 Good evening. I'm Mark up to go the director of the LBJ presidential library and on behalf of the Texas Tribune our partner for tonight's event I want to welcome you tonight. We welcome back Mark Halpern and John Hyman who will be Talking about their latest best-selling book double down game change 2012 an insider's view of last year's presidential election Mark Halpern is the editor at large and senior political analyst for Time magazine and a political analyst MSNBC and John Hyman is the national affairs editor for New York magazine and also a political analyst for MSNBC This is the third time Mark and John have graced this stage and the third time they filled this auditorium The first time they were here. They discussed their book game change Which definitively chronicled the presidential election of 2008 that saw Barack Obama take our nation's highest office the book spent seven weeks as the number one book on the New York Times best-seller list and 15 weeks on the list all together They then came back for a screening of the movie adaption for game change Which ran on HBO and went on to garner five Emmy Awards since double down has already been optioned by HBO We may be lucky enough to see Mark and John for a fourth time And I have no doubt that when we do we will fill this auditorium once again Moderating tonight's discussion with Mark and John is our old friend the CEO and founder of the Texas Tribune Evan Smith Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Evan Smith Mark Halpern and John Hyman Hello. Hello. Nice to see you guys again. Nice to fill this room again. That is quite something three times Pretty great. It's all about you Evan. Yes. It's all for me. I'm sure You're just riding on my coattails. That's how it's been for a long time So to Mark's point about this already being a best-seller debuted on the New York Times best-seller list this last weekend at number three Number one e-book in America This is a pretty great accomplishment, but maybe more important than either the best-seller list Hardback best-sellerist or the e-book is the fact that apparently Kim Jong-un According to the Washington Post today Has taken a shine to your book. Would you explain? It's it's very rare that authors get the satisfaction of accomplishing exactly what they set out to do We wrote this book with little our little thought bubbles above our head was the maximum leader and we wanted him to like the book And apparently he does he sees in it A manifestation of all that is wrong With President Obama and weak about America. I think it's basically it But the new service there did a little item about it and the Washington Post picked it up So we're waiting to see if if there's some sort of Dennis Rodman tie-in that we can We can work up because as good as we like to think we are at promotion This is a little bit John this is a little bit like the Oprah book club only it's more like you get a nuclear weapon You get a nuclear weapon you get a nuclear weapon, you know I didn't know that there was a Kim Jong-un book club, right? But apparently there is there is what the best part about it is really I mean the headline of the story Which is North Korea endorses double down as proof that quote the u.s. Is the root cause of all sorts of evil Isn't that great as I said exactly what we set out to do and talk about we've already got a great blurb for the paperback So I think that's gonna be as fresh as today's headlines. That's gonna be awesome It's gonna be great. So the last time you were here with the book not the movie But with the book I asked you if in the 2008 campaign It was fair to say that John McCain lost or Barack Obama won I am moved given the fact that we had two flawed candidates flawed at different levels running in this last election I guess every election features two flawed candidates at some level Whether Mitt Romney lost this election or Barack Obama won Mark. What would you say? I'll go with the very diplomatic answer and say a little bit of both I think it's clear the president could have lost I think it's clear that Governor Romney ran a weaker campaign in a lot of ways than Republicans expected their nominee to do Yeah, a lot of Republicans who might have been stronger candidates including Mitch Daniels of Indiana Chose not to run. Yeah, and so Governor Romney ended up I think being of the people who ran almost certainly the strongest But if the Republicans were gonna win the election given the state of Demography in the country in the electoral college. I think they had to run an election focused Pretty firmly if not exclusively on the economy and I think Governor Romney did not pull that off had he pulled that off better and Second guessing people have offered up a lot of ways where he might have done that I think it certainly would have been closer, right? I think he would have had a chance to win John in what way was Mitt Romney an attractive candidate, but his business record I mean in theory what Mark says is undeniable true had this been an election about the economy It might have and only that it might have turned out different. It might have been closer We might have seen some different twists and turns That was his core strength without that as his basis for a campaign What or who was he? That's a good question You know people Often ask him what the who is the real Mitt Romney, you know, because because there was a different Mitt Romney as Governor of Massachusetts A different Mitt Romney in 2008 right and and then a Mitt Romney 2012 who was trying to make his way back To being the governor of Massachusetts and that business guy But who was kind of trapped by 2008 and one of the things that comes through most strongly in the book. I think is Is the extent to which? Governor Romney was fighting the last battle In 2012, you know, he really he had made his his move to the right in 2008 taken a lot of very far right positions in 2008 Which were not what he had previously campaigned on as a governor And now he was called a flip flopper in 2008 kind of had that that label tattooed to his forehead And to a degree that Mark and I were both shocked by We discovered in reporting the book how much he was imprisoned by Those those issues the positions he took right because if you if your main thing you're concerned about has been called a flip flopper It's almost impossible for you to move back to the center again Once you've taken those positions in 2008 he said over and over again All my positions 2012 are the same as in 2008 and I can't deviate one iota from those positions because if I do Well get called a flip flopper again that and the fact that amazingly, you know, he wrote a book Which some of you may remember or you wrote this book called no apology, um, which by Ugly happenstance was the book that displaced us from number one in the New York Times bestseller list Not that you hold a grudge in 2010 I will point out that that when it appeared on the list it had double daggers next to it Indicating a bulk order. So we're not well. I'm not gonna say he cheated but he cheated. He pretty he pretty much cheated Anyway, we don't hold grudges, but right no apology Really also haunted him because at various times during this campaign when he would get in trouble Yep When apology might have been their wisest course after the 47 video league for instance the president's people all thought He was going to apologize and romney literally would say to people I can't apologize I'm the guy who wrote a book called no apology Right So if you're not gonna if you're not going to change from positions that are now pretty unpopular with the mainstream of the party And you're not ever going to apologize for anything you do wrong You are pretty significantly hobbled as a candidate going forward history might have been different if he called the book Sometimes i'm wrong But he didn't he didn't yeah that what what john says is is certainly the case in terms of the weaknesses that governor romney We now know needed to mitigate over the course of this campaign He really didn't have a lot of room whether it was on vain Whether it was on romney care the massachusetts health care reform that he Put into effect when he was a governor on the whole question of his richy rich status his You know the 47 video but even before that the idea of him as a plutocrat And on his investments and offshore tax havens all of those things Contributed to a caricature of mit romney that mit romney could not shake as john says because he couldn't walk away from those Yeah, you know everyone who runs for president is a flawed candidate who who if they're smart thinks about going in What are the things that my opponents are going to try to define me on right and how do i combat that and Governor romney did as bad a job as dealing with that psychologically and practically as almost he possibly could It was clear from a thousand miles away That if he ran and was successful he was going to be attacked certainly in the general election and as it turned out somewhat in the Nominating nomination fight as all the things you said a plutocrat out of touch his business record rather than being a strength being a weakness And although they saw it coming To some extent they did very little to mitigate it. They didn't seem to have any plans for combat The super PAC that was helping president obama had a three stage plan laid out where they were going to attack first on bane capital and then they were going to shift after that kind of You know burned itself out. They were going to shift to attacking on his record in massachusetts and then they were going to close with their advertising and messaging on Medicare and cuts and social programs They never stopped doing bane because they started and it just kept working. So they literally never switched They just did bane from the time they started all the way through the end And in fact john the predicate for the bane attack was actually the republican primary No less a liberal than rick parry And newt gingrich you spend that that much time in austin eventually you'll become a Eventually you become a socialist Where where it was it was newt gingrich It was newt gingrich and rick parry who actually laid the predicate for the bane attack in south carolina where they just pummeled Mitt romney ceaselessly, you know, there's a just a you know If you think about in some weird in some way if you think about where the country was in 2011 2012 With occupy wall street on one side and the tea party on the other side having just had a huge financial collapse, right? If we had had a conversation with david axelrod in 2009 And said, you know, we're the genie of the lamp, you know, we'll give you three wishes You know, what are the three things you'd like to do and he you know He would have probably said well first Please let the republican candidate be someone with deep ties to wall street Right, you know, and then the second thing he would have said is let him also be someone who's worth 250 million dollars at least and refuses to reveal his income taxes And then right and then if he was thinking about what the third was one of us might have said, you know Well, what about he's building a house on the beach in lohoya with a car elevator And and and you know david axelrod would have said, oh, no, no, I can't ask that much I couldn't be that way So, you know, there there are a lot of ways he was in some ways the worst possible candidate for the times But what's so interesting is that, you know, prog obama was a vulnerable incumbent He was beatable in the fall of 2011 the president's people thought he was at best the 5050 chance Many of the president's people thought he was an underdog the president himself thought he was quote in deep shit at that point And given the unemployment rate the slow growth of the economy his bad approval numbers the wrong track numbers He was beatable and yet even though the republican party wanted nothing more than to beat him And even though he was beatable the republican party the best they could do Was mit romney who in so many ways on paper was the worst possible candidate for this moment And that is a mystery that many people should and will try to unravel But in our book you really see how the the forces of the human forces that kept a lot of good republicans Possibly stronger candidates out of the race and made so many that were so attractive to the populist tea party wing of the party Sort of implode in ways that made it obvious that they could never win Yeah, mark I do want to come to the president and his own issues because certainly this was a loseable race From the president's perspective But what john is saying about the problems that mit romney had going into this on paper You would say this guy can't possibly be the republicans best shot That actually came up a lot along the way in the primer, you know You had rick santorum saying this guy is giving away our advantage on the health care reform bill by virtue of what he did In massachusetts you had newt gingrich and rick perry as we said beating him up on the plutocrat issue on the bane Issue but the fact is this was an incredibly weak field And the republicans were not able to do any better than him in the end despite the fact that these weaknesses were all known at the time Yes, yes yes, I You know One of the things that emerges from both books is this notion of you have to run when it's your turn And a lot of people were telling brock obama in 2008 You know, maybe this is too early and and he was convinced it was his turn Also in the last book we read about hillary clinton in 2004 where we reported for the first time that she took a very close Look at running in 2004 and decided it wasn't her time She may well have been been elected president in 2004 There would have been no brock obama because he wouldn't have spoken as a keynote or at the convention in all likelihood In this race there were a number of people who may maybe were stronger candidates Who a lot of mit romney's uh cohort Wanted in the race because they had such limited faith that mit romney could win the two that that seem to be the sort of Had the most potential uh from the point of view of millionaires and billionaires were chris christie and uh and uh governor daniels of indiana mitch daniels and They both chose to not run Mostly in the case of governor christie out of his gut that it wasn't the right His was not the right time for him that he would have a better chance down the road He thought beating president obama would be quite difficult And uh governor daniels didn't run mostly for personal reasons. He was interested in running But his wife and his adult daughters did not want him to run You know, there's a lot of talk about issues and personality and all that. There is this happenstance Factor about who's ready to step up and do it and increasingly In the last couple cycles you've seen people take a pass kind of surprising in this case We've got a chapter on people who didn't run micah could be for instance chose not to run He was the frontrunner in iowa. He done very well last time chose to take a pass in part because He was making a lot of money and he enjoyed it But some other factors as well that were that were some professional some personal so it's it's it's it's clearly the case As you said that governor romney was a flawed candidate I think it's also clearly the case that based on who ran he was the best the republicans had It is the old rule of the las vegas poker tables john You cannot win if you do not play all this hand ringing over people who didn't get in the race Well, if you don't get in the race, you can't win you're left with the With the people you have with the cards you're dealt But you know along the way we find out from your book in much greater detail than we knew at the time Even when it was inevitable that romney would be the nominee based on the way the process was set up There was still a core group of Donors and political professionals who were out looking for a white knight To ride in and save the party and it was fairly late in the process. Could you say a word about that? Yeah, well it was just short of inevitable at that point I mean you had we're in a situation where rick santorum had just surprised everybody by winning three contests on february 7th February 8th And and governor romney himself was suddenly was taken aback and couldn't believe that santorum had done this and Started to think that there was a chance in his own mind that he would not be the nominee I mean they were heading to michigan and most people thought that if if somehow rick santorum beat mid romney and one of his Well in the state that he grew up in his original home state That ohio would fall shortly thereafter and then you would be but romney would be too hobbled Eventually to be the nominee and and many in the republican party looked at race hand torem and and thought you know No, not not not not what we want as nominee one of the one of the great stories in the book Involves john mccain making his decision when looking at mid romney versus rick santorum Who would he endorse and uh eventually mccain who didn't really like romney very much in 2008 But he chose romney when he chose romney explained to romney that the choice had come down to The dog on roof guy and the man on dog guy And he thought that the dog on roof guy was better than the man on dog guy And a lot of the party felt the same way about the man on dog guy They didn't want rick santorum, but they also were looking at romney Buckling in front of rick santorum, right? And so you had as as we report in the book Suddenly a bunch of people at the very top levels of the republican party hailey barber former rnc chairman former governor mississippi Um as the kind of chief recruiter running around trying to find someone talking to jeb bush talking to mitch daniels Trying to get him to come back in again talking to chris christy This is in february You know and kind of on the premise that if romney loses michigan one of you must step forward And you know people that were involved in that process included john bainer the speaker of the house And paul ryan who a few months later would go on to be obviously governor romney's running mate All in the mix all having these conversations ryan considered it you report because he also found Mitt romney went romney wanting in in in many ways One of the the greatest misconception in the world is the notion that mid romney was the candidate of the establishment He was the candidate of neither the establishment nor was he the candidate of the populist, right? He was the the man in the middle Who was like the minimally acceptable candidate on both sides, but no one's favorite right now? Whoever the republic has nominated mark they were going to run against a president who Had just come off of a debt ceiling fight that he had Done very poorly in versus congress in 2011 the unemployment rate was still high Whether or not he could attribute it to the previous administration after a few years you own it, right? And for all his oratorical skills demonstrated in the 2008 campaign Arguably his biggest weakness for the first three years was he didn't do a very good job of communicating successes or much of anything to the american people. So as we said he was Beatable why did the president find himself having written about him as you did In the 2008 race, how did he find himself in that situation? What were the root causes of his problems going into this race? Well, some of them of his own making some of them not republicans were reflexively opposed to him Even before he was sworn in but by passing health care the way he did he alienated a lot of republicans And he alienated a lot of people in the business community. He would argue that he was Eager to work with republicans, but they chose not to do it But the fact is by the time of that debt ceiling fight in the summer and into the fall of 2011 The republican party was pretty much done working with him and he was pretty much done working with them So no allies there very few allies in business and even democrats who hung with him on some tough votes Were not Feeling like the president cared that much about them personally because of his famous Reluctance to mingle and mix and sort of the washington style the way didn't have the schmooze gene Yeah, the way the way the gentleman after who this facility is named Often would be compared to the president focus groups the president's people would find that voters would say Why can't he be more like lbj? Why can't he have people some combination of of cajoling and pressure and and schmoozing to get it done so Partly it was he left himself with very few allies He came out of that fight over the debt ceiling being perceived as weak not just by republicans, but by democrats And he was running at a time when the wrong country felt a majority of the country felt the country was on the wrong track And when the economy was still bad, and I think I know john agrees He still was not articulating much of a message about what his theory of the case was about the economy or what he would Do with the second term right and in that period He decided along with his age the only way to win was to stop trying to get anything done And just go to war against the republican brand and mit romney or whoever the republicans nominated To turn to turn his focus to simply getting reelected the paradox that emerges about the president is He doesn't much like campaigning. He thinks it's kind of superficial and a distraction from what's important And yet he's pretty good at it as evidenced by the fact that he's won two presidential elections He loves governance. He loves wonky policy discussions. He loves trying to solve problems But he turns out to not be in some by some measures as good at that So he's he's not good at what he likes and he's good at what he doesn't like and that And that um and that that left him in a very weak state Again with a single minded focus of a the only way to address all of that was to define mit romney and the republican brand is unacceptable Yeah, john the uh the the myth of barack obama is that he ran a high road campaign in 2008 When in fact it is said he ran more negative ads in 2008 than any candidate in history Either in just of this universe just of this. Oh, I didn't okay. Well, I'm leaving out of the universe Let's just stay within this universe So in fact, it wasn't a terrible surprise that going into 2012 he had to do what he had to do And given the weighted down with freighted with the disadvantages that mark's talking about and presented with the target rich environment That was mit romney in some respects. Maybe it was inevitable that his strategy would be Strangle him in his cradle before he got out of the summer so that going into the fall there was nothing left to beat Yes That the president's the people around president obama are tough guys and um, you know They they ran as you said evan it's not just said it's a fact that they ran more make negative ads against john mccain Then anybody ever run a presidential campaign before but if you think about the mix of things in that world in 2008 There was a lot of tough negative campaigning And then there was a lot of also aspiration and hope and uplift right and there were some big plans The president was campaigning on universal health care in 2008 the president campaigned on some big ideas that he also was pursuing He eventually developed an economic narrative toward the end of the campaign Especially after the financial crisis There were things that were there This campaign that he decided to Disqualify romney and that there was a that that was going to be a centerpiece of the campaign Whoever he ran against and especially given the target recent richness of governor romney is not a surprise What I think is a little bit of a surprise is that there was so That was almost all they did right there was he didn't defend a lot of his record And that was sort of understandable given that a lot of his record was not that popular The health care reform law was not a majority was not approved by a majority of americans The stimulus was very unpopular the auto bailout was one thing that was popular He campaigned on that the financial reforms and the wall street bailout not brought to be popular So it wasn't like he had a popular record to defend But what he really didn't do the missing the big missing piece that you could argue He could have done while still tearing that romney limb from limb Was to make an aggressive affirmative case about what he wanted to do over the next four years And part of his the thing that he said over and over again in the campaign Was that he hoped that this election would break the fever. That was his quote right this election will break the fever I will win a mandate. I will win. I will break the backs of republicans if I win reelection They will no longer have me to be obsessive about because I'm no longer going to be on the ballot ever again And now I'll be able to get things done in washington and in some ways by by only attacking romney and not really talking about what his Affirmative agenda was he managed to kind of campaign in a way that was at odds with Breaking the fever because the truth is there's one big thing he had a mandate for at the end Which was to raise taxes on the rich Pretty much nothing else Did he have a real mandate for because he didn't really talk about right almost anything else And so he comes out of the campaign having accomplished very successfully the primary goal get reelected protect my Achievements not have a republican get in and rip down everything he'd done right although some of those things are still obviously being contested as Witness healthcare reform But what he didn't do was again apart from raising taxes on the rich He didn't really walk out with any kind of of a real mandate You could claim from the electorate election on what he was going to do for the next four years And I think it's it's a huge problem that's bedeviling him now among many other things Among many other you know mark for all of this the wisdom in retrospect of the strategy just could have cut romney's knees off You know you could or slightly higher you can you can win or you cannot lose the trick here was not to lose right Even at at the midpoint of the campaign there was still enough anxiety about the fact that He might still lose to romney that there was as you all reported the first big news broken when this book Finally got out There was some discussion of switching horses on the vice presidential Running mate as you reported there was some polling done bill daily then the chief of staff Either initiated or orchestrated a plan to poll whether switching out joe biden and hillary clinton might be beneficial To the president this had been rumored at the time and had been Roundly dismissed as implausible didn't happen by the administration But you've actually got it confirmed that they really looked at it Yeah, you know in the sort of cycle of punditry during in real time And this is again in 2011 when the president's political standing is so weak You know I was of the view that it made sense potentially But that it wasn't going to happen because the downside would be so severe to show of weakness and And the president and the vice president have become as we all straighten the book quite quite good friends. Their wives are friends So it was a surprise to us when this reporting started to develop And it wasn't easy reporting to get because it was such a closely helped secret Just a very small number of aides including the white ass chief of staff and four or five other people Who did feel like it was something to look at now They looked at a lot of things because the president was in trouble and they had to consider every option And it's a it's a group that likes to consider its options But it is sort of remarkable that directed at the highest levels They decided to research this question to spend some money and to see what would happen now The data came back and it showed that Swapping in Hillary Clinton didn't help the president standing that much and they dropped the idea But but make no mistake had to come back differently It's almost certain that they would have at least gone to the next step and looked at it in a more serious fashion It's it's testament to As we say in the book the president's advisors as john referred to before They're more hard-headed than soft-hearted and even though if word ever leaked out That they had considered replacing joe biden that would hurt joe biden's feelings They still felt they had to do it as closely held as it was to just determine Whether it would help because i'll say again And john's alluded to this they really did think they were in tough shape at that point Even though they the republican nomination process had not been fully engaged They thought that would help them that that process would be messy and yielded probably mit romney But in a weakened state nonetheless They had to consider every option because of the weakness now john speaking of things that did not come out until the book was published And speaking of vice presidential running mates you all have i think fascinating material on mit romney's thought process on his number two Starting off with a list of 11 including john cornan from texas as a sort of semi finalist and then getting down to five Talk a bit about that process and what you found because again as much as we think these things are We think we know what's going on at the time based on all the ways that we learn About this stuff you you really broke a lot of ground on this reporting on exactly how he got to paul ryan the road there Well, and in particular obviously about governor christy, which i think is where most of the attention's been You know governor romney, um, you should be point out of any started out with 11 very quickly got down to five His five were senator portman from ohio Governor polenty from minnesota Marco rubio from florida paul ryan and chris christy those five those were his finalist Those were his five finalists the short list we reported in the book about The vetters who were running the team to research these five guys It was a very very close hold operation and to some extent the woman who ran the whole vetting operation beth miers Was sort of freaked out about Game change She got a lot more the movie had just come out Right at that moment when they were putting together the vetting the whole vice presidential process and there was so much attention on palin's vetting That she's like no one's ever or non vetting is the case maybe but like Like like no one had ever known the name of a lead of the person who ran the vetting process before abe call The house suddenly was a household name because of palin and she was amazed that there were news stories about her being named to run this So she ran a very very tight ship Right and those some of the vetters decided that they should they should use code names For the people so as people it's been publicized a little bit They all had fish names because the guys were eating a lot of goldfish crackers So they gave each one of them an aquatic code name. So, you know, um, governor senator portman was named filet of fish and Tim polenty from the land of a thousand lakes was named lake fish Um, senator rubio was called pescato um Paul ryan i'm sure sounded like a good idea at the time But as you tell it doesn't reflect as well on the whole thing Paul ryan, Paul ryan at their most creative was called fish scotson fish consen and He talked to break that code And then they be talking about and then and then they and then they they called governor christy puffer fish So actually, I you know, I I we actually there is a piece of news I want to break here, which is actually there was a sixth person on the short list And that was ebb and smith. I am who they they referred to as gefilte fish We're gonna make hats with that name So so they go through this process they get to the they get to the five they get to those five They did a lot of research governor romney was really was like he and ryan had really hit it off And and paul ryan was the favorite of most of the people in governor romney's team the favorite of governor romney's They started to look into governor christy They found that there were some issues in his background that they thought were a little troubling troubling enough That when governor romney looked at them he said okay forget it We're not going to look at chris christy but jewelry stevens as chief strategist somewhat surprisingly sort of stood up basically and said wait a second We're in a street fight the obama campaign is killing us on the air We need the best bore room brawler in american politics chris christy chris christy chris christy we should really look hard at chris christy So they dug further into chris christy and they did a pale and light kind of crash vet and a number of things emerged Um, some things are in the quote public record in the sense that if i gave you the right search terms If you look at google you could find them right? A good example of that is that for a period of time Chris Christie was a lobbyist, a lot of people don't know that alone, but that while he was a lobbyist he lobbied for the Securities Industry Association of America when it was trying to exclude financial fraud from the New Jersey State Consumer Protection Law. And the head of the SIA at that time was Bernie Madoff. The same Bernie Madoff? The same Bernie Madoff. So Romney's team thought, well there might be an explanation for that, but really the 32nd ad kind of writes itself. We were Mitt Romney from the man from Bain, now has appointed Bernie Madoff's lobbyist as his presidential nominee. Not a good picture. There were a bunch of things like that having to do with the federal government and Inspector General's investigation of Christie as spending estate as a U.S. attorney, a libel lawsuit against her, defamation lawsuit against Christie, a bunch of things in the quote public record, all potential unexploded landmines. And Romney very wisely thought that when people would say to him, well that's all been aired out in New Jersey. And he'd say, well New Jersey is not the national stage. And running for governor is not running for president. Correct. Right. And another way of saying what I was trying to say just now, and also he was very reluctant on other issues that they asked him about including his health, for health records, and a variety of other things where he was not fully participating in the vet. I was interested to see that Christie people, unlike the other four finalists, the Christie people were not particularly forthcoming and were unapologetic about being not forthcoming. And unlike any other vice president we've ever covered who's agreed to be vetted. They usually, like if they agreed to be vetted, they turn over the material. The Christie team was like, well why do you need to see that document? That was their attitude. And the Romney people had the reaction, Beth Meyers, she said to her team, if they're not answering the answer, must be bad. It's the kind of thing that can give New Jersey a bad name. Right. Wouldn't want that to happen. Right. So the final vetting report, which raises all these red flags, Governor Romney looked at that report and that very day killed off the puffer fish option. But as we've been saying around, people are going to be looking at that background very carefully and Governor Christie knows it as he heads towards 2016 if he decides to run. Well, let's go there. So I don't want to take the end of the story off the table. Spoiler alert, Obama won. We know this from, I'm not ruining the book if I tell you that. But I want to come back to a couple of key people who pop up in this book. And I want to stay with Christie for a second because the period of time in which the Republican leadership and the donors are looking for a white knight and Christie is contemplating almost Mario Cuomo-like. Do I run? Do I not run? You refer to him at one point in the book as Hamlet of Drum Thwackett. Drum Thwackett is the name of the gubernatorial residence in New Jersey. The portrait of Chris Christie that emerges from this book is not, I think it's fair to say, a terribly positive view, right? It's not a very positive portrait. There is a fantastic scene in the book where he decides, finally, I'm not going to run. And he offers his endorsement to the Romneys. And Anne Romney says, oh, Governor, you have no idea how big this is. And Governor Christie says, yes, I do. He comes across as just an egomaniac, and he comes across as an egomaniac with these vetting problems. And you wonder if he is considering running for president based on what's in your book. Mark, what does he do? How does he combat this? Well, regarding his confidence to paraphrase President Bush at his renomination convention in 2004, in New Jersey, we call that talking, maybe to obscure reference even for y'all. Even for us. President Bush said, people say, excuse me, of swaggering, and he said, in Texas we call that walking, talking. It was a brilliant thing. It was a very good one. It's OK. We'll edit it out in post. Don't worry about that. That's fine. Look, he has got weaknesses, some of which we write about in the book based on his very big role in the 2012 campaign. You think about he played a role as someone who might run, as a big endorser, as someone who was almost on the ticket, then as someone who gave the keynote address, and then at the end of the campaign with Hurricane Sandy. So he played a very outsized role last time. And I suspect even if he doesn't run this time, he will play another outsized role. He has a lot of strengths, and the party lacks someone with the kind of confidence and ability to speak to people that he has. So the flaws, everybody who might run has flaws, and I think his flaws are pretty manifest, but his strengths are too. And the billionaires love him, because they see in him someone who they think can win. Winning in a blue state, winning support from Hispanics, African Americans, women, it may seem like the flaws are so large, but just doing that, at this time and place for the Republican parties of the beginning. If only you can get out of a primary. You know, I think that's overrated, because you think about, people talk about that as issue oriented. You think about Bill Clinton in 1990, two years before he was the nominee. He supported welfare reform, right to work, free trade, death penalty. Talked about abortion rights in a different way than Democrats had. Those issue positions would have been unimaginable for the Democrats to nominate any earlier. But when a party really wants to win, they're willing to overlook some stuff. So you don't foreclose on it? I don't think his issue positions are nearly as far to the center in violation of party orthodoxy as Bill Clinton's were in 1992. I think the bigger problem for him getting through a nomination fight is his temperament. And some of that swagger slash arrogance that plays fine with his current constituents. But I'm not sure. That is a play. And the last thing I'll say about his record, and this has not been covered very much, because he had a very weak opponent. I won't say Gary Moro like, but he had a very weak opponent. Even Gary Moro referenced. Nothing. Boy. You come into our town, you make fun of our people. I tried so hard. I was going to make a sway joke, but that wouldn't go over you. No, no, no. Talk about Governor Perry's glasses. Talk about Governor Perry's glasses. His record in New Jersey is still kind of an open question. He's done some positive things. Some things to base like very much. But the unemployment rate is still quite high. This was not a campaign that really looked like it. There's no New Jersey miracle that he can brag about yet. And I think his people are counting on an improved record on the economy between now and when he has to decide to run. Speaking of Bill Clinton, John, talk about the Secretary of Explaining Things, who in the middle of the Democratic Convention, at a real key moment in the campaign, rode to Barack Obama's rescue, it is believed, and helped him get pointed in the right direction. Yeah, you know, we thought about the first book, Game Change, to some extent, is the love story of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, they then try to kill each other in the Democratic primary, and then eventually they end up married. Kind of the classic love story. Meek cute story. Yeah, that's a meek cute story. This book has a component of the love story of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and even more unlikely love story in some ways. And you point out President Clinton ran to his rescue. The story, we sort of starts with, after three years of the two of them not talking to each other really, in the fall of 2011, when we mentioned a couple of times now, it was like the worst period for Barack Obama, it was so bad that the people around Barack Obama decided they would do something they never done before, it didn't really want to do, it was time to court Bill Clinton. So they arranged a round of golf for the presidents to go out, went to Andrews Air Force Base to play golf. Somebody just did a story on golf digest about how there are 13 pivotal golf moments in Double Down. We didn't know we were writing a book about golf, but apparently the book is actually just about golf. Yeah, we had thought it was a North Korea manifesto, but it turns out it's a book about golf. So the two of them go out to play golf, and you know Barack Obama has a real Obama kind of attitude towards playing golf, you know, he wants to, you know, he's disciplined and rigorous, he's the president of the United States, he's got a schedule, he wants to get up and down three hours, get back to the office. Bill Clinton is different, he's a retiree, he has a lot of time on his hands, and he's always enjoyed mulligans, he also enjoys using the fairway as an opportunity for exposition and extrapolation and other things, so they didn't get through 18 holes in three hours, more than three hours, and when President Obama came off the course, one of his aides said to him, well, how did you like that? How did it go? How do you feel about President Clinton now? He said, I like him in doses. But from there, through the end, they just get closer and closer together, and largely because President Obama needs President Clinton, President Clinton needs President Obama, and Obama sees Clinton over and over again at fundraisers, giving great speeches that extoll Barack Obama's record, and eventually he goes and gives that speech in Charlotte, which is really, in some ways, the most important moment in a lot of ways in the campaign. Bill Clinton ends up doing a lot of super surrogate work for Obama during Hurricane Sandy when he was off the campaign trail. There's a moment in the book, though, that, to me, summarizes the whole Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney thing. It's in September when Romney's at his worst moment, and Obama has somehow floating even with all the economy hasn't really gotten better, but he's still way ahead, and someone says to Clinton, what do you think of Governor Romney, you know, give us your assessment, and Clinton says to this friend, he says, I think he's a very nice man who's in the wrong line of work. He should not be talking to people in public. And, you know, a similar timeframe, the question is, you know, what do you think of President Obama? And President Clinton answers. He says, and I'll do it in Italian, because I'm not sure I can do it in English here. Oh, do it in English. He says, he says, pew fortanato un di cane con due cazzi. That's the Italian. Do the English. Really? Do the English. You sure? Let me look away. Look away. Mark is embarrassed. Do the English. He says he's luckier than a dog with two dicks, which apparently for Bill Clinton is like the luckiest thing you could be in the whole world. If there is reincarnation, we know. I got to say, I got to say, I love that line, but I'm still not sure what's so great about being a two-dick dog. But there you go. He knows. There's a long history of people in Texas looking down on people in Arkansas, and I don't think we've done anything to set that back then. Let me, speaking of people in Texas, for a hometown crowd, let me ask you each to spend a few minutes on your reporting on Governor Perry in this book. You know, again, much of the Governor Perry campaign reporting at the time pointed us in the direction that you all point us. But there's more and more in your book. Mark, say it. Kind of give the thesis sentence or the topic sentence of the Governor Perry. You all know he lives just right up the street, right? Yes. He can't hear us, so go ahead and talk. You know, he was, I thought, would be a very strong candidate when he got in, because he was everything Mitt Romney wasn't. And Mitt Romney thought the same thing. We have in the book an email that Governor Romney wrote to his team shortly after Governor Perry got in the race and rose up to the top of the polls talking about this is the challenge we've been expecting. We knew someone would come in. This is it. It's going to be tough, but we'll try to rise to the challenge. They were worried about it. Well, Governor Romney was. Governor Romney was. Right. And Governor Perry, and as Evan said, a lot of what we write in the book is built on the foundation of the work that Tribune and others did about kind of the trajectory of this. But we filled in some of the details, which is an extraordinarily human story, which is he got in thinking he could do this quick. And his small team of aides felt like it would be a challenge to raise the money and get up to speed on issues and build the team. But they thought they could do it given the weakness of the field. And their fundamental belief that Mitt Romney was so out of step with the base of the party. Veterans Tea Party, ag, religious conservatives, just across the board, the kind of nominating electorate of a lot of the early voting states, particularly Iowa and South Carolina, that he'd be able to come in late and kind of overwhelm the field. And when he got in, he did rise to the top of the polls. He was a formidable fundraiser, not surprisingly. But he also went and got back surgery, experimental back surgery. And just wasn't recovering fast enough. And what we learned is Governor Perry had insomnia for most of his young life. And he got into his 20s, and he was here living with some colleagues when he was in the legislature. And one of them recommended that he take up jogging as a way to deal with his insomnia. And it worked. And Governor Perry has said to people over the years if he's addicted to one thing, it's jogging. And after the surgery, people made a lot of, was he taking medication? Was he in a lot of pain? It turned out he basically went back to having insomnia. And he couldn't sleep. And so on the nights before all these debates, basically the two debates in Florida and then the famous one in Michigan where he couldn't remember the third department he wanted to eliminate, I knew that people would laugh at that. It's what we call in the book an historical fact. Wasn't meant to be a laugh line. On all those nights, he got little to no sleep because he was still not able to run. Because of the pain he had, a tingling in his leg. One thing we report in the book, I believe we report for the first time. One night in the midst of the debates where he was messing up, he went and left the governor's residence and spent the night in a sleep facility to test his overnight sleeping, wearing one of those things over his nose to measure his sleep patterns. And he was struggling because he was exhausted. And as happens so often in politics and in life, candidates make mistakes when they're tired. Mitt Romney made the 47% comment at the end of an extraordinarily long and tiring day. And there are lots of other examples of it in the book. That to us is kind of the story of Governor Perry, which is getting the surgery was a huge mistake coupled with getting in late. And the return of insomnia at the time when he was supposed to be doing basically the toughest thing he'd ever done. And yet here he is, John, looking at the prospect of a race this time. Well, as James Carbell famously says, you don't have sex just once and then say, OK, I'm done. Running for president is kind of like that. A lot of people, once they get the taste for it, they keep trying over and over again to try to get better at it. And he's got a great new pair of glasses that are not quite as handsome as yours, Evan, but they're pretty handsome. It's kind of the Rachel Maddow glasses, sort of glasses, right? You look smart. Don't say that loud enough for Rachel over here. She may be down here. I don't know which one of them would be Madder. I don't know. Look, I think the thing that Mark said at the end, and this is something that presumably would not bedevil him in the future. I mean, it was crazy for him to get in the race at the time that he did and do the surgery. I mean, the idea of not having dabbled in the water, not having done anything, and then in the summer of 2011 to say, I'm going to get in the race, but first I'm going to go and have an experimental stem cell treatment on my back and try to have a major back surgery. And assume that six weeks later that you would be up to the, forget about that. I mean, there's a huge, running for president, one of the things that comes through in all these books, it's incredibly hard. Emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and physically, it's a grind. So I wouldn't schedule back surgery if I had to be tended about scheduling back surgery in any circumstances, let alone if I was about to embark on the hardest thing I would ever do in my life. And the fact that the people around him didn't really challenge him, let him do it, assumed it would all just be fine, was sort of like a crazy act of political malpractice, because he was not ever going to be ready to run under those circumstances. I don't think, I think it's just, and presumably one lesson that he will have learned from this race, which will stand him in better stead than last time, was that you need to prepare, you need to lay groundwork, you need to not be doing this, you cannot do this in this environment, in this world now, you cannot run for president by the seat, flying by the seat in your pants. You can't do it, it's not possible. Mark, a lot has been made by reporters who wrote about this race, the significance of the 47% video, this fellow Scott Prudy, who recorded and then ultimately provided to the world this video of Mitt Romney talking about the 47%. Is that moment, has that moment been overstated, the importance of that as a pivot point in the campaign, do you think? Well, I mean, Governor Romney ended up losing by about where he was behind at the moment that happened, the two beginning intervening events that moved the polls around were the 47%, and then the president's bad performance in the first debate. Otherwise, the race was remarkably static, not just during that period, but for almost all of the general election. I think there's three reasons why it was extraordinarily hurtful to Governor Romney. One was it reinforced the worst thing people thought about his public image as a plutocrat and someone who's out of touch. Two is it ate up a lot of time, a lot of critical time, where Governor Romney might have been able to start developing some momentum with fewer and fewer days left before election day. And the last thing is it was a gaffe on a secret video. And the life of that is endless as compared to almost anything in politics. And so even when it went away as a daily news story, it lived on in the collective unconscious and on the web and in news stories and narratives about the campaign forever. And I think the way Governor Romney handled it didn't hurt him that much in the sense that then he performed great in the first debate and it kind of got people off of it in a dominant way. But it did illustrate, as John alluded to, a kind of passivity about it. Our reporting in the book of how he handled himself from the time the tape was released through that first debate reveals a guy who was extraordinarily passive about fighting back. And you think about George Bush or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, the last three guys who won, they would have almost certainly said, I want to give a major speech or I want to do a full interview on this or I want to write a long op-ed or something to try to take control of it. And he was extraordinarily passive. And I'll just say one of the things that surprised us about Governor Perry was he was remarkably passive, too, as all the things were going bad in his campaign really struck based on our impression of him and never have done this depth of reporting on him. He was remarkably passive as things started to go bad, both in terms of his own public image, but also in terms of the staff inviting that took over the campaign, where he knew full well that stuff was going on with different groups of people, including Dave Carney, who'd worked with him forever. And he just kind of stayed back and said, that's not what I do. I'm up here and this is down there and they'll all work it out. Let me, we're going to have questions in a few minutes or apparently you're going to be if they're not already there are microphones in either aisle and we'll ask you to line up and we'll have about 10 minutes or so of questions. But before we do that, I want to use the balance of our time to talk about process here. So the last time you did this in 2008, there had not really been a book exactly like this. There had been books that had collected reporting done over the course of a campaign with the promise that it wouldn't be published until after the fact. But really your book, Game Change, Revolutionized may be a little too strong. The kind of reporting that we now expect to actually almost come to take for granted and indeed at the end of the 2012 cycle, there were a whole lot of books where people essentially got promises from the campaigns. Tell me stuff. I'm not going to report it until after the fact. I'm unaware, I'm unaware of any of those books. I am in fact aware of a couple. Did you find it to be harder this time since people were effectively on to you and since the pool was more full with people swimming in the same water? Did you find it more difficult to write this book as a result of the last book, John? No. How come? Logically, you think that people would have been more wary. Why? Well, there's a presupposition in the question that I think I reject. Not for the first time. That's OK. Go. I mean, we did the last book. We talked to over 200 people for that book and did over 300 interviews. And there are things in the book that certainly were written about people, candidates, who the candidates, I'm sure, would have preferred not to see in print. The people that we talked to, including candidates and their spouses, after time passed, the truth was there was really nothing in the book that anyone challenged in terms of its factual accuracy. True. And the one thing that was challenged, you will recall, was Louis Cheney, who said when we reported that her father had called Palin a reckless choice, Louis Cheney came out and said, no, that wasn't true. And then three years later, her father was asked on television what he thought of Palin. And he commented publicly for the first time and literally said I thought it was a reckless choice. So I think the first rule in journalism is we live and die on our record. And so for the people that we spent so much time with, these are a lot of people that we've been dealing with for 20 years each as sources, they looked at the outcome of the book and they thought the book is accurate. We lived up to the promises we made to our sources. And not only that, the book captured, for a lot of them, what it actually felt like to be involved in that campaign. And the thing that I think a lot of you know as a journalist and your staff knows and everybody who does this is lucky enough to do this for a living knows is that people generally want to tell their stories. And people, particularly in presidential campaigns, who are pouring blood and sweat and tears 24-7 for months, sometimes years on end, into what they think of as an important, historically valuable, meaningful endeavor. Those people especially want to see the thing reflected on the page accurately, fairly, with nuance and with a sense that when they read it, they're like, yeah, that's what it was like for me when I lived this. And the first book, I think, for some number of the people that we talked to, many of them, apparently, they felt like it did that. And so when we came back around to start asking people to do interviews for this book, we got no more pushback and I would say even less pushback. It was no harder and in some ways easier. We did more than 500 interviews for this book with more than 400 people. And in both cases of the both books, fewer than 10 people in either case turned us down for interviews. So I think that the first book put us in a good place to do the next book, as opposed to in any way. Made it easier as opposed to dissuading people. And let the record show, Mark, as much as I'm aware of the response to this book, I'm only aware of one factual challenge to it. And that is the Huntsman Sr. has denied being, as he denied previously, the source for Harry Reid's claim that Mitt Romney didn't pay taxes for 10 years. I'm not even Governor Christie, who reacted negatively to the book when it came out. Overall, the stuff we've talked about simply said, well, there are two guys trying to sell a book as if somehow that's bad. And just for the record, he's right about that. He is correct. Factually accurate. So really, as John says, it's about being right and it's about demonstrating to people that you're going to treat them fairly, even if what you say doesn't ultimately make them that happy. At the end of the day, it's going to be about telling what actually. I mean, we wrote this one under less, there was less anticipation for game change than there was for this book because we hadn't done a book before. And we purposely kind of laid low that we were doing it. But even in that case, we were extraordinarily aware of the kind of material we had that we were writing about people who were at the highest levels of government and politics. And so we took great care. And so as we did on this book, and so when people say you're just letting the story be told by people with access to grind or it's all gossip, we respectfully dissent from that because we interview everybody. And gossip is something that's unverified. There's things in the book that are interesting, but they're not gossip because they're verified. And our standard of reporting is quite high. We're extremely cautious. And there's lots we could have put in the book using lower standards. And no, we won't tell you what that was. But thank you for asking. And we choose not to because we have enough stuff that's verified that's really good to not risk at all our individual credibility or the credibility of the book itself. I'm publishing something not that way. Not sure it's true. So the book has been optioned. So John Ham as Mitt Romney on HBO, obviously, in a couple years. When will the process of that? And John Goodman as Chris Christie. John Goodman as Chris Christie. Mine was good. Yours was better. I like that. When will the process of that movie being made begin? Underway. Hollywood works more slowly and in a more serpentine fashion than even the University of Texas faculty. So. Just trying to get back at Rick Perry's good graces with that one. Exactly. I'm at the liberal faculty. So we'll see. But they optioned it early on. And we're going to be working with them to see what might happen. It'll be fun to see it. The last one was so great. OK, so if we can bring the lights up a little bit. We have microphones. You've got about 10 minutes. Ask good questions. I'm at a good questions. Or maybe my time is out, even though I may have a couple left. And I'm happy to bring any of you into the conversation. Hello. OK. There's some people at that one. Right there first. OK. The two of you spend a fair amount of time on the Morning Joe program. And you do a wonderful job, by the way. Thanks, Dad. Any time. I just wonder whether you believe or you think that Joe Scarborough would make a credible presidential nominee. He's not here. So it'll just be among the thousand of us. No one tweet this. OK. Go ahead. Go ahead. What do you think? Luckily, it's John's turn to answer. Is it? John, Joe Scarborough for president, or something else? I like to think that I have a great belief in the infinite capacity of human potential. And I think. We may only get to one question. I think. I think Joe. Up to Grove was right. No questions. I like to believe that all of my friends are capable of really doing anything. You're one bad answer from Fox and Friends, buddy. So watch out. I think I look, you know, I think Joe can grow up to be whatever he whatever he wants to be. Pass. Yeah. We don't have time for both of us to answer every question. Right. I'm sorry. Mark would love to answer, but he can't. There's no time over there. Yes. Healthcare reform, obviously, in the news today. But what role did the ACA play in the campaign with it being before the Supreme Court for much of that time? And how unprepared was the president's team for the Supreme Court to actually uphold that? And were some of them actually hoping that it would be overturned? You're going to try to go in order? I'm trying to go in order. Backwards, no. They thought that the law would be upheld. They didn't guess that Justice Roberts would be in the majority. They thought Justice Kennedy was. But they were confident. Some of them guessed the reasoning that the court used, but not all of them. But they anticipated that it would be upheld. And they wanted it to be upheld. I misjudged it badly. I thought that in either case it would be bad for the president, because I thought if the law was upheld, it would give the Republicans a chance to run against it. It was relatively unpopular. It turned out it was obviously much, much better for the president, because Governor Romney simply was neutered on the issue. He could not talk about health care. There was probably a way to do it, but he was just not able to do it effectively in part because of Bill Clinton's analysis about it as not being someone who should talk to people in public, and in part because it is a very complicated argument to say it's OK to violate the constitutional rights of people in one state, but it's not good to do it to the whole country. And we have a scene in the book where Carl Rove is talking to Mitt Romney early on, where Governor Romney's trying to grapple with how to talk about health care. And that was Carl's judgment as well, that he was the worst possible messenger to kind of go after Obamacare during the race. Your first question was, if you can't remember either. Well, to what degree was the Affordable Care Act a fact? Oh, it was. Governor Romney didn't want it to be an issue, and the president didn't want it to be an issue. And the press should have made it more of an issue than we did, but it's hard for us if neither campaign is driving it to make a big deal about it. And so it really was almost absent from the general election. Except for at the level of the president and targeted constituencies, they can't be like crazy on it with Hispanic voters, with African-American voters, and with single women. And they did no national advertising, but in those markets, targeted advertising, they did it at a time. And it was more of an issue in the primary, you guys, right? Because obviously, Gingrich, Santorum, Rick Perry, they came at Romney hoping to neuter Romney on the base of that, and we're unsuccessful. Over there. Yeah, I have one of those Arkansons, I live here in Texas, and kind of take it all and everything. But to that point, you talked about Clinton and the fact that in 1990, I mean, he really, my friend's from Arkansas, didn't really tell me that Clinton was really looking at this until about then. And then, of course, it went to there. Now it seems like we're projecting presidents very far in the future. I have a senator that's being projected in, and my mayor in San Antonio is being projected for. Do you think things have changed such that we're now projecting so far with this? Cycle's been sped up, no question, right? It's been a little sped up, but you think about Mitt Romney in 2012, for instance. He was doing things to kind of lay the groundwork, but he didn't get into the race until June of 2011. The Republican race actually started quite late. A lot of people formed exploratory committees in the spring of 2011, and a lot of people didn't get in the race formally until the summer, until the late spring, early summer of that year. There's no question that the race, and compared to 2008, that was late. The cycle has certainly been sped up, but again, Bill Clinton, people who, because you just used the example you cited, the whole reason why Bill Clinton's convention keynote in 1988 was so widely noted, was because people in 1988 were projecting that Bill Clinton would one day run for president, and that he gave this horrible keynote that is, I think, probably still going on in some alternative universe. He gave a horrible convention keynote. People said he was dead, and then he had to go on Arsenio Hall and play the saxophone to revive his fortunes. So it's not like people haven't been. Johnny Carson. Johnny Carson was actually Johnny Carson. It was Johnny Carson, that's how long ago it was. So it's not like people haven't forecast, for rising stars in politics, people have forecast cycles in advance, and I think that's not a new thing. But there's no question that we, especially after this incumbent election, the prospect of another open election has people pretty spun up right now. But, Mark, President Hillary, I mean, this, we are being told, I will accept John's suggestion that the cycle has only been sped up a little bit, but goodness gracious, we've already elected her. I mean, isn't that the discussion right now? I just think at night about who she's going to put in the cabinet. Right, I mean, so, I mean, that to me is evidence that we've moved to a place where we've decided these things so much earlier. Look, she might not run, she might not be the nominee, she might be the nominee, and I'll say elected, I think anyone who thinks it's inevitable is silly. On the other hand, by every metric we use to kind of evaluate these things, and the mood of the country, the nature of the nominating electorate of a given party, and the strengths and weaknesses of a given candidate, she is for a non-incumbent, and an extraordinarily strong position if she chooses to run. So I don't think the speculation about her as clearing the field if she chooses to run, or as exceedingly formidable as a general election candidate, I don't think that's out of line with reality. That doesn't mean she's going to run, it doesn't mean she's going to win. A lot of things could happen. A lot of things could happen. They're the Clintons, right? Yes. One of the things that changed dramatically between the time game changers were written and doubled down is that Twitter really came to an end of itself. Good question. In 2012, and one of the things that I've seen to notice is that you have two ends of the spectrum where you have one side of the new cycle being controlled by Ben Smith, BuzzFeed, and 140 characters, and these post-motorm books that are written after the fact. So what's happening in the middle ground in your classic David Broder Boys on the Bus kind of stories? Do you see those playing a role in 2016, or even for their election cycles? Who's that kid? Sign him up. That's a good question. I put pictures of cute puppies on Pinterest. Does that count? Yes. Is that what you mean? Yes, it does count. Whose turn is it? Mine, or I enter an ebbing question. I have no idea. Well, let me extrapolate from that very good and layered question to this. Did Twitter change the outcome of this campaign? Have we overstated the degree to which Twitter now drives so much conversation out in the world about politics? Well, no. Look, it's a big deal. But it seems to me evolutionary rather than revolutionary, right? I mean, in the cycles of presidential campaigns that Mark and I have been adults for, I remember very clearly the 1988 presidential election was the first one where there was a fax machine. That was like a big deal. And the 1992 campaign was the first cable election, where cable news mattered, CNN coverage, MTV, Tab of the Soran on MTV. 1996, the web had its first, the web had its first, the earliest covers in 1996. The blogs really came in in 2000 and then in 2004. Facebook was big in 2008. Twitter was much bigger in 2012. All of those things have been in the arc of information technology, democratizing, making things faster, and speeding up our news cycle, making democratizing more voices, and speeding up. So Twitter matters. And there will be something after Twitter that will speed the thing up even faster, I suspect. But I don't think it's determinative. And certainly to answer the question, there's still great newspaper journalism being done in unfortunately fewer newspapers, but still great newspaper journalism done. There's still journalism done in the Texas Tribune, though it's done online, that it would be recognizable, would have been recognizable, the Timothy Krause in 1972. That the kind of work that Jay Root did on Governor Perry, for instance, was it happened to be native to the web, but was good old-fashioned newspapering in another sense, good old-fashioned reporting. And I think you can drive the news cycle, Busby, Ben Smith, all that stuff. And that can speed things up in a given moment. But in the end, the actual stuff that really matters and drives voters, drives perceptions of candidates, comes from actual reporting. And that can appear in a variety of different formats. And I think recently there will be more and more of them. That's a good place to stop. On that positive and hopeful note, when you are in someone's house, you follow the rules of the house. The rules of the house tonight were, end this thing as close to 10 after 7 as possible. And we've done that. This was wonderful, was it not? These guys are so great.