Female Speaker: From the Library of Congress in Washington,
D.C. Marcus Brauchli: On behalf of the Library of Congress,
welcome to the 2011 Book Festival.   We hope you're having a great day.
Before we begin, I want to inform you that the proceedings
in this pavilion are being filmed for the Library
of Congress's website and for their archives and by C-SPAN for airing
on Book TV, so please be mindful of that as you watch the presentation.
Please don't sit on the camera risers on the back.
We wouldn't want a camera toppling on anybody.
And please, if you could, silence cell phones.
I'm Marcus Brauchli.
I'm the executive editor of The Washington Post.
We are proud to be a charter sponsor of the festival, as we have been,
in the 11 years since it's been going.
As you all know, who are here, the festival is really one of the city's
and the nation's great literary festivals.
A place where books and writing, thinking, and the people who do all
of those things are celebrated.
It's my great privilege today to open this pavilion
by introducing Eugene Robinson.
The act of introducing him to an audience
in Washington is probably an exercise in redundancy.
He's a big figure in this town, and for many good reasons.
He's a long-time reporter and editor at The Post.
He now writes an op-ed column for the paper and the website
and is syndicated nationally.
As you know, if you read him, he writes thoughtfully
and compassionately, and he's written on just about any subject
and every subject you or I or anybody else might find interesting.
He's also held just about every job at The Post.
He started as a reporter covering City Hall, he worked as City Editor,
he covered South America, he was London Bureau Chief,
he was Foreign Editor, and he was Assistant Managing Editor overseeing
the Style section, before he began writing opinion columns in 2005.
He's won a Pulitzer Price for his commentary for his columns
on the 2008 Presidential Campaign.
Today he's here because he's also an author.
His latest book, "Disintegration", is a fascinating exploration
of the ever shifting sands and understandings of race in America.
It's terrain that he has covered powerfully before.
In his book, "Coal to Cream", Gene, who is a South Carolina native,
described himself as an African American, who once was black,
once was a negro, once was a colored boy.
In that book, there's a telling sentence that sets
up the ideas in his new books.
He writes, "I'm a chronic integrator.
Sometimes by accident, sometimes by design,
but since high school has always been either a black student
at white schools, or a black employee at white institutions."
Contrast that with the title of the first chapter of his new book,
"Black America Doesn't Live Here Anymore".
You get the idea of the journey that Gene is taking.
It's an extraordinary one, and one I hope you will all join
in reading his -- when you read his book.
[applause] Eugene Robinson: Thanks so much.
Thank you, everyone for coming, and thank you, Marcus,
for that wonderful introduction.
Marcus is a great journalist who has, what I think has to be one
of the toughest jobs in America: editing a great daily newspaper
in the era of the Internet, in an era that is not being kind
to great daily newspapers.
And yet maintaining the quality of the journalism and the ambition
and the accomplishment of The Washington Post.
Marcus does it elegantly and he's been doing it for several years now,
and he's not wizened and bent over as most of us would be,
or crushed by the pressure.
And so I, let me first applaud him and thank him for his exertions.
[applause] I'm going to talk a bit about "Disintegration",
which is just out in paperback, and how that book came about,
and what it's about, and then open it up to questions.
And we can have more of a conversation for the second half
of this time we have together.
"Disintegration", by the way, is just out in paperback,
coming out now, right now.
So anyone who is interested, I think the nice folks at Barnes
and Noble would be happy to sell you a copy.
"Disintegration" is a book that grew out of a nagging feeling.
It was -- to the extent that there was a conversation at all
about Black America, I felt, it was an unreal conversation.
It seemed to be -- it seemed to have very little connection
with the reality that I was seeing every day.
So this kind of thought worked on me for really a couple of years
in 2005, 2006, and I was thinking
that well maybe there's some sort of book here.
Maybe, my thought was that Black America was really much more
diverse, economically, socially, and culturally than it was --
than we made it out to be.
When we talked about Black America, we talked about, talked about it
as if it were still 1967 or 1968,
and you could make certain generalizations
that just weren't valid anymore, I thought.
And, so I kind of -- I didn't know where this led,
and then in 2007 actually, three things happened
that made me think this is definitely a book.
The first was that the Pew Research Center, which does all sorts
of interesting surveys about anything under the sun,
did a survey of African Americans.
And buried, sort of, toward the end of this --
of these survey findings was the following question and response.
Thirty-seven percent of the black Americans who were interviewed
by Pew said they no longer believed black Americans could be thought
of as a single race.   And I said, "Wow.
That is a really weird finding."
There was no kind of backup to say exactly what that meant, but I said,
"Well, you know, that seems to fit into what I've been thinking,
and I think it's probably -- I think it means something,
but I don't know exactly what it means."
Second thing that happened was that at --
a group of black publishing executives
from the African American press around the country were
in Washington for a meeting and they were invited here,
invited to The Washington Post for a reception, and I was asked
to deliver a few remarks at this reception --
kind of a drive-by greeting, five minutes, "Hello, How are you?
Welcome to Washington.
You can catch a trolley outside and I'll, you know, see you later."
And, so I went downstairs to our auditorium and I spoke
with this group for a while, and I started getting into this question
of diversity in the black community, and whether,
when we talk about Black America, we're talking about reality.
And the response was incredible.
This five minute drive-by turned into an hour,
which was more them talking to me than me talking to them.
And people said, "You know, you know, it's really true, and,
you know, there's this --
there's this group that's in the middle class that's doing well,
but there's also this group that's not doing well,"
and somebody pipes up, "You know,
what about the immigrants, black immigrants?"
and it was, it was just a really energizing and in some ways,
validating dialogue, and it made me think, "Well,
there is something here."   So I started doing research.
I started looking at census data, at marketing studies, academic papers,
journalism -- anything I could get my hands on that kind
of addressed this question of what was Black America today as opposed
to Black America 40 years ago.
And then, and I actually worked up the proposal, that,
for "Disintegration" and signed up with Doubleday to do the book.
And then the third thing happened in 2007,
which is that the presidential campaign
of Barack Obama caught fire.   This Junior Senator from Illinois
who had a name off the Guantanamo detainees list all
of a sudden was not just a viable candidate
for the Democratic nomination, but looked like he might get it.
And so I talked to my editors, my book editors, who were by then kind
of patiently waiting for me to get started and explained
that I didn't really think I could do this book
until I knew how that story came out.
So I did wait for that story to come out.
And I will tell just a little brief story I'd like to interject.
As some of you know, I grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina
in the late 1950s, early 1960s toward the end of Jim Crow.
I went to segregated schools, lived in a black neighborhood
on the black side of town, because that's where one lived.
I was too young to remember, but Dr. King did visit my church and spoke.
Two black colleges in Orangeburg, and in 1968 there was an incident
that became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
Students from South Carolina State University began a demonstration
over a segregated bowling alley in the heart of Orangeburg.
It's called The All Star Lanes, long since closed,
but it was a whites only bowling alley.
And this protest over the bowling alley grew into something larger.
And it mushroomed over the course of three nights.
After the second night --
this demonstration was about five hundred yards from my house,
so we had kind of a direct line of sight -- after the second night,
I remember getting up in the morning, schools were all closed,
and looking out the window to see what was going on and my father,
who was an extremely gentle man, yelled at me in a voice
that he had never used before and said,
"Get down out of that window, right now!"
And so I ducked down and then he let me peek over the window sill.
And right across the street from our house there was a line
of 12 highway patrol cars, the state troopers were out of the cars,
behind the open doors of their cars with the rifles pointing
at a house two doors down from our house.
And they were looking for the organizer
from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
from Smith [spelled phonetically].
A man named Cleveland Sellers [spelled phonetically],
who they correctly suspected was the outside agitator who was stirring
up all the colored folk in Orangeburg,
and they were coming to get him.
He had better intelligence than they had, so he was long gone,
so there was no gunfire that morning.
However, that night there was.   The highway patrol claimed
to have been fired on, by the, from the campus.
Gunfire was never demonstrated.
It was never proved that anybody on the campus had any weapons,
but nonetheless the state troopers did fire at, into the crowd,
and when the smoke cleared, three black --
three young black men had been killed.
All shot in the back, or the soles of their feet.
A couple of dozen other people injured.
That was the Orangeburg Massacre.
If you kind of fast forward to election night on 2008,
when we're about to see how the Obama story was coming out,
I was at Rockefeller Center with my very interesting,
but somewhat dysfunctional, MSNBC family on the anchor desk.
And it was that period when it was really dysfunctional, you know,
because we had Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, and Rachel Maddow
and I were there and kind of trying to figure
out [laughs] what the deal was with Keith and Chris,
and at 10:45 that evening, we heard through our little earpieces
that the network was going to call the election for Obama at 11:00.
And so I got to live one of the moments of my life
that I will never forget.
I got to, at the next break, take out my cell phone and call my father
and mother, my father was then 92 years old,
he died several months later actually,
right before the inauguration.
And I got to call my father and my mother who was 87,
and tell them that they had lived to see the election
of the first African American president in U.S. history.
It's a moment I will never forget.
A moment none of us, I think, will ever forget.
And certainly a moment that kind of rounded out the arc of the story
that I had decided I wanted to tell with "Disintegration",
which was essentially that there isn't one Black America anymore.
I, somewhat arbitrarily, because I think
such decisions are almost always arbitrary,
came out with not one Black America, but four.
And they are as follows.
From all the research I did, all the interviewing I did,
it seemed to me that, number one, there was a majority
of African Americans, not a huge majority, but a majority
that had managed to enter the middle class,
such as there is a middle class in this country anymore,
we can discuss that, and we can also discuss the impact the recession has
had, but that if you look not only at income, but if you look
at education and other sorts of social indicators and you try
to make a realistic assessment of not only where people are,
but what their prospects are, I see a majority
that entered the middle class, and I called that group the Mainstream.
It was clear to me, too, that there is, however,
that there is also a very large minority of African Americans,
35 percent perhaps, 30, 35 percent, maybe that much, that did not make
that climb from poverty to the middle class and for whom
that climb is more difficult and actually becoming more improbable
than it has been in decades, simply because so many rungs
of that ladder are missing.
Those blue collared jobs that used to exist, that a person with,
who perhaps didn't have a college education, but was --
but wanted to work and do better for his or her family could get a job,
have job security, good salary, good benefits,
a pension when they retired, could have a little house,
could send their kids to college, so the kids would have a better life.
Millions of African Americans, many of whom participated
in the great migration from South to North, took advantage
of this great sort of escalator that the auto industry
in Detroit provided and that other industries in Chicago
or Baltimore or wherever provided.
One example is Michelle Obama's family.
The way -- her father is sort of the person I think of when I think
of this striving, achieving group of African Americans.
And where are those jobs?
Well, they're in, you know, they're in China, a lot of them are
in China, they're going to be moving offshore from China, I guess,
at some point soon to places
where you can pay even lower wages, but they're not here.
And they're not going to be here.
So, huge group of African Americans, that, to my mind,
has become abandoned, practically.
And so that's what I call that group -- the Abandoned.
And then I saw something that struck me as new.
A group of African Americans who have achieved or obtained wealth,
power, or influence on a scale far beyond anything we have seen before.
Not just relative to other African Americans,
but relative to anybody in the world.
And so, you know, the number one obvious example would be President
Obama, he's president of the United States.
But also Oprah Winfrey or Bob Johnson,
the founder of Black Entertainment Television,
I think was the first black billionaire.
Richard Parsons, who was chairman and CEO
of the world's biggest entertainment -- media and entertainment company,
Time Warner, and then was asked to come back after his retirement,
leave his vineyard in Tuscany and come back to help right the ship
at Citigroup after the collapse.
And so we had a -- we had a tableau that could,
we could never have had, ever in history.
An African American president grappling
with the worst financial economic crisis since the Great Depression,
sees that a steady hand is needed
at this giant world important financial institution, Citigroup,
and is able to call on an African American seasoned CEO to come
in and help right the ship.   That couldn't have happened before.
So I called this tiny group the Transcendent group,
and actually opened the book with a scene from a party
at Vernon Jordan's house that was quite interesting.
And finally I saw something new that I called Emergent Black America.
And this emergent group I further subdivided
into kind of two categories.
One is the record number of black immigrants from the Caribbean,
but especially from Africa, who have come to this country in the last two
or three decades, especially the last 20 years, who are --
who arrived from Ethiopia or Nigeria or Ghana with intact families,
without a lot of money, but with a tremendous amount of education.
It's the best educated group
of immigrants coming to this country today.
And whose children are doing spectacularly well.
A few years ago Skip Gates and Lani Guinier
at Harvard did an informal survey that has been
since replicated with more rigor.
What they did was, they just took a list of the incoming black freshmen
at Harvard and checked how many were African surnames.
And it was a little more than half, I believe.
My wife, for several years, ran a college access
and scholarship program that she founded
for African American students from the Washington area.
We found the same thing.
We found that, at least, I would say, 35 to 40 percent of --
and at times more, of the high achieving black students
in this area had African surnames.
Clearly obviously either Ethiopian or Nigerian or Ghanaian.
And this sort of nascent record of achievement tells me
that this is going to be a very, very important group in the future.
The other emergent group that I saw is the increasing number
of biracial, black white Americans, who self identify
as African American, but whose relationship
with White America is somewhat different in nuanced,
in a nuanced way, but somewhat different from mine,
as President Obama has talked about this.
Remember during his race speech in Philadelphia
when he essentially said --
before he threw Reverend Wright under the bus, he said, "I can't,
I could no more throw Reverend Wright under the bus
than I could my own grandmother, whom I've, my white grandmother,
whom I've heard say racially insensitive things."
And it seems to me that this is a nuanced, perhaps, difference,
but it's a distinction, and it will be interesting
to see how it evolves.
So those are the four groups I saw: Mainstream,
Abandoned, Transcendent, Emergent.
And "Disintegration" really is about kind of how we got to where we are
and eventually where we're headed.
And where I really come out is that, whatever is left
of affirmative action, whatever attention we have,
we can summon for promotion of equality
and justice in this country.
We need to focus in on this abandoned group.
And if it means the rest of us got to fend for ourselves, that's fine,
but we're really in danger of losing millions and millions of people
who are just kind of dropping off the map in terms of this society.
So, thank you again for coming.   I'm going to stop talking now
and so we can do a few minutes of questions.
So thank you.   Thank you.
[applause] There are a couple of microphones up here.
I just wanted to ask a question regarding your primary thesis on --
Eugene Robinson: Could you, sir -- could you pull the mic down?
Male Speaker: Oh sure, okay.
On your primary thesis that you have these three groups, so to speak.
Don't you think the same situation applies
to many ethnic and racial groups?
That you have a -- what you might call a emergent group,
a transcendent group, and those that might be left out.
That might apply to other ethnic and racial groups.
Eugene Robinson: Yeah, the question is whether that,
this sort of schema applies to other ethnic and racial groups.
You know in a -- I'd say
in a general sense I think you could certainly --
you could certainly look at other groups in a similar fashion.
I'm not sure you'd come out with the same way of kind of figuring
out distinctions, for example if you were talking about Latinos,
you might put some emphasis on national origin, for example,
which is still a, you know,
kind of an important factor in some people's lives.
But, yeah, you could use the same method, I think,
for kind of looking at other groups, too.
Female Speaker: You made your distinction along race lines,
but it, as you were speaking,
it seems as though addressing the problems of the abandoned,
would be as much a class and economic solution as racial.
Eugene Robinson: Yeah, are we talking about --
Female Speaker: Can you please address that?
Eugene Robinson: Are we -- right.
Are we talking race or are we talking class?
I think the inevitable answer is both.
And what I -- you know, I tried to go into the book with an open mind.
And tried to prepare myself to be led to the conclusion
that really we didn't need to talk about race anymore,
we just needed to talk about class.
I didn't come to that conclusion, actually.
I mean, and I found it, yeah, but I, no, but I understand.
I found it impossible to kind of tease the two apart, and so I,
but yes, the, certainly the economic situation of the abandoned,
will be addressed when we, hey, here's an idea,
when we talk about poverty.
When we talk about ways to alleviate poverty.
When we actually pay more than lip service to the notion
that everybody, you know, deserves a chance in this society.
[low audio] Eugene Robinson: Oh, yeah.
Female Speaker: Thank you for your comments.
I very much admire your work.   Eugene Robinson: Thank you so much.
Female Speaker: And I look forward to reading your book.
I've not had the opportunity as yet.
But it strikes me in your comment about jobs going away,
that they're in China and elsewhere in the world,
and that they're not coming back, and I think that's true.
I think that companies are very invested outside
of the United States, but I think also that they could make more
of an investment here in the United States
if they were motivated to do so.
For example, just retraining of the Abandoned,
regardless of what is class or, you know, ethnicity,
but the retraining aspect, building more schools, secondary,
not secondary schools, but the, thinking of two-year type schools,
where they're focused on that.
So I was just wondered, do you address solutions in your book,
and do you think that that might be a way to incent companies,
manufacturing companies and otherwise to,
you know, focus more on that?
Eugene Robinson: I do try to address some solutions in the book,
and I kind of decided not to confine myself
to what I thought could get 60 votes in the Senate.
You know, because otherwise I could just call, you know, Susan Collins
and Olympia Snow and ask them, "Gee, what should we do?"
Yeah, because they would be the votes.
But, and where I came out is that, you know, the one thing I've seen
that really works is very expensive because it's a holistic approach.
You've got to work on education, education is complicated.
I use the example in the book of a program that my former colleague,
William Raspberry, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist at The Post,
who retired and started a nonprofit called "Baby Steps"
in his hometown in Mississippi.
Tiny little town, mostly black, very poor.
He wanted to do something.
And so he decided, he did it, he did some reporting,
he decided early childhood education was
where he could have the biggest impact.
So he sets up this, set up a program for early childhood education,
and he quickly discovers that you can't just do that.
You have to -- he learned that you couldn't just instruct parents
on how to read to their children if there was nobody in that household
who was capable of doing that in a way that really helped the children.
So he needed a center for those kids to come to.
He needed to do, you know, some very thorough assessment work before
families came into the program,
and he needed a center for kids to come to.
Then he found that he needed to deal with nutritional and health issues
because there were a lot of, you know, chronic disease, diabetes,
obesity, and questions about, you know, kids who were eating a lot
of empty calories, but not good calories.
So he had to deal with the health aspect,
and it just kind of mushroomed.
The program is still going strong, and it's having a real impact,
but you know, he's a famous newspaper columnist,
whose name is recognized, who was, who got his phone calls returned
when he called, you know, the Kellogg Foundation
and other big foundations, and he managed to raise a lot of money
that is having a real impact.
It's very expensive, though, and we need 30 million Bill Raspberrys.
Female Speaker: I'm coming from the point of view of a,
working in the schools in Arlington.
And there I saw that the African American,
historically African American kids versus the African,
historically African kids saw themselves as two complete
and not necessarily friendly groups.
And I was gathering from what you were saying that things got better
by college age, but how do you see this, and [inaudible]?
Eugene Robinson: You know I do think that,
at least in my fairly limited experience, you know, I haven't,
we haven't had a chance to do sort
of a longitudinal study of that relationship.
But it does, it strikes me that it does, that the friction
which you see in the schools, in the elementary and secondary schools,
and the sort of culture clash, seems to attenuate, seems to diminish
over time, and you see a lot less of that in college, and then,
of course, as this large, sort of, group of either foreign born
or first generation kids moves out into the workplace,
I think you'll see it even less.
As they kind of increasingly identify as African American,
rather than as Ethiopian or a Nigerian or Ghanaian,
and as African Americans expand their definition
of African American.   So. Thank you.
Male Speaker: I'd like to know, if, from your research
on the fragmentation of blacks, if you get a sense that the election
of Barack Obama will go the way of the election of Harold Washington,
a moment in time, not to be repeated anytime soon,
or has the country gotten to a real turning point?
Can you derive that from what you've look at?
Eugene Robinson: Oh, I don't know.
[laughs] I mean, you know, if I knew, I would,
I'd be in tremendous demand as a pundit.
I think from what we've seen since,
I think you could make a good argument that the stars aligned
in an unusual way for the election of President Obama.
Nonetheless, you know, they could align again.
I mean, there, you can't -- it wasn't an accident,
and it does reflect, I think, obviously real change in the country
because it couldn't possibly have happened, you know,
20 years ago, or 30 years ago.
I don't know if it happens again next year.
I don't know if it -- and does it happen anytime soon?
I really think he was the man for that specific moment.
If the man or woman for another specific moment emerges,
but you know, you just don't know.   You just don't know.
Female Speaker: Hi.   Good morning.
Eugene Robinson: Good morning.
Female Speaker: Enjoyed watching you on CNN on "The Last Word".
Eugene Robinson: Thank you.   Female Speaker: Okay.
My question, I'm going to piggyback off of a previous comment,
but from a different perspective.
The comment that I'm paraphrasing was about the abandoned class and,
you know, classism and all of that.
And I wanted your take on, okay, the abandoned class, that issue has
to be addressed, but oftentimes when you address the abandoned class,
it's perceived as welfare or classism or socialism,
but then on the other end you do have, and I'm not trying to make it,
this political, I'm asking a valid question, corporate welfare,
bailouts, and whatnot, but it's not perceived in the same way,
and they're both almost the same.
So why do you think that, okay, if you help the underclass, you know,
there's the perception, oh, it's socialism, but it's not viewed
in the same way if you bail out a larger company that,
you know, corporate welfare.   You know, it's almost the same.
Eugene Robinson: Right, well, that's an excellent question.
I've asked it myself.   In print. But I don't have an answer
as to why we don't see corporate welfare as,
we don't recognize corporate welfare, and we do recognize,
well gee, we don't even have welfare anymore,
but we're certainly determined to get rid of, kind of, social welfare.
So, you know, I don't know.   I don't know.
The similarity seems clear to me.
But. [low audio] Eugene Robinson: I can't hear you.
Female Speaker: So what part of the opposition
to President Obama do you feel is racial,
and at first glance this might seem obvious, but Clinton had
such an ugly opposition as well.
Do you think that's just part of the system now,
or do you think that's hard to determine?
Eugene Robinson: So, the question, what part of the opposition
to President Obama do I think is racial.
I don't know.   48.3 percent?
[laughter] 52.9?
You know, I think it's, I think it's a lot.
I think it's -- and, some of it I think is consciously racial,
and some of it probably is not explicit or conscious,
but there's a -- but for some people I think his race militates
against legitimacy in some way.   That, and it is striking to me,
the extent to which people feel they have permission
to consider the duly elected, in a landslide,
President of the United States as somehow illegitimate,
an illegitimate holder of the office,
not just the birtherism [spelled phonetically] but -- [applause] --
and, you know, if you think I'm overstating that,
I'd show you my email.   [laughs] Because I get it.
And it's sometimes very ugly.   Female Speaker: Thank you.
I'm a special educator in Montgomery County schools,
and even though I think it's not a special education perspective,
the problem in, I feel, in education today is
that the vocational programs in high schools have been shut down.
Eugene Robinson: Yeah.
Female Speaker: And you can be a very intelligent person,
but not interested in the academic program, and the --
there seems to be no addressing this in the race to the top program
and -- Eugene Robinson: Right.   I -- Female Speaker: -- everything.
Eugene Robinson: You know,
I agree that we have not been creative enough in thinking
of education and in offering viable alternatives to people,
particularly in the, you know, in the vocations, in, and we're going
to have to find some way to do that.
And maybe it's through community colleges.
Maybe it's, you know, but why not start at the secondary level?
And, you know, it's an excellent question.
We persist with the kind of "one size fits all",
when we know that one size doesn't fit all.
And we know that, you know, we're not giving people the kind
of education that they need to compete at a high level, you know,
without necessarily having the classic liberal arts
college education.
So. Male Speaker: Hello, Mr. Robinson.
I really enjoy watching you on MSNBC.
Eugene Robinson: Thank you.
Male Speaker: If you had the opportunity to speak
with President Obama, what would you tell him about the abandoned class
to make them take notice?
He and his senior advisors, to try to help that class you
so well identified in the book.   Thank you.
Eugene Robinson: Well, I'd say, "Read the book."
And I'd say -- I was getting [spelled phonetically] a plug --
and I would, you know I'd throw out some numbers and statistics,
and he would already know them.
And he would say that -- and he would respond that, what he's,
what he has tried to do and would like to do is pursue policies
that would uplift, you know, all people who are similarly situated,
but policies that would necessarily have a greater impact among African
Americans, simply because the problems of, you know,
in terms of poverty and dysfunction are so much greater.
I'm told that I'm out of time, so take one more question, that's it.
Male Speaker: Just a quick comment on the Republican field
for presidential nomination.
Eugene Robinson: [laughs] A quick comment
on the Republican [spelled phonetically] field.
Well, it says a lot that, after, you know, we had several weeks of,
you know, "When will Rick Perry get in?
If Rick Perry would only get in, that's the guy."
And now, it's, "Where's Chris Christie?
Please, Chris Christie, to get in the race."
They still, to my mind, haven't found, and I think it's,
this is clear to the Republican establishment,
they haven't found a candidate
yet who they're confident can beat President Obama next year and,
you know, I thought the toughest candidate for him to face last time
around would have been Romney.
I think that's true again this time, but I don't know
if Republican's primary electorate will choose Mitt Romney.
Because of RomneyCare.   So. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
[applause] Female Speaker: This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.   [end of transcript]