what i want to talk about tonight is kind of two visions of the family two visions of the family that i think are symbolized in the selection but are not very not there put it this way that the candidates who are running in the selection signify these two visions the family but the vision of the family are much bigger than these these two presidential candidates and so i want to talk about that and talk about why that such a big deal right now  i've been studying presidential politics and rhetoric in news coverage and public opinion for about fifteen years and it is an interesting dynamic that we've had back to back presidents that have inspired a great deal of  of for ever and animosity back to back presidents and what's interesting is that here in seattle this kind of hotbed of one of the one of the more liberal major cities in the country that you know the opposition to george bush was very high in two thousand anything after kind of like two thousand and two two thousand two three four and so on and so that animosity was extremely high but just as a point of comparison the animosity toward brock obama is so high that that they that the he was compelled at a certain point to produce a birth certificate and that's that's takes it up to another level that he didn't think was american had approved that we never had a president to prove that and so i've been intrigued by this back to back kind of pendulum swing of this disagreement over a set of policies essentially with bush but then something that is somewhat policy related but seems to be something different  neo marxist critique of western culture and it's kind of one of those people that that i would never ever come across except i went to graduate school and so in graduate school you read these things and these folks and you at first you don't understand them at has been informative of my research and informative to me as a citizen and his argument about water structures a feeling it's a concept a set of structures a feeling is that there are things in society that are occurring sometimes that are quite profound and are structural and are like like a tectonic movement but they aren't things that people necessarily can put their finger on or articulate very well there are things going on changes occurring that people can feel culturally and also can feel almost physiologically so it's idea that you can feel certain things that you can't necessarily fully articulate you can't put them into a graph very easily you can't have a conversation about them over coffee very easily because they're there deeper culturally deeper then then then knowing what what the weather is or what the number of people who are insured with health care often only recognizable when there is these grand changes only recognizable in retrospect when those changes have become codified and put into policies in ways that you wished you would have kind of articulated unknown at the time and you felt but you weren't really clear about and then they become in retrospect eminently clear like yes of course that was happening that was going on yes that's obvious and these structures the feeling are often profoundly disruptive to people and they in the midst of this these changes they are people search for for saviors and  and the opposite of saviors people you want to send to jail or worse so you're looking for something to solve this anxiety this disruption that you're feeling in the structures of feeling and i have become convinced that that we are in the midst of two major structures of feeling in the united states right now in the midst of two profound shifts culturally that are being most profoundly felt in a negative way by  ideological conservatives by people that are truly troubled by these changes and are being are being noticed by progressives but are not being seen are being lived out in the same kind of terror as exists for conservatives and williams finishes his argument by saying that that that the early monitors of structures of feeling those kind of canaries in the coal mine that tell you that something's going on are you are people who are opposed to the changes it's not the people and if they agree with the change it's people that are opposed to the changes and so if you want to look at look at when there's a profound change going on who's feeling it the most and who is acting out the most are people who are opposed to these changes and they may not fully grasp what's going on but they're feeling something profound so i want to talk about two that i think are signified in the selection by  signified for the last four years by barack obama and our president in this campaign is significant ways the first is the racial change of the composition of the united states that the changing face of who is america who is america who are americans if you look at census data and you look at generational shift what we're seeing is that for almost until generation x mice which is my generation which are folks who were born in the  dropped in terms of white composition significantly and so we've begun to change dramatically so much so that generation y the letter not the word generation y who are my students now  are being raised in a population in which the white american which the white population is about fifty eight percent of the society so it's dropped from about eight over eighty in the last two generations and this produces but it also produces anxiety among those who may want the shifts but are trying to deal with the transformation trying to cross culturally process it to live in the midst of it to to navigate it in all of the different heritages that come with these different groups so you don't need to be as many progress as would say that only racist are deeply troubled or anxious about this kind of racial change no actually you can be quite progressive and be still feeling the grasp of this change because it's such a significant deal so much so that you know just six months ago we had these blaring headlines in news organizations about the fact that more than fifty percent of infants now born in the united states are non caucasian are ethnic minorities and that's that's part of this shift but this is this is something that is seen as a symbol of this grand change ok so this is going on when you look at the university of washington students which are which is a predominately  white institution across the street but even there we are increasingly diverse in the department of education in my department we are almost fifty percent undergraduate students who are students of color and so this is a row markable thing at the university of washington so this change is big it's quite profound now that's a big cultural shift that's going on it is changing the composition of the united states it's impacting our our discussions about immigration it's certainly impacting our discussions about health care it's impacting our discussions about a number of things to bring it in the context this presidential election or this presidency and this presidential election we have a president that is not only in a president he embodies this change so we have a president that embodies this profound transform a nation and he embodies it in two ways first of all he's black i don't know if you've noticed that but he is black and so the reality is that we have our first at least in terms of visible recognition african american president in the white house and he embodies this grand shift so for anybody who's feeling any anxiety at all in a negative way about the chefs they don't have to be racist to nonetheless transfer that anxiety to this president because he symbolizes this so it's a grand transference it's a curse he becomes the symbol that's the problem in their mind but he embodies it in a second way because he also would not be president now and will not be reelected on tuesday if he is reelected if it wasn't for this transformation because among white voters in the united states his support is significantly lower than among non caucasian voters in america in two thousand and eight this president lost the white vote in the united states by about sixty to forty percent the only population among white voters that he won was the under thirty population and he won them sixty six to thirty four crushed mccain in that but lost all other older than white older than thirty populations among whites significantly and he's going to lose the white population on tuesday by roughly about sixty forty again and if he gets if it gets worse than that if you lose the by sixty five thirty five then he'll do he'll be doing the worst that any democratic president has done in forty years among the white vote so he's only president because people of color elected him in very high numbers and because that population was growing and had gotten big enough in american society to become a political force so his reelection on tuesday hinges upon those voters coming out again and with the changing composition of the society so that if he loses the white vote worse on tuesday than he was then he lost the white vote in two thousand and eight he can still be elected because the population that is now nonwhite has increased by a couple more percent since two thousand and eight so his election and possible reelection hinges dramatically upon this shift that's occurring in our population so we've got this guy who's a president and forget all the policies forget anything else about him he  embodies this tectonic shift that's going on in our society and because of that for many americans he he is both the savior because for people who might want to sit embrace his multiculturalism and look at him and say he's he's what my colleague really joseph calls the exceptional multiracial ok he's the one who who is our future he's the grand messiah and then for those who are opposed to this shift or are just feeling anxious about it in a deep way they look at him and they say i don't know what it is but you're a problem and i don't like you and oppose you with everything i've got i'm going to make sure that we never give you a vote winner in congress we're not going to agree with you on anything we're going to post anything you do anything so we've had unprecedented op struction to this president so this first shift is something that we live in the midst up and the thing is you've got to get out of seattle to feel a little bit of this seattle is such a white placed tremendously and doesn't have the multiculturalism in the same way but i've had the privilege with students over the last nine months traveling around the country covering the republican primary and covering presidential politics and going to states from everything from south carolina to nevada colorado pennsylvania virginia and so on and so on to about fifteen states and seen this play out across the country this symbolism that this president has been tied to this racial shift the second profound structure of feeling that is ongoing is got to do with definitions of marriage who gets to marry and who counts in the marital concept ok if you look at attitudes about same sex marriage our marriage  equality or gay marriage pick the terminology that you want to use the reality is that the shifts on this this and this issue are moving very rapidly in the united states more rapidly them than people can kind of keep track of  and you know on tuesday this is one of two states where you have a chance to for the first time affirm a legislature decision in the state that same sex marriages is legal and should be fully constitutional so in maryland and here we have that chance to affirm that without judicial feel this is moving very quickly we also have a chance on tuesday not in this state but in maine to repeal a law that bans same sex marriage that was passed in two thousand and eight so four years later that same law is back on the books but now the attempt is to repeal that which had banned it in two thousand and eight so things are moving very quickly in two thousand and twelve earlier this year in north carolina they passed a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage in fact banning civil unions as well and the primarily primary proponent of this bill a republican in the state legislature there the speaker of the house a few days before the before the state voted on it was an initiative that went to the all the citizens of the state after being passed by the legislature so it was a constitutional amendment the primary proponent of this stood up in the well of the house of representatives in the north carolina state house and said we're going to pass this on tuesday and indeed they passed it sixty to forty as a statewide vote he said we're going to pass this on tuesday and then in twenty years you will repeal that's absolutely true the recognition that this is occurring among those who are still trying to ban it tells us that they are well aware of the structure of feeling that's going on the shift that's occurring so i have this great graph this great figure from a couple sociologists that track support for same sex marriage by age cohort across all fifty states in the united states some a couple years ago and i have a really big if i could have brought it's really big like this and hold it up for you it's kind of like my big poster and it's my favorite graph of all time because it lists all fifty states on it and it lists by zero to one hundred percent using all publicly available polls back in two thousand and nine for support for same sex marriage and it breaks out by age cohort sixty five and older fifty to sixty four thirty four thirty to forty nine and then under thirty and it tracks them across all the states looking at support for same sex marriage and what you see is a perfect generational shift in which  the least support for same sex marriage is a among the sixty five and older cohort across all fifty states and then it's the third forty five to sixty forty five to sixty four year olds and then it's the thirty to forty four year olds and then it's the under thirty year olds with from zero to one hundred with greater support going this way no nobody's up at one hundred they were they were up around fifty or sixty among the older group but you go from the older to the next youngest to the next youngest to the youngest and it's almost perfectly statistically a shift ok across all of these fifty states you can look at it all the southern states in utah are in the bottom of the graph in terms of support for it and all the coastal states are up at the top in terms of  greater support the top less support the bottom but here's the kicker to the point is that when you draw a line from the greatest state the state with the greatest support among over sixty five year  olds which is massachusetts in this graph greatest support there about thirty percent among sixty five and older folks for support for same sex marriage when you that's the that's the highest of any sixty five and older cohort for any of the fifty states when you draw a line straight down the sixty five and older folks on same sex marriage in massachusetts look like thirty year olds and under an alpha alabama and same sex marriage it's almost exactly a line straight down so you have this incredible generational replacement what political scientists call generational replacement and this this dynamic of who gets to marry who gets to vote on marriage who gets the legal who gets the cultural benefits of marriage is also embodied by this president who may be kicking and screaming but came to to address and support same sex marriage in may so not think so right prepare lee taking the position that that beam black wasn't tough enough for him politically that he decided that he would come out in support of same sex marriage the first president to ever do anything like this and in the midst of a reelection campaign so there are all kinds of reasons this guy has let down progressive but there are all kinds of things that he's had to overcome and the reality is that he embodies now that same sex marriage shift in a way that he would not have embodied before so he's african american with this structure a feeling shift on race going on and he supports at least personally same sex marriage although he's not defending doma either and has presided over the repeal of don't ask don't tell so he embodies it in all kinds of ways this shift on marriage and the definition of marriage this structure of feeling and marriage like the structure of feeling on race is again most apparently being manifested the the exiled over this be most apparently manifested among people who oppose it that they're deeply anxious and concerned about this issue and are mobilized around this in a way that is below the radar of most anybody in the city of seattle who might be in this room and deeply engaged around this so much so that are the base republican party are given up giving a pass for the presidency to a man that they're convinced is a member of a cult ok because they're willing to see this president as so disruptive to that notion of family and who gets to marry that if they allow him to be elected that not only is he going to be socialist or so they say is also going to be is going to enact certain definitions of marriage that are unacceptable so we've got a presidency and a presidential campaign in which you have these two shifts that are occurring in our society that are fundamental to the american identity who we are racially and who we are in terms of marriage are not small matters these are not like what kind of clothes are you wearing today these are fundamental to who this country is and always has been race is a tapestry element that has been woven throughout american history and definitions of family and we've been fighting over those from the beginning so the reality is that these have come to the fore in the early twenty first century with this president and this moment this is what these is really at stake in this election and you may already  obama that's not my issue here my issue is for us to recognize the tensions that are in play here because whatever happens on tuesday whatever side winning this election and i can tell you right now  's going to win but whatever side wins this election there's going to be significant significant cultural repair work that has to be done and that's where the people in this room come in what are going to be the steps that we're going to take once all of the emotion of this week is over what are you going to do all of that cross cultural work that people in good progressive circles in seattle are well aware needs to be done on race it needs to be done with white people what are you going to do the kind of cultural connective work that needs to be done around definitions of marriage when our seventy four passes by fifteen points in the state ok what are you going to do or if it fails by fifteen the first one seems more fun right but imagine if you're on the other side of it and it loses that isn't just it is every bit as exhilarating on one side as it is terrifying on the other if chris i mean if richling could write a book about christian fascism then he felt that very strongly about bush you have to recognise that every bit as strongly are the feelings around these issues too and we're people as adults who have a chance to engage on these matters to engage in a conversation tonight but also to engage in some significant cultural way with people who may disagree with us and i think that that's that's the challenge i have for you is do you want to do that work i know who you want to win on tuesday and i know what issues you want to win but i think there's more than that there is and these structures of feeling aren't going away after tuesday in fact they're probably getting bigger all right so why do we going to do about that is it going to be your neighbor is it going to be someone at your synagogue is it going to be someone in your profession is it going to be someone in your family that you're going to have to talk honestly with and be vulnerable bout because any reconciliation work that i've ever seen that actually works or been person a participant in involves serious humility and honesty and often pain so what are we going to do well i would just say first we have to win on tuesday then then then we have to we have to be if you don't if you do if we do or you don't win on tuesday you've got be willing to recognize and to look at yourself and say you know what it's important that we come together and even if others don't want to come together i can't let their behavior control my behavior all right otherwise you give them the power right so for all the flaws of this president and he's of these flaws flawed as anybody the one thing that i'd there are many deep things things that i deeply admire about him but one thing in particular is that in my view he has never given up on trying to work with people who disagree with him many people who who are progress as want him to give up want him to have quit to have walked away to use majorities for different purposes in the congress to have just stopped but to me he has embodied that every day reconciliation work he's african american he has been from the moment he became a candidate told that he's muslim not american a socialist and yet every day goes out there and does i think he's a model of great so what about me as a citizen and what about you as a citizen what are we going to be after tuesday win or lose i think that's the question i came to give you tonight what are you going to do who you're going to be who is america going to be what are we going to do after tuesday because wherever you stand wherever you sit there is going to be a lot of work to be done  a yeah so the only kind of reconciliation work that i've ever seen work is work in which you spend a lot of time listening in which you you you'd have you really seek honestly to understand rather than to change because if you try to change them you've lost the humility i think that needs to come with this right so the common good caf love the idea what if it went on the road once a month what if it went on the road to overlake church see rich is going to be the one you're going to have to watch the closest on this ok so what what what if you did that once a week and then what if you had somebody in partnership come here i'm sorry once a month and you had a partnership somebody come here and i don't think you start with a conversation it you don't you don't start with the accusatory certainly and you certainly don't start with the with the trying to put yourself up on a higher pedestal you start with hey this is the idea of a common good caf and we want to understand each other and we don't know you you don't know us but it's possible we had some different viewpoints this last election let's just we just want to hear about your viewpoints we want to hear and i think that's hard work it's really hard work and i think that it's the kind of work though that i think does change people and i think that that it only is it's deeper relationship work now i think the reality is that most of us don't want to do this i think that's the case it's just so hard i'm forty five years old i'm tired ok that kind of thing and you're not a bad moral person for being there but i have to say that if it isn't the people here in this room who don't do that work then i don't know who does all right so i would i know the people in social work the school social work who do these dialogues it's incredible and they always involve great relational work they're hard work people are exhausted but they change everybody so what if you took a set of making it hard for everybody why don't we took what you had like you had a common good caf on the road in which you say if you were your regular attenders or if you're ok jle ten years where you had like five subgroups and one of you subgroups went out once a month and so there's ten of you in each subgroup and ten of you had a meeting set up over the east side or down to south or whatever and so you only had to make these tracks or to have these relational moments once every fifth month doesn't sound like much but i know how hard this is so these kinds of conversations where you actually just go and ask questions are to me exactly how i do this and i know because when i went to south carolina and asked people i said why are you opposed to brock obama they they would tell me very candidly and it forced me to deal with what they were sane because when i looked at them they looked like me they just had a different drawl but they looked like my dad they looked like a lot of people i know here and so the issue is that for most of my life i don't talk to the people in south carolina so i can just put treat them a certain things and not like them or not like me but when we talk to each other that's when things change i think said i voted the other day and so i know who i voted for and i speak about a couple things and i voted for marijuana legalization because to me that's an issue of injustice for people that are arrested and treated under that for a minor thing doesn't seem any worse to me by and large than alcohol or cigarettes so there's a moral component to that because the people that by and large get get get put under put into jail on the so called war on drugs or people of color and people of lower economic or economic status so to me that's an issue of justice i voted for our seventy four that was that was an easy one for me but i'll tell you that fifteen years ago i would have voted against it i've come a long ways politically in ideologically and and i think the people my life has been with me through that journey who didn't stop talking to me who walked with me through that it's only through relationships that you i think these changes occur and i voted for jay inslee but i'm not sure he'll win i think will be close but i voted for him because in the end of the day i agree with more of his  major dynamic that is an issue of equity and injustice right now in the united states that is that is been been building over  decades the reason i wouldn't characterize it as a structure a feeling issue is because in my understanding of the concept the concept refers to two  identities schiff's and that the issue of a racial identity of from america as a white nation and the issue of definition of marriage between a woman in a man two to any two  adults non related adults to me is more fundamental identity chefs for the definition of this nation because those two issues are so entwined in religious conceptions in the marital stuff and in just back all the way to the found in the nation on racial terms the economic matters have been things that we've argued about and we have waned unwaxed in terms of position ality i think of the inequalities that exist i do believe and i think there are significant data behind this that shows that we're at a a stunningly perhaps apex moment for inequity in terms of earnings and wealth in this country but i wouldn't in my mind characterize that as an identity shift for america america's always been a capitalistic nation always greed filled seeking to make as much money as possible and it's an individualistic nations of the poor are left to their own devices too much but that's been there from the beginning in my view it's not a it's not a rend it's not a rent hundred of the fabric in a way that i think that conservatives feel racial chefs and the marital definitions are really a tearing of the fabric of who this nation is so i think it's a big deal but i wouldn't characterize it as a structure a feeling i was going to go there was value syria i think that's right on i think that that was it's the  transference of the all the things i do to obama and it's not quite that simple but i think that we if we're looking for a parsimonious theory of of hostility to barack obama i think that's the place to start is the transference of these anxieties to him and also if you're looking for a theory of the of the messiah take on obama it's i think a transference of wanting these changes and pointing to him as the embodiment of those changes i think we know that in psychological terms as well as in i don't know nature terms like ecological terms that forces that try to move one way that are not able to achieve their goals that way find other ways to move rivers flood surges these kinds of things and relationships in families so if you're if you're having unhealthy dysfunctional relations and family families and one person suddenly says i'm healthy and i'm not dealing with that anymore that hell in a healthy person will find other people to be to have their dysfunctions with ri so to me i think that that the control slash articulation or demonization of women's rights generally and the  embodiment particularly of non traditional women and even worse if you're nontraditional woman of color i think is that to me seems like a logical place it would go and just as an example how that would play out and how that could matter even more than it does already is that all of this hostility towards this president that we've igs experienced and again most of it is largely theoretical if you live in seattle  of it you know you go outside go outside the city either in the state or across the country and you experience it much more dramatically but all of it that you've seen there it's going to come to full bear on a woman candidate for the president presidency when that moment occurs it's going to all this is going to come full bear on her because she's going to signify yet another element of this so i think that that that's been the story of american history black men got the right to vote in  nine women did not get the right to vote until nine hundred twenty took a long time and it wasn't because it just took a while to get there it's that there was a push against that after black men got the right to vote that that required when it took a longer because of that backlash and so i think that's going to happen and god forbid it be hillary clinton because it's already a lot of stuff there with her culturally but i think it's going to happen for anybody and and i expect in two thousand and sixteen that there will be a major female candidate for the presidency and she may be a major she may be the front runner for the presidency and i think that we're going to see this play out in that respect because this is and is going to be another part of this kind of massive shift going on yeah back here any time you take up serious questions you risk the loss of relationship well i think there are actually good tools out there for tough  perspective on the world and the way i would phrase is about twenty five about twenty years ago this was kind of one of the early for runners of the shift that i referenced in terms of my attitudes on same sex marriage is i went to a talk and this was when i was  with my wife need to neck deep into conservative angelical culture we went to a talk as we're trying to figure out how to interpret the bible and think about it and this guy gave it was a it was a progressive christian group and we were just starting to even know these existed and we went to a talk like this and the speaker said i speak he opened his talk by saying in this word stick with me today that i speak with the humility of someone who's experienced a paradigm shift that you've seen the world this way and now you see it this way but you know you saw it that way and so you're seeing of it today is always couched in that humility of having seen it that way too and i think that recognition so that you come to a position of understanding as opposed to zisha of openness and understanding instead of judgment against those against it alternative positions so if the goal of the conversation is persuasion you're doomed if the goal of the conversation is relationship in understanding then you've got a great shot because in all of this moment you want to say wait what about or that hurt you let it go more often because you're just trying to understand that person but you're trying to persuade then you have to get your point and you have to get your point or if you're trying to defend yourself because you're concerned about your own identity then you have to stand up and defend and say wait a bit you just offended me and or you find my friend or wait a minute but if the goal is understanding like to understand the guy at the chick fil a in columbia south carolina who is wearing the obama is a muslim button if the goal is to understand him rather than to point out how he's crazy then that's a very different conversation than if the goal is to point out you're wrong there's no chance i have from seattle that i'm going to get this guy to buy my argument that obama is not a muslim there's no chance but if i'm going to go and ask him tell me about your button i'm from seattle i don't see that often like to know about that then then i'm there to understand him and say the weakness of my position here is that the critique that can be labeled  disagree with that to me all relationship discourse is change and opens the possibility for attitude change but if you go straight fretted to change you'll never have that foundation of trust that's essential so if you go straight for attitude change which is most of what we do when we have five minutes instead of five days if we go straight for that and we wonder why didn't that work so imagine always it being turned on you in somebody walking up to you and saying say in their position do you think they're going to change your and change you in five minutes you know if it's your mother your father your brother your sister you're going to appreciate that they walked up to you and said i don't understand but can you help me understand i think they'll be tremendous anger if he's reelected yes i do think that and i think that if you were to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college that would be just a mountain of anger and would be even further do you the jetta miser people would attempt  deal even further i don't know how many would go much farther by say fasten your a muslim was not american but they'll try and so i think that if that scenario occurs which i don't think will happen but if that's a narrow curse that that would be a yes run very dangerous terrain i don't think you'll lose and i don't think i don't think so let me say the positive he don't think he's going to weigh in and he's going to win the popular vote he's going to win the electoral college i think it'll be a if we can be fine but it's not going to a big landslide victory roughly think of three twenty three three twenty electoral votes so i'm thinking and i've gotten to that position after being in despair about three weeks ago when i was but seriously studying this for four years now  i do think this that the anger that that is that it was articulated in the piece that you read is going to be there no matter who wins because these issues are so deep and the  division is so substantial in this country that even if that if obama loses the despair that will be felt among many particularly people of color who are left out of this conversation entirely but the reality that hey look at how a person who looks like me or kind of like me or at least not white has been treated for four years so there are significant issues there that have to be worked through i can't tell you that i know exactly how this is going to play out afterwards it's way more in the words of another coll philip howard it's way easier to have the revolution than to have the work done after that because the work done after it is the relational structural work so it's not been easy to get to where we are but i'm just saying that that's how much harder it's going to be going forward so all i would say is please wake up on the wednesday after words knowing that you're exhausted you're either in despair or you're in joy and it's time to put your work clothes on again because we've got a lot more work to do a why do i win a couple things actually i've been doing a lecture series on this for for four years so the reality is that the change in racial composition of the country give some advantage in the electoral college many of the states where there's been the greatest ethnic change in the country are key battleground states ok there's only a few that aren't like the texas or california a lot of them are though you've had a significant change in florida has significant change in nevada colorado and even in virginia composition electorate works for him second of all i think that that he's maintained the support and enough so enough significant support in the midwest to win the key states there that that his support among white working class voters has diminished the least in the midwest because of his auto bailout position that and i think that that elect that issue decides the selection and i think it should decide the selection from michigan from detroit i think there is nothing more culturally center to the american identity than the automotive industry for good or for bad and the reality is that he took a position on that issue that that was absolutely politically anathema at the time that he did it and he did it and he did it because he thought it was the right thing to do and it's turned out right so i think that he wins on that issue in michigan he wins on that in ohio he wins on that in in iowa because it just kind of all goes together he wins on that in wisconsin too so i think that holds those states and the third thing i would say is that  reason i'm so confident of it today is that if you every politician has a tell you know tells our tellers when they say it's they may not be aware of it but they're doing something that tells somebody else that clearly they're nervous or worried or something and that the clearest tell well for the romney campaign is that they started absolutely bald face line in ohio not just kind of like somewhat line but absolutely completely aligned on the auto bailout completely line saying that he supported and that jeep was moving jobs to china when and here's here's why that's such a tell to me if you're going to be president if you think you're going to win and you need to work with the c e o s of the automotive industry then you don't you don't lie about their product two weeks before you're about to win the presidency because you need them when you win so these guys are all they're all guys i think all these guys have all said this is a lie seems false so how it would be like the president of the university of washington the guy who's about to be president coming from utah and saying something like this the provost is cutting faculty jobs at the university of washington and lying about that before he cooked a job here what kind of relationship would he have if he came in the door after saying that about the provost of the faculty we all hate the guy right so he's lying about that and that is that is a bridge too far to me you don't do that if you're actually winning yes i think they're not believing his lies i do i absolutely think that this is the case there is there are moments when you go too far and this is too far because there have been people worker after worker who has heard him and has contacted political officials and leaders of their job of their work saying i've heard this is this true and they've been reassured that it's not and now they look at this guy romney who they might culturally have been in sync with and now say oh that's that you just you scared the crap out of my family and me we can't trust that and the newspapers and in ohio  bloomberg didn't endorse obama so much as indorse climate change fighting climate change so what he said was we need to deal with climate change there's one of these guys who does this i'm endorsing him and he clearly doesn't love obama right i mean he doesn't but he use this moment this devastation of the east coast to highlight climate change because he's he's he's he's egotistical like all of these guys including obama i mean they're all the go to stickle this is his issue climate change it's an issue in which he cares about is just devastated his city in new jersey in much of the much of that area and so he uses political moment to endorse dealing with climate change it will help obama with some moderates but mostly i think it it  s it elevates that issue in a way that it just wasn't so i think it matters there in terms of chris christie the bromance between christie and obama is really something to behold if you've ever wondered if these politicians care mostly about themselves and even more about maybe america or the party you just have to look at what christie has done to romney in the last two days ok here he is probably the ultimate symbol of republican kind of straight talk and this in the country he's a big a large my figure he fit in at the can he went to the convention and gave a speech that wasn't about romney it was about christie and all of this right and so christie you know not only brought the president to new jersey the guy practically married him right i mean he said he's been incredible he's been calling me gave me his number we talk six times yesterday he's been incredible leader and i think two things about this one it's clearly a political opportunity for both of these men for obama and christie and they and good politicians know exactly what's going on they never have to say to each other like hey chris make sure you say how great i am they just know what's up but second i think the reality is that to hit to move it out of the political realm i think christie is a very emotional  person and i think he's really just torn up about new jersey and i really appreciate that that in the midst of all of that that he was able to do what we should always be doing which is coming together in these devastating moments right so he i'll tell you this he's got me to take another look at him after this election yeah in a pure political sense i think it benefits the president politically in terms of the structure of feeling shift  occurring i think for good faith individuals it it helps to ease some of that anxiety for people that are really trying to work through anxieties that they may not know it may not know what they are they're just feeling numb and for people who also maybe maybe do it do are aware that they're not comfortable with a black man being president but they're not outwardly hostile they're just they just know that it's just not comfortable to them i think in that respect that the president has earned tremendous goodwill and how he has approached all of this and i think as we never had a black man in that position to be in that ability we just  haven't so i don't know exactly how that plays out going forward if it's really interesting i just hadn't thought of it in that term of that term of of the reversal of the paternalistic position the right it's always been the white man usually has reached out to help those poor black people right in this case the devastation has been largely among whites and romney it said something interesting today he i haven't yet but it was all over my twitter feed he offended italians in some kind of way today and so i don't know if there's a lot to tell you the population somewhere there in new york new jersey we know that yeah i know there are there but i don't know in terms of the yeah i don't know if they if he made some kind of comment like about those people or something like that right i don't know but i think i do think this that when obama wins on tuesday that given everything that's come forward he could go into that victory and in any better position of starting to then where he's out with sandy right now it's still a very hostile difficult environment but he clearly goes in with a bit more goodwill than he would have gone in otherwise i've got about three more minutes ok no no i don't think so but i do think is that we live in a capitalistic society where we have a commercial media system and so they they they functionally function that way they don't is not a puppet master dynamic  it's a reality of they need access they need sources they need powerful people to pay for advertisements and so the media function that way if we wanted a different media system they didn't uphold the powerful certain powerful groups we would have to have a different kind of system so that's the reality of it the media are centrally conservative and i don't always mean that ideologically i mean they're conservative economically the reality because of that positions of people in power both overtly and covertly are able to manipulate slash control the discourse in the press but i don't think it's an it's something that is that is somebody behind the scenes orchestrated or delivering emails or any of that kind of thing i got to go i got to get my eleven year old at the more theater where he's dan and