base demographically. that could be other solutions. >> we sit here and talk of how the republican party needs to moderate to let me show you, those same discussions are not happening in iowa. in fact, it's the opposite the eye think they're saying a lot more, we've nominated to moderate interval, look where it's gotten us. nowhere.
i think some of the names that you start seeing and traveling to iowa and ensure our people like rand paul and, well, certainly bobby jindal from louisiana. rubio will make a trip or two i'm sure, sort of test the waters. scott, let's get back to the house. how are these new, i thought it was interesting you mentioned the new class. how are they going to react to being led? either going to be able to be led? >> i think no windows and that's kind of the point. you know, again, i think the comparison to this enormous freshman class we just had come everyone has made so much noise about, it's instructive. if you, considering the enormous number of open seats that were left over from retirement and redistricting and so on and so forth, and then incumbents who lost, there are going to be more members of the house with fewer than two terms of experience in
the 113th congress than anytime in the past two decades. not since 199200 redistricting and the banking scandal that filled the house with new faces. and i think no one really knows. using boehner and cancer and the other house republican leaders span out across the country especially to run -- fundraising campaigns even incoming members who were in cakewalk. in north delhi, california and forever else around the country here did need a fundraiser from house majority leader, but you saw them putting in face and getting to know these guys on the true. i think possibly in the hopes of being able to work with them when they did it spent or perhaps in the hopes of their votes in next week. scott, i want to talk about one other thing that i think has gotten overlooked in the broad
scheme of the house to we talk about redistricting as his evil, and yet there's some folks who are, there's some states that are taken a different approach. and the number one state that has taken a different approach is california. california of course is a state that has gone to a bipartisan redistricting commission. they drew lines without input from the state legislature. allegedly without input from the state legislature. and over the last decade, 53 seats in california, five house election cycles, 265 elections in california, only one seat out of the 265 times changed hands. that was when richard lost. now though, today, we've seen, i guess they're still counting and a lot of districts but we seem eight, nine competitive seats with some real interesting stories. tell us about california.
>> on both sides of the aisle. by the time we left the office this morning there were 13 votes separating congressman brian bilbray from his challenger in san diego. through about 200 separating congressman dan lundgren, both republicans, from his democratic challenger in sacramento. mary bono mack was behind by about 1500 votes, and jerry mcnerney and lois capps, both democrats, had tough races, too. it has completely changed the landscape of both parties and the outside groups affiliated with them and made a real effort to try and do the best time and resources, getting to know you with consultants and apparatus that you never had to pay attention to before. because there's just no point in going there. again, the one seat in a decade. now it's kin going to be very interesting to see what happens.
in a sense given how many -- narrow balance right now. what we end up thinking about the final results of this house election basically depends on a few hundred votes each and a half-dozen seats, which could tip an election either way. but you never would've seen anything like this in any kind of redistricting which completely opens up democratic opportunities, fast-growing hispanic communities. >> it's funny to watch these two party committees learn about california. these are data points they simply have not had for years on end. it's been interesting process to watch. okay, jack, i want to ask one question and then question and demagogic questions and issues. if anyone has a fascinating question, there's folks around the rims with microphones. jack, at the beginning of this cycle there were 20 democratic and only in republican seats up
in the senate. it sure looked like republicans are all but guaranteed to win, met the four seats message if you take back the majority. now, of course, we know that didn't happen thanks to some rem statements. however, there's this other thing coming and it's called 2014. not to jump to four ahead as the corpses are still warm, but in 2014 will be a lot more corpses, arthur? >> and once again because they had success six years ago, democrats are going to be defending more seats. it's going to be 20 democrats. of the 13 republican seats there's only one that is sort of a prime takeover, and that's dubious really in my opinion, susan collins in me but i think if she wants, and probably when reelection pretty easily and less main republicans do something stupid like take on in the primary. so but you've got frank
lautenberg is going to be 90 years old. you've got jay rockefeller in west virginia who is going to be 77. you've got paul levin. you could have retirements and then you got mary landrieu. you've got pryor in arkansas. you've got kay hagan in north carolina. so you've got seats that could be contested. and even in lieu seats you've got al franken is one by very slim a margin. so that could be a tough one as well. so to me what that says is again, the senate, i don't think is going to be the obstacle to the grand bargain. again, i think the 100 for republican votes that speaker boehner will have to get together and actually how does barack obama help boehner do that? and that's going to be i think big key fiscal issue coming up
>> one toshiba will be competitive in 2014, mitch mcconnell see. whether in the primary or the general election, he actually concerned about his reelection. he's been raising like $1 million a quarter in the off year. every quarter for the last year and a half or so. he hired rand paul's campaign manager. ron paul's former presidential campaign chairman to come right his race in 2012. so he assisted by turning -- preparing for the contest's. he has a tough spot. emitted comment your colleague, major garrett, our top priority is stopping barack obama. congressional approval rating went down to historic lows 10%. and they suffered last night. one bad thing about, you talk about statements being made when the television cameras are on the one bad thing about this polarization that we have worked at we usually only watch msnbc or only watch fox and only talk to people that want to hear from
is that you begin to adopt this alternative reality and have come everybody is talking to you about the fact that women who are raped get pregnant commune, you tend to believe it. then you put it out and the rest of the world goes are you out of your mind? that is going to be a continued risk. and i think eventually it will become a risk by democrats as well spit back to mitch mcconnell, i think there's a kentucky democrat who is suddenly out of a job. he might be the democratic recruit. who has a question? yes, ma'am. >> since you just brought it up, what is the lesson from the taken-mourdock situation? is it that the republican party should be more tolerant as women's issues. even romney at the end of his campaign was running as about a woman time have worried about --
[inaudible] which i thought was fascinating. so what is the lesson there? is a more tolerance by the republican party because they can lose on that issue, the women's vote? or is it -- >> something else. >> an anomaly. >> without drawing a lesson about with republican party should do, i think it brings up the fundamental difference between, sort of an ironic difference between the two parties right now. on the one hand, democrats have iron fists when it comes to their primaries. and he was able to get through a primary. we saw this in maine earlier this year were a woman named cynthia dale, a state representative was running. she wanted olympia snowe's seat, and it turned out that it was really hard to raise money to win chuck schumer calls lawyer donors and say don't raise money for her. don't give this person money. because the democrats rooting for and his team in the contest because he was going to win. they didn't want what happened in the 2010 governors race to
happen there. across the country democrats have the ability to sort of pick their candidates, because of the money supplies, because of simple party organizations, and simply the fact that the democratic senator campaign committee is able to go in and not be the bad guy. when they get involved in a race. on the other hand, you've got the national republican senate committee who, because this activist class outside of d.c. can't stand anything that is from the beltway, automatically despises anybody who gets the blessing of the -- as charlie crist found out the hard way back in 2010. this year we didn't see them and was a single candidate if you ask them why, they would have a welcome we do that. but privately they say are you kidding come we can't do that. if we do that we will lose. they can use him here and there. they can get a more professional campaign staff to one race to the contract money to a coordinated by do something like that, but they can't really sort
of control he was going to be the nominee to the extent that the democrats do. i think there's a little irony there that the republican party, who sort of at the mercy of the activist class, and the democratic class has a iron fist of control. >> yeah kaw i also think there is, as you pointed out earlier, there's a wrinkle when you talk to outside the beltway inside the beltway, because it got organizations like freedom worth and club for growth that claim to be the grassroots organizations after taliban actually they are playing hardball inside the eye, politics getting their candidates in. this is one, i thought one of the more smart comments that i heard from senator richard lugar said to his constituency in indiana, he said that i sort of knew i was going to lose because after the races in 2010, i knew i was a likely target of the club for growth and freedom works another super pacs,
dedicated to defeating at least one republican as a purification exercise to enhance their own influence over other republican legislators. that kind of thing can be steady but you can't go out, can't go out as a washington boss and tell republicans activists that you shouldn't vote for the candidate that you love. but you sure can apply pressure to inside the beltway organizations that are out there just trying to boost her own clout in washington, for their own personal purposes. that's one thing that republican leaders i think could do to try to improve the handling of the election process. >> scott, what roles did those groups play in house races? >> in the primaries, than the general elections, trying to choose the two candidates. much like we just discussed. and i'm kind of thing to me seems like such a long time ago,
primaries, especially since this morning. >> i think yesterday was a long time ago. >> but in general, they got involved, one thing instructive was the club for growth ad rather aggressive letter to the house republican leadership back in march i think it was, warning them off, getting involved in the primary between david schweikert and ben quayle in arizona. and i think, it certainly caught a lot of attention which i guess the point of it all, and the fact that these groups aren't afraid to step in for no particular reason, i think is a large reason why, why we do end up with candidates who are willing to say and do anything. >> and by the by, in that race ben quayle's -- schweikert ended
up winning. so they once again, they beat the leadership. somebody else. somebody over here. right there in the back. yes, sir. >> thank you your country and. comment has been made on what will need to be relationship between speaker boehner and president obama on achieving a grand bargain. wonder if you could comment on what role mitch mcconnell and the senate republicans could play, particularly when as noted mr. mcconnell is up for reelection in 2014. so what likely role would mr. mcconnell and his senate republicans play in achieving a so-called grand bargain? >> jack, what do you think? >> our colleague, major garrett,
a great political sluicing a few weeks ago, talked to republican leadership aides innocent and identified a dozen or so republican senators that could be relied on to vote for some kind of revenue package. the fact that you now have a couple more votes towards the 60, the magic 60 number, the democratic side will probably help a little bit. although scott brown was one of the republicans that was being counted on. so again, my personal instinct is that the senate is doable. and it's eric cantor. who could play a tremendous role is paul ryan. paul ryan champion of the conservatives side of the party, and yet his voting record shows that he will vote for smart compromise but he will moderate his views, and he is somebody that really could sell a deal to
the republican right. the question is, is this the first step your cutting a deal with obama or does he now wanted be the champion of in no way, we're going to stick with the ryan budget and tell the last man. >> scott come it was kind of interesting to i will play out the paul ryan picture in the second. the most famous republicans in the house, a couple of them had a pretty our time last day. paul ryan did okay. he won by what, 15 points? but a couple of the others, michele bachmann very close race. ellen west, looks like he is going to lose. a close contest for the well-known candidates. >> i think one of the things, and now -- michele bachman, she is learning, acting the way she does is great for fundraising but it's also great for her opponents fundraising at the same thing happened to ellen west. patrick murphy who is now
looking like a pretty good bet for congress next year is a 29 year old who works in his family construction firm for a little while and raised, god knows how many millions of dollars from all across the country. this year. that just barely allowed in -- an avalanche of tv ads that was put on the air. so there's a benefit to being in the tea party icon but there's also, also does going back to the question about what role, and then going back to the even earlier point about whether or not the backbenchers will allow themselves to be lead. i think it's important to remember with congress on hanging around for three or four days a week now, that especially the people, the freshman and folks like them or hang out with, taking their cues from, are not the party leaders.
they our friends are back on. they are people their money to the neighborhood bar, the diner. a friend and colleague of mine at "national journal" in florida recently with one of the tea party, and she's a freshman down there. you know, he told him, he doesn't, he doesn't feel pressure from dana in canada and the card and whoever else. he feels pressure from the guy he runs into at the local restaurant. >> david, the bad thing about this, the brilliant obama strategy which won him reelection, the bad part about it is i putting the president and some achievements in the battleground states. really did have a president who went to georgia, who went to texas i went to louisiana. or went to montana. and either helped bring in democrats or a little bit of this opposition that is a
constant pounding he's been taking for four years that has demonized him in a lot of places in the united states. so that's one weakness he's going to have coming in. at the very end of his speech last night, he said there is no breadstick, no blue state and that is the way he governs. it's going to be a really hard hurdle to go over in georgia and texas, and he means it. i think that that's the way i think, that's the way he as seen the roots of health care. >> we have just one second left. i'm going to ask scott, give me a final wrapup and what did you learn last night and 30 seconds, and then jack, i will go to you spent again, it just goes back to the party sorting itself completed, sorting themselves into different parts of the country. sorting themselves further and further ideologically from each other. and by the way, it's not just geography and ideology. it's race also. if you look at the seats that republicans went after them
after they built this huge majority of the democratic seats that they managed to go after, almost all of them were more than 80% white, the population. on the flipside, the majority of the republican held seats that were heavily minority, i think more than 40% were targeted by democrats. they were successful. both sides were successful out on the edges. so just more and more the parties are sorting itself out and further apart on so may levels. >> i learned from him -- this is the first time since jefferson/madison and monroe that we've had three presidents elected to two terms. and that's not bad. spent i don't know exactly what that means. i don't the democrats have a real problem coming up. you hear a lot about the republican problem with demographics. how they're going to do with this premise, how to deal with
the coalition. if ron brownstein were here you would've heard that today. a couple times. what democrats have though is a problem with the obama coalition. they've got it out of 2008. they got out in 2012. can they get it out in 2014? can make it out in 2016 with another presidential candidate, or is this coalition specific to this individual person who have such magnitude and, within the democratic base. i'm going to watch how the democrats try to absorb the obama campaign organization over the next couple of years but i think that will be critical to their success as the republican outreach to that the democratic coalition. so with that, i selfishly took the last word, i apologize. thank you all so much. i really appreciate your time. [applause] >> if there's a mandate in yesterday's results, it's a mandate for us to find ways to work together on the solutions
to the challenges that we all face as a nation. and my message today is not one of confrontation, but one of conviction. in the weeks and months ahead we face a series of tremendous challenges and great opportuni opportunity. >> the american people want us to work together. republicans want to work together. democrats want us to work together. they want a balanced approach to everything, but especially the situation that we have even with the huge deficit, and taxes are a part of that. >> the newly elected congress artwork in january but the current congress does work to do to the end of the year and was typically referred to as a lame-duck session. work as expected on the pending fiscal cliff, including the expiration of the bush-era tax cuts, the federal deficit, raising the debt ceiling and by how much. and planned cuts to domestic and military spending also known as sequestration. fall on the floor debate
starting tuesday with white house coverage on c-span and the senate on c-span2. >> former centcom commander admiral william fallon and former u.s. navy deputy surgeon general admiral thomas cullison moderate a discussion on the relationship between global health and national security. posted by the center for strategic and international studies, this is an hour and a half. >> let me just take a moment to welcome and introduce admiral fallon. i will skip the part about how he walked across the tidal basin to get here today. very, very dear friend. he's had senior command. he was of course ahead of the central command, was head of the pacific command he was instrumental in opening up our opening of our relations with china and establishing new relations with india. he is in every sense the diplomat warrior what we most
admire in our uniform, and our combat commander. i want to say thank you to bill, for you, for doing this, and let's turn this over to you. [applause] >> first big step. doctor, think you're much and welcome, ladies and gentlemen. while we are getting settled here, have our panelists come up and get settled into their chairs in order to serve. and for those of you that missed the chat line, it may be too late. [laughter] but then again, i don't think too many in israel are starting. not the same can be said for others in the world. i wanted to begin with first in case you missed the copies of this on the way in, recommended to your reading and perusal and
safety john and steve, thanks for inviting me to participate here in this event. i never get into that in a minute what i think is really important. i'd also like to add my voice to the memory of trip to sell, who contributed as he did it so may things, to this effort just before he passed away, and quite a remarkable man, as john indicated, an amazing list of accomplishments in a relatively short life. so, trip, hopefully you're up there smiling on these efforts, and somehow using your powers of spirits to motivate us to do more. i'd like to say a few things about the effort.
the idea to tap into some of our most experienced leaders, both the civilian, diplomatic and military side, to get their views and their experiences before they tend to disappear into the recesses of their memory. so that we can collect the body of firsthand knowledge through the experience of many people who have done a lot of work in recent years in connecting the dots of security, something that i spent four decades plus involved with, and something that an aspect of this word, security, that i think is fundamental. very basic. as i mentioned to some of you probably heard this in the past, but i will say it again, that during my career, my viewpoint
has changed significantly in the understanding and definition of what security really is. and my current appreciation for it is that it's much more fundamental, much more personal, much more down at the individual human level that i had thought it was back in earlier years where we tended certainly in the days of the cold war where i grew up in service in the country, where we tended to look at things as those guys, those gals and uzbek so it was them and us, state actors and countries in borders and that made us insecure, secure or somewhere in between. but as i had a chance to work with people around the world, i realized that it's much more fundamental, much closer, how we feel about ourselves every day
in our outreach to others, has a lot to do with how we feel and a comfortable and confident we feel about our fundamental surroundings. and health is pretty important, isn't it? so if you don't enjoy good health, if you're chronically suffering from challenges come in the environment or from whatever source, you're going to be in my experience not paying a lot of attention to things that are very far away, but how do exist, how do i deal with this problem, how do my children and my family deal with these issues. as we are well aware, there still lots of problems in the world. the good news is there's been a tremendous amount of progress, many of you industry have been major contributors to that. we've made great strides, it seems to me that one of the things that ought to motivate us today is to figure out how to
leverage the dances in science and medicine, to actually benefit every person in this world that has a need that can be satisfied, salt, resolve by these advancements. and that's a task we have in front of us. why i'm interested in being here, while we are participating in this, and there's still a lot of work to be done. so no now that you are all ther, nobody leaves the room without signing a pledge to donate significant amount of your time, effort to the cause, right? you wouldn't hear otherwise. so let's talk a little bit, or think a little bit, if i can motivate you to do that, about this business of our government and our military capabilities and what it can do. as i mentioned, we saw a little tiny clip in the video.
ice to believe that the biggest thing is the most powerful thing and the passive thing the military can bring to the table is disaster response. we have the capabilities to move quickly and to do things to make a difference straight away. however, there's lots of other things that we can do to facilitate, and that's one of the things we're trying to get at after the series, why is but together, why would wanted to pull people's minds and what i expect will happen here with the good folks at csis, steve, take an outcome is they are going to comb through this wisdom or, passage or wisdom from some of us and pick out things that are to be worked to the next stage. to be able to do things to get it done. but back to fundamentals.
the military is a strong right arm of the nation's cement, but in the daily activities that we conduct, we do a lot of things are important not only to the members of the military and to the members of this country, but that have a significant effort in advancing the well being of others in the world. ..
you want been the absolute highest level of health that we can possibly provide, and so we have a very very healthy group of folks and we worked overtime to make sure they stayed here. in the process of doing that we have learned a lot. we have learned a lot about people, a lot about diseases, lot about physiology and on, and on and on. one of the things we have to offer in this case the department of defense, this country is sharing that knowledge with others in figuring out ways in which we can actually export this body of knowledge and practice in other areas. another part of the department of defense that is particularly helpful in this regard is the research and development and it is unique. to the best of my knowledge it is not done anywhere else and certainly not to the degree that
it is. we have hundreds of people dedicated in different places around the world that are looking at specific problem areas both in climate and the environment to better understand the problems, the diseases, the pathologies involved and i am on thin ice as a nonmedical here so i will try to limit my divergence into these matters. the centers that we have that i became pretty familiar with in indonesia, egypt and other places do research that is not done in other places. it was certainly self-motivated in the early days to make sure that we had our service personnel in the best possible shape and the tropical environment that we understood that went on in these places and we are better prepared for it. that bottle -- body of knowledge
grows and i would hope to continue to nurture it so we can take the lessons from these efforts and move them out into the greater world. so, to try to pull it together, we have a u.s. government military capability that has global reach, very very rapid response, high-volume and the means to get into and operate in areas that are prone to disasters and i have just seen it in our own backyard. you don't have to go very far these days. nobody else can do this. we have very sharp people, well-educated, well-schooled and will train particularly in the medical professions to make a difference and we have this ongoing research and development and the spec round to make us all better. so these are the basics, and one
of the things we would like to draw out today is, okay, what else is there that we should understand and what else can we do? how can we take these attributes and capabilities and maybe make them better? i don't want to monopolize all the time, but i would like to throw my pet desire on the table and that is, it's been a great honor and i have to admit an eye-opener at first, to go around the world, to places that are certainly less privileged than we are and see the dedicated efforts of so many people, not just from this country but from many other countries, who are trying to make a difference in places that need help. whether it is a medical area, whether it's a general health and welfare of people advancing their education, but in this
venue the fundamental security, personal security through better health. i see this all over the world. and my big wish is that we can figure out ways to connect to various levels so these individuals who may be often in remote villages in a distant place in the world making things better for a handful or 100 or a couple hundred. major well-resourced donors, philanthropic organizations and individuals that have much greater leverage financially and access to other resources also working a lot at the same problems. and then the government, like ours with capabilities like our military. very quick response, a big difference in in the short period of time. how do we pull these things
together? how do we help ourselves to help others to really make this a better place? it seems to me there are gaps between these things that we might want to think about and talk about and i would invite you to help me make my wish come true. these things are much more coherent and we truly are able to leverage all the good efforts of so many people. i think that is probably enough to start and what i would like to do is introduce our panel. many are well-known to you i am sure but we will start with ambassador hume who is a distinguished diplomat to serves quite ably around the world and the last three years in indignation, a country of great importance to us politically, economically and security wise and a major player in health.
ambassador, thanks for your efforts and joining us here. ellen embrey certainly no stranger for people who've been around the department of defense. in fact she is much older than she looks. [laughter] she has been around for several decades. in service across the river and bringing her knowledge and experience to bear to help in the policy world and to try to make the defense department better performing and basically better operating helping us and others in the process. ellen, thanks for coming here. and the gentleman with my hair colored that i like a lot and actually he is very distinguished looking, much better than mine. tom cullison navy rear admiral,
retired. he was the deputy surgeon general back in the day. he is also much younger than i am despite the hair and now he worked out in the pacific here at the center of excellence in disaster management and humanitarian assistance. a pretty big deal out there and nice operations started by one of my predecessors which was really a great idea. he also contributed to this body of work that we hope to leverage into something, in the sum of its individual parts. so why don't -- i will go and take a seat and invite somebody else to run off here a little bit. the rules are, i will post a couple of questions to the panelists to get you warmed up and take notes and so forth and then get into the audience and see what is on your mind and feel free to hopefully make a
question without a statement but at any rate put your ideas out there and make this the better out document, understand it and figure out how to do more with it. so thank you very much. [applause] >> he so i think we have in this panel an opportunity to benefit from not only the collective wisdom of our distinguished guests here but the fact that they have served in many different capacities during their careers and i would expect that they will have some interesting and potentially different views, if that's okay. that is how we learn. so if i could pose a general question, and i will tip them off ahead of time.
ambassador cullison first but what i would like you to share with the folks, your sense of the nexus if you would to health and security writ large and the things that you, most folks have not had an opportunity to read this to us unless they are speed raters -- speed readers so if you could share your thoughts about what do you see? is there their connection to these things and what has struck you through your career as things that might illustrate the importance of this? >> thank you very much, admiral. i would like to go back to your earlier question and add, how do you bring all of this together? i think it's the connective tissue and how do you get the relationships of the people who are in the philanthropic
organizations in the research organizations, people who are deployed in the field, are able to find their own means of collaboration and there were maybe two aspects. one is, how do you help deal with the problem in south africa with aides? how do you come in a government that did not want to treat people who had aids, how were you able to make the human connection so that over time, you can both prepare society for a change in policy and terms of capability, but at the same time build political pressure and the potentiality to make changes more likely. i think in that case, it was interesting we were able to build a relationship between the u.s. military, the cdc, nih and south african military which had an interest in treating its own people, get a pilot program
which was sort of a post to the the -- the minister of health likes to call me to clock in the morning and harangue me. that was before -- for alcoholism. in indignation it was different. there it was more of a question of dealing with influenza and building relationships so that our country as a society has the confidence in its own research capabilities and in collaboration with others so that they feel that they will share early warnings, share samples so that research can be done on a global basis. how do you build those personal relationships? maybe if we could just think for a minute the risks that the u.s. citizens with influenza or aids are huge. my understanding it's up to 40,000 people a year die in the
united states from seasonal influenza. if we had a real pandemic, how many people would die? this a security that meets the borders and our best attribute i think is making a personal connection so that we get collaboration. >> ellen you have had a chance to view this, particularly from the vantage point of the nation's capital here. what have you seen in the basic relationship to health and security? >> i think that help has no boundary in terms of country and every countries infrastructure with basic human needs, water, nutrition, health varies by resources and there are too many to name but i think from a national security perspective, when the infrastructure is
unable to provide health or protect the health of a population, it becomes unstable and when the government or the people in charge aren't able to address that, then you end up with a lot of -- that influence their ability to preserve and work well with others. so from our perspective, especially for those countries that are not our allies, i think this is where global health and the dod, military with the state department, partner with the country to help them address their infrastructure vulnerabilities in health care. at the very basic level however i think when we bring in high-tech it's difficult for them to adopt because their other infrastructure and -- infrastructure problems like electricity and water and things like that. for me, the nexus there is if
you have an unstable government that is not able to provide this, then when the u.s. military and the state department collaborate together to help stabilize back, that is where i see the nexus. the information helps to create the ability to understand the diseases that are confronting them and to bring in the right resources, whether they are ngos or big pharma that have medicines that could help or whatever. i think that is where i see the biggest push. >> thanks, allen. tom you have been a practitioner and have been out on the point in different places in the world and recently in honolulu looking out into the asia-pacific. what is your experience? what do you think about this topic? >> let me talk a little bit about where we got our gray
hair. and we will take a longer view of one country. the first time i visited vietnam was in 1972 when i became a line officer and the next time i visited vietnam was in about 2003 or 2004 and at that point we were really trying to find ways to have military-to-military contact with the vietnamese. what can we talk about? pleaded had the j. pac missions and so on but at that point, we were trying to find ways to talk to the vietnamese military and if you wanted a safe topic to talk about one was every military in the world recruits young people and they get them to do dangerous things in the cause they believe in. so talking about the health of the military is a topic that we all had in common. we don't talk about how we use that military but the technique to keep the military healthy or
safe things to talk about. we worked with the vietnamese surgeon general of the time to arrange a surgical project with the vietnamese military and one of their hospitals and about a year after that we went back and talked about hiv prevention in the military as part of the defense hiv and aids program which is the military part of the program and again we talked about how the do you keep the military safe when you want them to do dangerous things on one hand but you don't want to take the risk on the other with their health. that evolved over time to where we have had two or three hospitals visits to vietnam. our relationship is much better with the country and about two months ago reviewing the last hospital ship and i could not my wildest dreams in 2004 and particularly in 1970 to imagine that poor people could go to a town in the former north vietnam and ask questions about how they practice medicine and just to
see this evolution over that time period i think is fabulous and it really struck me as to the value of military-to-military health topics for discussion. now, they're topics he can discuss on many many levels and one of the benefits we have in the u.s. military is the capabilities from very basic primary care to the most sophisticated surgery in the world so whether we are talking to a nation in the developing world where they have a nascent surgical capability they want to increase or a country that is just getting started and has unique problems about how to start any kind of the health system we have the capability to go discuss that with them, with the u.s. military positions but to the point ambassador hume brought up and the general brought up in the video, why should only be military and medical personnel? one of the values of a hospital ship is it is not the military.
it is military, ngos and partnerships working together on a common theme which is health care. and it sends a couple of strong messages. one is about the patient, not about who is delivering the care and number two we have a common goal to work toward. lots of different people from lots of backgrounds can work together. >> if i could go back to ellen. in the policy world, what is, how difficult or not is it to utilize the capabilities of our people within the department of defense? what issues do you see through your experience being raised here and is there anything we need to do about it or is it working to solve itself? >> from a policies issues on the health side, we train our physicians to care for and treat the beneficiaries eligible for care in the dav.
sometimes we are engaged and care for others and those who are designated beneficiaries the lawyers get a little sticky and so the fine line that we often walked was, we needed training. we had relationships with countries and we train together to improve our ability to protect our forces and those countries and at the same time build the goodwill with the military and civilian members of the health infrastructure in those countries. that is how we leverage the reese -- resources that were built for our protection but from a policy perspective, there was a directive that was published i guess in 2005 that basically said this is important to our combat operations it is to our existence as a strategy. however, the resources did not follow that policy, so i would
say that, and those resources have declined actually in recent years. so i would say from a policy perspective, while we believe in a strategy, investment in the strategy, it leaves a lot to be desired inside the department of defense for the health personnel. >> and if we could extrapolate the situation from 2005, out to the future. probably will be continuing the pressure on these resources. >> ambassador, could you give us a sense from your experience of how we are perceived in other countries? week, here with the health aspect of the military. do the people recognize that there is a potentially usually helpful part of this military presence that goes around the
world or what is the ability to actually discern goodness from other general perceptions, some of which are not particularly helpful to us? >> i think pretty uniformly deeply admired but that does not lead to a clear operational pass. when i went out out to indonesia one of the issues that we had was the indonesians refused to allow our hospitalship to visit and this was i think correctly seen by people at pacom as, as a gratuitous insult. why can't we go there and do things that are just good for the people who are getting the treatment? and the indonesians having the character that they do, they never explain why they do anything. and i came to feel that the best
explanation was, it was the opposite side of that. it was a feeling that some people in the indonesians services had built up that the main consequence of this was our showing the indonesian people that we would do good things and their own government failed to do. and so it was a question of loss of faith. but you know, those things can be fixed and they are fixed by the human relationships and in doing things together. admiral as you suggest doing things together, bringing in and civilians on the ships, closer cooperation with the mobile services, civilian or military, and that took two and a half years but since then they have done very well so i would say deep admiration. >> okay.
ellen, how about this kind of inherent conflict and the resource demand? what is your assessment of the efficiency if you would have our overall military medical capability? one of the chains that rattles around the building in the halls and down the street here of course is look at these individual services that they run on empires and dod allows them to do this. having been on both sides of the argument, what did you see and what do you think about this? is this an issue that, or something that is really not important? >> while i am schizophrenic on the answer is a taxpayer and a person who is knowledgeable about the military health
system, how it's organized and why it is organized organize the way it is, having competent capability to address the health needs, to maintain its ability to execu its miswhere that it serves needs a very strong, very capable medical force structure. we have some added expenses to our mission which is retirees and family members, which i think forces us to address a much broader range of health issues than we would otherwise that is directly correlated, mission related. and i think that for a variety of reasons, political and otherwise, we owe i think the best we can offer to those who have sacrificed so much for this country, and their families, and the retirees. so part of me says we need to set up the structure to be able to do that and the other part of
me says yes, but it's very costly and we could probably buy some of that capability for some of the force that we support. so, i think that we are going to find out how the unaddressed problems of the last four years are going to be addressed because we have become so scared right now. my sense is that regardless of what happens, there needs to be a very strong focus to retain capability to address the war fire needs and whatever platform they operate on it i think they need to wear the uniform of the services they support on that platform. they can have a common commander, they can have common practices, they can have common infrastructure to share information, but and that is where deficiencies can occur but the most gossamer health system is the shared number of people and the of the structure of the hospitals in and the clinics and things like that. so the only way to really reduce
that is to reduce the infrastructure and the number of people and the question is, who do you reduce and that is going to require a very strong assessment of what is absolutely essential to support the mission readiness and the force health protection of the force and continue to do the kinds of things that are important for our ability to perform our national security mission which would include the research, the surveillance, the laboratories, the things that we do to make that nexus between global health and national security. >> that is great. you highlighted a couple of things and i would like to make sure everyone listening has an appreciation for that. within the department of defense, medical resources, there is not a carveout if you would, where doctors and their supporting medical staff deal
with the people and active surface. they are dealing with the entire family, the retired and the children but we also don't have a reservoir of doctors and nurses and other medical people standing by for the next contingency in the world so we have wars such as the last decade, endeavors in iraq and afghanistan. we don't just have a pool of folks who come out of nowhere and deploy. these are people that are actively in fact serving in hospitals and the admiral mentioned the manning for those vessels comes from other hospitals around the united states. people have pulled off temporarily but it brings another point and that is the complexity of all of this that
we need a medical capability that can deal with the day today problems, challenges, everyday living people in this country and others where they are stationed around the world but also the very very special areas to deal with combat situations, and the many things we have relearned or learned to do because of technology, good and otherwise, in this aspect. and so there is a continual demand it seems to me for resources to get adequate training, the readiness of these people while at the same time dealing with those things. it makes this a much more complex issue than many might appreciate and one of the challenges is an understanding of that and the resources, sort of the op-ed on that one. but i think it's really important and i found that
people don't quite understand it because they are not exposed to it so how would we expect them to no? tom, tell me a little bit about your experience. what particular things in the tool bag of capabilities within the military? anything that would be particularly useful in a situation that might extend security in those nontraditional ways. >> i can answer that in a lot of different ways. let me start with disaster response. there has been a lot of discussion and a lot of groups over the last eight or 10 years about how does the military and other branches of the u.s. government, ngos, private enterprise in most nations how do they come together to respond to a disaster? people point fairly regularly back to the indonesian tsunami that occurred back in 2004 plan
a battle group was the first american to respond, one of our hospital ships came about a month later and that was one of the first times that the military and ngos had worked together. in a disaster response setting and subsequent to that, there has been much work in many meetings which really brought the two sides together to realize that yes we are going to respond to a disaster so how can we do it better? we might look at who is going to respond the best or likely the host nation will be the first responder to any disaster that will happen there. if you think about manhattan, the people lived there weren't as -- disaster response so we will come in quickly but fairly late to the game so we need to understand who is in these countries that we are likely to respond to and what is their capability? how can we work with them before the disaster occurs to make sure
we interfaiths as quickly as possible and who are are likely partners to go with us when we respond to this disaster? and if we start with that scenario and we start looking at ways to practice this, and we look at the nexus between security and health care, why not while we are taking our hospital ships over health engagement missions, take the people with us on the ships that are likely to respond to the disasters. if we fast-forward from this nominee -- not tsunami in 2004, couple of years ago, the ngos that went with us on that mission to haiti had been the same ones largely with whom we worked in the intervening six or eight years and other more routine responses. the health care skills that it takes to respond to a disaster particularly in something like haiti are the full gambit of health care. primary care, and neonatal care, ob care for pregnant women,
infectious disease, major chronic care, intensive medicine care and air medical transport all of which we practice during our regular missions. the advantage of this to us is the u.s. military and the u.s. medical capability writ large can do all of these things. we are looking for the capability perhaps to work with an ally which comes to us with a very specific question, how do you guys do so well transporting people who are injured in iraq and afghanistan all the way back to washington d.c., our nation's capital, through germany and your survival rate is so high yet we have problems in our country two hours from our capital and we can't replicate that. how do you do it? that was a very well developed nation that lacked one aspect and that was medical transports. they have the tertiary care
capability in their capital. they have good response in the provincial region where the incidents were occurring, but they couldn't put together the air medical transport peace so we can say that's the issue and they say yeah help us do this so we were able to teach air medical transport of c-130s to a country so by picking very specific things we can work on, we can have an effect that is helpful to the country which hopefully will be what ambassador hume is talking about rather than being afraid -- asking for specific skill set that we can teach and work with and they can do it on their own and we can say that's great. when we have the response to a disaster, we know you can do that and we will have that ready next time. thanks. >> ambassador, what goes on
downrange if you would in other countries with these various entities that are working in the health area? individual folks who decide they want to make a difference and go off to some remote place. did you have an opportunity to engage with some of these folks? what was your experience without naming names, the foundation that have greater leverage and want to make a difference. can you share with us your experiences they are? >> you are asking the question, one word kept coming forward in my mind and that is confusion. there is a risk of confusion, not a certainty of confusion. you get confusion when the local government doesn't have strong enough leadership or plan if you
aren't a place where you have perhaps a u.n. operation and an international coordination and also leadership. you have confusion. i think that one of the highest hurdles to overcome is the residual feeling often among ngos that they will be contaminated if they do in a cooperation with the military, but in most places it's only the military that has the logistic capacity to project not only power but to project water treatment and sanitation equipment into a remote area and take people out from that remote area and you need more sophisticated care. if you don't have the leadership on the ground that can help rich those gaps, i think you get
confusion. i think there is also a continuing sort of intellectual political task. obviously, the red cross have a long tradition of relating to the military on the battlefield and knowing how to deal with this potential sense of conflict and perspective but i think that is the dialogue that has to be extended to all of these other groups that are active. i think some are fairly pragmatic. doctors without borders right now and there are others who are anything but pragmatic. so that is an area where i think groups like csis, there needs to be a continuing dialogue. how do you manage the priorities of or the perspective i should say of an ngo world and a
military organization when you are actually sharing priorities? >> na experience back here in town with ngos coming to the pentagon or the defense department on their side either asking for help or asking for distance or what experience do you have there? >> i have, the red cross comes to mind but i think the issue with ngos from my point of view is very few actually come in other than to say how can we help and who do we go to? that was very prevalent during katrina. a lot of people wanted to just go and they knew enough to know that just showing up wouldn't work. so they were trying to not bother the operations and they were coming to the pentagon to say how can we help in what and what can we do?
i think that scenario replays itself at various levels all over the world, and so again, i am torn by the need to keep the government out of a local cooperative effort so that the benefits of capitalism can come up with a solution that is efficient, low-cost and philanthropic way supported. you have people confuse with a very limited amount of technology and infrastructure requirements like the use of cell phones and how do you communicate during these kinds of disasters at the local level to say what your requirements are? how would you leverage those technologies to inform and independent group who is dedicated to supporting those kinds of things? that could be the csis and any
non-governmental government to apply a bias or an agenda. as much as the government wants to do what it wants to do, it is there because it cares and it wants to help but everyone on the receiving end is going to be looking at it, what's in it for them? and so i think that we need a way, supposedly government supported so there is, i don't know, i know of a lot of companies that have identified ways to handle logistics and bring logistics into in a very businesslike way. yet we continue to use what we they know because it's there but it's costly and it's costly to the government that supports it. i would like to see us address a uniformly embraced standard
process for how you manage and sort through priority needs at disaster sites. and negotiate it by non-governmental entities but that is my personal opinion. >> on ambassador hume's comment, any help engagement the military is likely to do will stay there for a long period of time with the exception of overseas -- [inaudible] so one of the big concerns that is come out in these discussions i was talking about between ngos, usaid and the military abandoned trying to figure out the cultures and how they come together is trying to get an understanding for how the episodic military help engagement with usually another military be helpful to what started going on in the country as opposed to becoming disruptive. many -- any health engagement we
do with another country's military is likely going to involve -- if not ngos in the country and there has been a lot of discussion about how do we go when and as to what is already occurring in the country. from my experience in the studies to the military has been relying on helping advised to how do we insert ourselves and how do we help in this process and leave you with a better situation after we leave? >> since you have opened the box, ambassador your last post and jakarta, a country that has had its share of natural disasters, lots of volcanoes and a very huge area spread thousands of miles across the sea, how did you approach this from your country perspective by way of reparation, thinking
about what might happen and have your folks look at that and what you might do or how to try to help to get assistance in these situations? >> i went out in mid-2007 during the epidemic -- ver ploeg, it really wasn't epidemic, almost an epidemic, as it was unfolding. half of the deaths in bird flu are in indonesia and two-thirds of those deaths were from the township where the airports from jakarta are located. jacquard is the fifth-largest city in the world so if you had a change of the bird flu influenza so that it became
easily transmissible among human beings, well there would be no way to stop it because within 24 hours people who had been exposed to this would have flown to every corner of the world before anyone knew that it had in fact come highly communicable. so, i went out and while there was a long list of things when you go places, they fix all of this. we are not giving you any tools, just fix it. the thing that was in the back of my mind was, more than anything else, even if you can't fix it, you can't be asleep when there was a risk, even if it's a small risk and you cannot quantify it. the place where you are serving is going to be the place that explodes with the spanish influenza epidemic from 1918 and you were asleep and he didn't do anything to identify it earlier
on, put anything in place. i want to add that i didn't know what i was going to do and i went out and i found we had some really highly, highly capable people in the country, people of nam rue and the navy lab but also other people, usaid people in the country team and they had generally good connections in the medical community. we worked at various levels to begin with the health minister, in this case sort of an anti-american mystic, and at that level it was very hard to deal with but at other levels there was a lot of possibilities for professional cooperation. and there were in fact people in the government who, when they decided they would no longer share influenza samples, you
still shared influenza samples. and how do you, how do you deal with this? we had access to clinicians and access to people in hospitals and the subsequent health minister who has since died was a doctor who had a degree from harvard and public health. and her husband was the head of the public hospital in the township where the airport was located. you just do the best you can. we have brought in, and we had support from nih who offered to help with training and level 4 laboratory --
a base laboratory downtown and to build those human relationships, but no automatic answer. and now we don't have the navy laboratory but other than that we are back on an even basis and both understanding the importance of improved, improved relationship on this and building for the future and it gave us time. the influenza did not become a pandemic. >> the personal relationships are key. >> the training incident lay, education. we have no reason not to help these people but exceeding their medical and health care professions by bringing them here and training them. when you train someone at last for 40 years. nothing else less for 40 years and that is what we should be generous about. >> do you mentioned earlier, one
of your comments, so i think of water sanitation, fundamental to human life. of course we can do that and people know a of ways to help in my experience is we episodically, we go and do engagements in other countries and we bring folks in this part of an exercise. we work with the locals to do something and dig wells or help in some areas. but then we are gone. we can't afford, we can't seem to afford this and this is our main business. any thoughts about this? first the importance of these basics again and how -- what role the military may play in this? >> one of the things that people
really don't understand about our military is how can we go anywhere in the world and we don't seem to get six? we look at the basics of our own troops and before we go there. the industrial hygiene and preventative medicine and infectious disease capability we have in the u.s. military is wonderful and we use that every day ourselves. when it comes to basic public health in other countries, even though the u.s. military can go there and be episodically involved like i mentioned, that is an area of other parts of the government and ngos and the cdci would see is probably the lead for that. the cdc and simple for global health plan they just published about what their plan is for 2012 to 2015 for how they want to engage globally and they really look at what is our strength with the cdc and how can we apply that to other parts
of the world and how do we develop ourselves so we can get better and where should we take this and also how does the cdc work with other parts of the u.s. government including the military to strengthen this? this comes back to the different parts of the government working together to have an effective u.s. response, not a military response or a cdc responds or an ngo response but a world response to the security and health in any given country that comes back to the generals comment in the video. >> ellen one question switching gears a little bit here. how do you think we could do a better job of getting the word out here in town to those for example, folks on the hill, not just the senators and congressmen but their staffers to have a better understanding
of how these pieces come together and the intricate ways in which we can leverage these health capabilities? >> the cost of health and the people and the things that it performs in its entirety, both the civilian and those in uniform and the of the structure surrounding it is such a big part of the pie of the dod budget. it's very very difficult to raise issues about this unless you tie it directly to the core mission of the department of defense. and when you do that, you are confronted with the way in which congress appropriates money for health resources. they put it in specific little bags of money that you can't exchange and it is not for the readiness of the force. is for the delivery of health
care. and so, what we try to do is explain over and over again that the most important part of what we do besides the department of defense with those in uniform that deliver care and capability everywhere, not just here at home, is to have -- operate those labs and understand emerging infectious disease and train and do the research on what it will beat well prevent these things from keeping us being able to perform in those risk environments. that is what is critical for the military health system but those investments actually, out of the budgets of the military departments, not out of the defense health program. so we get a double bank. we are taking it out of the operational dollars of the military as well as the defense health program and there needs to be a very clear pot of money that addresses how the military health system addresses core
missions and that is what we are talking about here today, how the military supports national security and that is the part that is not being funded at the department. it is being funded by the wise men like you and you and you through usaid and others that have help us persist in supporting these important functions despite the fact that the defense health programs, the main contribution is training of those assets and education but in terms of the mission support, not so much. >> to the audience here today, thank you. we have heard a wide range of issues that we have tried to bring out in a complex discussion and hopefully a little bit of food for thought.
so at some risk here i would like to open this up to folks to ask questions either of individual panelists or a bus in general and we will see if anybody can try to field the grounders. how are we fixed for mike's? ladies come are you going to be a will to do that? that gentleman decided to the left he had his hand up first. go ahead, sir. please stand up and tell us who you are or who you are affiliated with. >> good afternoon. i'm with talk radio news service. a quick comment. you mentioned the indonesian government feeling a little bit that they were losing faith. i guess it would be similar to the canadians and the germans coming here after super storm sandy and our own government did nothing which was pretty much politely ask what was going on. my question has to do with the risk in going into places around
the world that need health assistance on a very critical level. this year usaid was booted out of russia. initially when they went there to help the russian people one of the first things they did was the help of the russians in extreme poverty. my question is, is the risks too much for us so that we would basically go and help some nation and then they would say thank you and don't let the door hit you on the way out? >> first of all, in the indonesian case, part of that is just cultural. they are far more sensitive to the question of faith than we are, so it's not infrequent that we would behave in a way that doesn't take into account their cultural sensitivity. but this happens all the time in life.
i think you have to ask yourself what is the right thing to do, and you try and do it. if you make your very best effort and someone is appreciative, you didn't do anything wrong. don't worry about it. sometimes that happens. i wouldn't hesitate to help people because someone related to a recipient that they weren't helped by their own kind. so i would want to help. >> if i could at something. in the indonesian case, the thing that exacerbated the relationship that made things more challenging and the ambassador was still there when he was in residence, was, we had a policy decision here in the u.s. regarding military engagement with the country and to sum it up there was non-for about a decade. the repercussions of that, the
ramifications of it were very significant. i showed up just after and we would go back to the 2004 tsunami. there was a lot of discussion about what we were -- whether we were going to do anything and should we do anything given the testy relationship and a lot of baggage that we had. thankfully, we not only did the right thing but did it in a very bang up matter. manner. the fallout of policy both domestic and otherwise are sometimes quite significant and people will institute these things for what appear to be and certainly strongly held opinions about this is the right thing to do given the circumstance but as to most other things in life you have to be careful because the an intended consequence sometimes is very severe.
so the background situation in this country was one of less than ideal, we love you so much, what else can we do for you? so it's reality and you have to work with it. i couldn't agree more. we shouldn't let that stop us from trying. here in the center. >> ed berger, the duration and medical education programs the american college of physicians operated in russia for the last 15 years. and the vehicle has been continuing medical education cooperation with our colleagues in the academic medical centers there. let me offer two comments. one is a reflection on something something -- in a setting right here and that is in fact from his experience it was much more valuable, much more useful to
provide capacity building abroad than it was to provide things, technological and otherwise. the other one is an observation of my own and that is that as we have this morning, we have talked a great deal about crises of various sorts, disasters or riots or wars. they are in fact is much less conversation about something that i think is at least as important and that is, what can one do to reduce the probability of a crises? health has been our experience a place, cooperation health has a place to -- that is politically much less salable but probably i would propose much more valuable than to concentrate only are exclusively on the issues of management at of the crisis

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