The Scribe

Are the cards stacked against a Democratic win? Validity of the 2006 elections: Avi Rubin, Mark Crispin Miller, John Fund, Sean Greene and Ian Inaba

From "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook 10/30/06:

Guests:  Sean Greene, Director of Research at "electionline.org", Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Culture and Communication at New York University & author of "Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal the Next One Too," John Fund, Columnist for The Wall Street Journal & author of "Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy," Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University & author of the recently-released "Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting," and Ian Inaba of videothevote.org.

WBUR Host Tom Ashbrook believes that with all the excitement and anticipation about the upcoming elections -- now only a week away -- there are also fears about the process.  The Washington Post carried a report on the person who has exacerbated those fears through his cocky confidence that the Republican majority will be maintained in both Senate and House -- Karl Rove. Just how vulnerable is the election process?   Ashbrook asks:  "Are you confident that the country's electoral system is good, or good enough, to reflect the people's will?"

Tom Ashbrook:  Joining me first -- from Washington -- is Sean Greene, Research Director at "electionline.org."    It's billed as the nation's only non-partisan, non-advocacy website providing news and analysis on election reform.  It came out with a big report last week looking at potential trouble spots in next Tuesday's midterm election... We'll get to what you found, but first just a response to your report of last week -- what's your assessment of the level of fear among Americans about the credibility -- the validity -- the security -- of the vote?

Sean Greene:  I think there is a fairly strong concern out there.  In fact, in the past week after our report, we even saw polls asking people about their confidence in the vote and the numbers, especially in certain demographic groups, aren't very good -- for the competence, accuracy, and validity of the vote. 

Ashbrook:  Who is most lacking in confidence?  ...

Greene: When they compared Democrats to Republicans, Democrats had more concerns as did African Americans.

Ashbrook:  Do those fears look justified to you? When you talk to American citizens, do you say "go with fear and trepidation into this process" or "fundamentally sound."

Greene:  Not go with fear and trepidation, but try to be as prepared as possible in the sense of doublechecking your registration before the election, figure out where your polling place is, and educate yourself in the kind of voting technology that's in use in your polling place.  I think what we've noticed in the states that we pointed out in our report that might have potential trouble spots, that have a combination of close Congressional races with fairly new technology and new requirements -- such as voter identification or registration requirements. 

Ashbrook: Sean, 2000 was such a bell-ringer in terms of raising American concerns about how the vote works, it was so close, and we all saw what happened in Florida with so much controversy about that.  2004 had its own controversy, some pretty significant.  Where are we in the American response to the concerns that, to say the least, were put on the table by those two elections?  What's happened since then in terms of addressing?  Responding?

Greene:  Well, I'd say we're still actually in the beginning of the process of responding to those changes.  The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a federal law which was passed in 2002 in response to what happened to Florida in 2000, tried to address those issues.  It focused on voting technology, voter registration, provisional ballots at the polls so no one would be turned away from the polls if they were not on the registration list.  The problem we've seen is that while most people seem pleased we've moved away from punch cards, the move to new technology and new requirements led to a whole set of concerns which I think were unexpected for some people but not for all.

Ashbrook: What are the concerns that are arising now?

Greene:  As we've discussed, the biggest concerns are the voting technologies and specifically electronic voting.  Not only during this primary season, states that have rolled out their voting machines for the first time.  There have been a number of problems having to do with the machines themselves, pollworkers' interactions with the machines.  I think that's what's causing the biggest stir.  But there are also new voter identification requirements in certain states that certain groups feel are too restrictive and might disenfranchise certain people at the polls.

Ashbrook:  Give us an example.  What's the most extreme requirement of voter ID being rolled out that voters will face in this voting day, next week?

Greene: Well, there are two states -- Indiana and Florida -- that now require photo ID at the polls and if you don't have a photo ID, you can then case a provisional ballot.  Your registration status will then be checked later for its validity. There are two other states -- Georgia and Missouri -- that also have photo ID laws, but they were actually struck down by courts.  So for now, in those states, they'll just ask all voters to show ID photo or non-photo ID.

Ashbrook:  And the concern there is that people may not vote because they're afraid they won't have the right ID when they get to the polls?

Greene:  Exactly.  That people, if they don't have a correct ID, they might not go to the polls or they're scared they may be incorrectly turned away at the polls -- or that a provisional ballot is not a regular ballot, and how the provisional ballot is counted if that's what they have to have.  It counts differently than a regular ballot.  There's that concern as well.

Ashbrook:  What's driven these moves in Indiana and Florida and elsewhere?  Is there evidence that there was in fact people voting early and often?  Was that the problem?  Or non-citizens vote?  Was there evidence of substantial abuse?

Greene:  I think that's been the concern.  This is certainly the most partisan issue in all of election reform, is that Republicans pretty much across the board support stricter and stronger identification rules, and Democrats tend to oppose them, saying they depress the vote.  What's interesting, though, is both sides have presented a lot of anecdotal evidence but there have not been a lot of studies on either side, showing across the board numbers of the concerns that I mentioned.  Certainly what we have seen in the past, and this is true -- that there are dead voters on the registration rolls and people worry that could lead to potentially someone not alive voting!   But there haven't been a lot of cases of actually polling-place voter fraud that have been substantiated.

Ashbrook:  What about new regulations surrounding registration -- tightening that up or making it easier?  What are the trend there?  Where are the areas of concern?

Greene:  I think the trends have been towards tightening up in certain states. In Ohio and Florida for example they passed laws where third-party registration groups, where advocacy groups, League of Women Voters, would register voters and hand in registration forms that were invalid or incomplete or fraudulent.  I think those states responded by saying, We're going to pass laws that impose more regulations on who can hand these in, what sort of training process you have to go through... that sort of thing.  In both those states, those laws actually got struck down by courts as being too restrictive.  But that's been the move.  I think there's been a concern that some of these groups return fraudulent or poorly filled out registration forms.

Ashbrook:  The concern on the other side is that tightening the regulations around registration make it harder to get more citizens to the polls.  With those having been struck down by courts, are there any new, tighter regulations actually in effect for these 2006 midterms?

Greene:  Well, when it comes to filling out your registration form, in Arizona, for example, they passed Proposition 200 which has actually gone back and forth with the courts. It required ID at the polls but it also required that when you hand in your registration form that you provide proof of citizenship.  That has gone back and forth.  That's still in effect and has been in effect in Arizona for all of 2006.

Ashbrook:  Issues around ID.  Issues around registration and maybe above all, in voters' minds, concern around lots of new technology being put out there particularly in this vote.  We're joined right now from Baltimore by Avi Rubin, Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, and author of the new book, "Brave New Ballot:  The battle to safeguard Democracy in the age of electronic voting."  Avi Rubin, so where is the hot edge of concern around electronic voting? How many more Americans will be doing it this year, and how confident can they be in the outcome of those touch-screen or other electronic votes?

Avi Rubin: Well, the number of people voting on electronic voting machines is unprecedented and it's very high right now.  We have 39% of voters will vote on these touch-screen voting machines and I think there's a lot of cause for concern.  In many places the electronic machines have no paper record of the votes and so you've got what amounts to a Windows machine in most cases, a self-contained computer with a voting application on it and voters will go up and make their selections and vote, and the votes will be tallied on a computer memory card.  The problem is that there's no way to audit such a system.  So if there's a bug in the software and the machines get the wrong answer we might never know it or we might get some ridiculous results and we'd know there was a problem but there would be no way to recover from it.  And you can't perform any recounts on these systems.  I think the potential for vote-rigging and vote-fraud is very high, especially when you consider that we can't tell for sure if it happened or not.  And so certainly kinds of outcomes in the election could spark all kinds of theories about what happened and there would be nothing that we could [inaudible] the way we did in Florida 2000 which is an example of a very difficult election that [faulty transmission from WBUR archives, or Avi Rubin's cellphone, takes out several words here]... we were able to have a recount and observe the process.

Ashbrook: So potential for manipulation... You also say that there's potential for glitches.  It's new software; some people just don't know how to use it.  Or there are problems within the software. Which do you see as the greater concern, active manipulation or just computer glitches that we have all come to know and not love!

Rubin:  My biggest concern is the collection of those. Collectively they result in an election where we can't know that we got the right answer.  I don't know how likely it is that fraud will occur.  I guess whoever loses is likely to have some claim and I think the claim will be a lot stronger where there's a system that's not auditable and which can't be recounted.

Ashbrook:  Sean Greene, that's a very disconcerting view from Avi Rubin.  Can we live with this level of uncertainty about the vote's outcome?  George Will says today, C'mon, there are a lot of people in this country and a lot of votes... Get over it. It's not the margin of victory we're talking about here. We've got to have a little tolerance... Can we live with this? Do we still need some kind of major overhaul?

Greene: About what Avi was talking about, there are a number of states which have moved to paper trails and having the voter-verified paper audit trail on electronic voting machines to be the actual record for a recount.  As Avi mentioned, I think there are 15 states plus the District of Columbia that use some touch-screen voting machines that are paperless.  It's a big concern for a lot of people in those jurisdictions.

Ashbrook:  Those are words we don't want to hear, going straight into voting day... On the electronic front, Avi, so many more people are going to be voting that way in 2006.  What's your answer here?  What are you proposing that will bolster confidence in the accuracy, honesty, security of the electronic vote?

Rubin: I've been studying this now for several years and I've seen all kinds of technologies.  There are multiple ones. And the best one I think we could have would be paper ballots.  We can use technology to augment the process quite a bit.  We could use computer touch-screens to mark the paper ballots so you go up to a touch-screen machine and you make your selections and it prints out a filled-out paper ballot -- basically the same one you'd fill out with a pencil except the ovals will be filled in perfectly.  You get a lot of advantages of the electronics there in terms of the interface the voter has which is the nice touch-screen, which the voters like, and which avoid all kinds of problems.

Ashbrook:  Is such a system employed and ready to be used next Tuesday anywhere right now?

Rubin:  I believe they are using it in several places.  The most widely known system of this kind is called the Automark and I've only given you half of the equation because now I've described the way in which voters mark the ballot -- it's a paper ballot -- but then how you count it is very important as well. What I'd like to see would be precinct-level optical scanners.  So you don't take these papers and try to transmit them before they've been counted to a central place, but you count them right in the precinct with an optical scanner machine.  Obviously that's an electronic machine as well.  The difference between that electronic machine and a touch-screen voting machine that counts votes is that you can audit it.  You can feed it all kinds of ballots and then count the ballots by hand and compare them to the totals the optical scanner gets without knowledge in advance of which machines you're going to audit. 

Ashbrook:  So in a way you're saying, keep it local and, at some level, keep it simple!

Rubin: Keep it simple and keep it local.  Think about how much software you're trusting in a system like this. If you're auditing these optical scanners and you're not trusting the software on them there's very little software to begin with.  Whereas if you use the electronic voting machines, you've got -- in the case of the Diebold Accuvote which we use in Maryland -- 50,000 lines of code in the software on top of millions of lines of Windows.  So I think, as a computer scientist, that I think it's a bad idea to trust the elections to software which can have bugs and which can be manipulated in a way which cannot be detected.

Ashbrook:  A lot of people are not exactly trusting software just now but nevertheless likely to be using it next Tuesday.  I want to invite another voice into our conversation.  Joining us from New York is Mark Crispin Miller with us.  He's a Professor of Communication at New York University, author of "Fooled Again:  How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too Unless We Stop Them."  ...Mark, you're right out there.  You're not cutting any corners here in your description.  You say the elections have been stolen already and they're going to be stolen again.  How can you be so sure.  Is the evidence so clear, looking forward?

Mark Crispin Miller:  Well, it is quite clear, unfortunately.  I want to make a crucial point here.  This is really not a technical issue.  Certainly, technical matters are all-important and I'm fully in agreement that the use of touch-screen machines is very dangerous and I think we should get rid of them.  But this is not a technical issue.  At heart, this is a civic issue.  This is about our right to vote.  So I don't think we should be concentrating on looking for the better mousetrap.  We certainly need to discuss the simplest, safest, most transparent method of voting. 

Ashbrook:  Doesn't it boil down, Mark Crispin Miller, to -- at the end of the process -- how we punch the ballot and how it's counted.  And on the way to that process, how people register, how they identify themselves.  Aren't all of these steps what, in total, add up to confidence or lack of confidence?

Miller: Yes.  What we need is process that's completely transparent.  We actually need popular control and oversight of the election system.  Elections per se are not the hallmark of democracy.  Saddam Hussein had elections.  We need a system that's not in the hands of the two political parties -- and I know that may sound utopian -- but the fact is that partisan control of the system has really, over the decades in this country, made for an extremely untrustworthy system which now, I argue, is being manipulated by one party while the other party sits by and does nothing.  There are countless examples of all sorts of anomalies, improprieties and glitches -- some fo them technical, some of them not -- and in almost every case, they've only benefitted one party. 

Ashbrook:  Point to the sharpest evidence you've got of not just bumbling but manipulation.

Miller: In the 2004 elections, for example, there were thousands of reports from eleven states, not just Ohio, of machines systematically slipping votes, electronic votes, from Kerry to Bush.  Now, I'm not a Democrat, Tom.  I'm a Chicagoan!  So I know too much to be a Democrat!  So I looked very hard to find examples of votes slipping from  Bush to Kerry...

Ashbrook:... Slipping votes? You're talking about software that would change a vote once it was in the bank?

Miller:  I'm talking about people literally pressing the button for Kerry and having the Bush light go off.  If people want to see first-hand accounts of this kind of thing, they should consult a very valuable archive of first-hand information called "The Election Incident Reporting System." 

Ashbrook:  Are you saying that Karl Rove or Ken Mehlman went out an jimmied with these machines?

Miller:  Well, I'm not saying they personally went out and jimmied with them.  What I'm telling is that if it were simply an innocent glitch then we would have seen roughly an equal number of examples on each side of the partisan divide.  What I'm telling you is that in 2004 there were almost no examples of these machines benefitting the Democrats.  If people go to my blog they'll find reports of early voting that's already taken place this time in Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri where there have been dozens of reports of the same thing -- people trying to vote for Democrats and the machine won't seem to respond.  It seems to want them to vote Republican. 

Ashbrook:... Sean Greene -- there you are, Research Director at electionline.org, you're hearing the charges of straight-up manipulation, you're hearing of the instances Mark Crispin Miller is pointing to, you've done a lot of research very recently -- are you nodding your head in agreement or is this beyond what you found?

Greene: It's not something we focused on in our report....

Ashbrook: ... Why not?!  Whether or not there's manipulation, wouldn't you pay attention to that?  Wouldn't that be fundamental?

Greene:  That's true.  But we would focus more on the process and the voting machines and the more technical aspects...

Ashbrook:  So is the process corrupt?  Or not? Mark Crispin Miller is saying straight-up that it's corrupt and it's manipulated.  Did you find evidence to support that or not?

Greene:  We did not find evidence to support that but I think his point about transparency is one of the big issues in election reform.  One aspect of that, voting machines in the US are certified by certain companies and the companies that certify the machines... the certifiers are actually funded by the voting machine companies.  I think a lot of people find that not a very transparent process and want that to change.  So that's the sort of thing we found in our report.

Ashbrook:  Mark Crispin Miller -- here's the Research Director at electionline.org.  He says well, no, we did not find evidence to support the case for manipulation.  You're saying you found abundant evidence.  What do you make of that gap?

Miller: Well, I respect Sean's work and he did make clear that he didn't actually look into this particular aspect of the problem.  Tom, I'm not making stuff up!  In my book, "Fooled Again," and in several books that have come out over the last year and in a number of other studies, all of this stuff is very thoroughly documented.  These aren't rumors! 

Ashbrook:  What should Americans think when they've got the Research Director on one side saying "we didn't find it," and you saying with perfect confidence on the other side, "we've got manipulation here."

Miller: I think they should look at both sides of the case and make up their own minds.  They should certainly read my book, "Fooled Again."  They should Steve Freeman's book, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"  It came out in June.  It's a very important study of the exit polls which there is no reason to believe were wrong.  The idea that ten exit polls could all be wrong in the same way is frankly statistically impossible.  We have accepted the claim that there was something wrong with the exit polls.  But we have not actually studied whether they were accurate or not.  Steve's book is a very good start for people wanting to look into this.  There's a brand new book out by Bob Fitrakis called "What Happened in Ohio?"  It's full of primary documents, Tom, demonstrating that Kerry probably won Ohio last time by as many as 350,000 votes.

Ashbrook: Professor Miller, where are you going to be focused next Tuesday? Where is your eagle eye going to be looking?

Miller: I'm going to be involved with the Election Defense Alliance which, in turn, is going to partner with other groups and we're gonig to try to have our "eagle eyes" all over the country!  The fact is, it's crucial that people get out and vote.  My belief is -- not because they can be confident that their choices will prevail but because it's not possible to be confident of that -- people should get out to vote as a protest on behalf of fair and free elections.  The higher the turnout on election day, the harder it will be for the Republicans in this case to spin their victory as legitimate.  I don't think they could possibly win in a fair election.

Ashbrook: We're glad for the call to vote in any case, and we hear the case you're making.  Thank you very much for joining us...  Avi Rubin, how about it?  You've expressed your concerns.  What about the charges that Americans have been manipulated already?  Have you found evidence of that in the electronic realm?

Rubin: I have not.  But I haven't been looking for evidence of that.  I've been focusing my attention on the current technologies, finding problems with them, highlighting them and exposing them, and making recommendations for the best kind of technology we can use.  I'm a computer scientist working with a lot of lawyers and political scientists.  I know my limitations and when I'm asked about whether we need a constitutional amendment for this or that, I step aside and say I don't know the answer to that.  But if you ask me about software, I can definitely comment on that!

Ashbrook:  There's another big critique of process and it's around voter ID and who's voting and whether or not they're eligible and properly registered to vote.  I want to turn now to New York and John Fund, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, author of "Stealing Elections:  How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy."  Here's a critique from another angle.  John Fund, you hear the range of concerns around voting and it's a sad thing to have this range at all.  You bring another facet to the table that's got your attention -- voter ID and voter fraud.  What are you most concerned about next week?

John Fund:  First let me say that I think some of the concerns about electronic voting are valid.  Diebold has a very spotty record as a company.  They spend only 10% on electronic voting machines as they do making ATM machines. 

Ashbrook: But they're the biggest provider at this point...

Fund:  ...I agree there are some problems.  We need oversight.  We certainly need open-source software, audits, things like that.  But I think the more extreme conspiracy theories have to be addressed.  I don't ask people to believe me.  I cite Joe Andrew, who was Bill Clinton's hand-picked chairman of the Democratic National Committee until 2001.  He is the only national chairman who was involved in the internet.  He's involved in several companies though nothing with voting machines.  He gave a speech a little bit ago to the Maryland Association of Election Officials in which he said that when it comes to electronic voting most liberal conspiracy theorists are just plain old-fashioned nuts.  He says there's no conspiracy trying to steal votes in America today.  And he says it's unfortunate that we have this anti-electronic voting machine bandwagon being circulated because "It is not possible to move a constant fraction of votes from one party to another in each jurisdiction without it being obvious that something is going on.  The internet activists who say this are bonkers."

Ashbrook:  We've got that, and we hear the sort of balance that you make there. Alas, there's no way to solve that issue right here, right now.

Fund:  We do need more money spent on this.  We do need more auditing.  We certainly should address each and every concern.  I'm simply saying, I don't think people should make the leap from the technical difficulties to being sure there are computer programmers in a back room hacking.  We've had optical scan voting machines and computers for 30 years.  There has never been a documented case of those being hacked into and the results being changed.

Ashbrook:  You said "watch out for toxic cynicism" and we hear that!  Because it can keep voters away from the polls all by itself.  I want to get you to come to the voter ID issue that you've been most focused on... 

Fund: Voter ID is something which I don't think should be controversial.  As Andrew Young, former UN ambassador and Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader has said, if there are poor people out there who don't have voter ID because they're elderly or they're completely out of the mainstream of society, let's bring them into the mainstream of society and make sure they get a free voter ID.  You can't really do anything in American life today without such an idea.  You can't cash a check, you can't travel, you can't check into a hotel. 

Ashbrook:  You can vote without it in most states, though. Is that really a problem?

Fund: That's the point.  I believe that has created strong suspicions that there's the possibility for manipulation and misrepresentation at the polls.  We have a lot of examples -- I can cite you examples from a dozen states -- of people who have shown up, claimed that they are somebody that they aren't, and turn out never to be found again.  In Wisconsin, which has same-day voter registration, we had 12,000 people show up in Milwaukee, register and vote the same day, and when they sent out the registration card to the address listed, it came back "undeliverable."  We don't know how many of those people weren't eligible, but it certainly should give ground for suspicion. 

Ashbrook: So, Sean Greene, here's another example of manipulation. Do you see it in a scale sufficient to influence elections?

Greene:  We haven't seen any huge studies across the nation that show statistically that, but anecdotal stories are everywhere.  In fact, there was a story this weekend in a New York paper that studied the voter registration list in New York and found about 75,000 dead voters on the list and some of them had voted!  Now, they weren't sure if those were clerical errors or not, but I think that's the concern that's out there.  If there's not actual fraud going on, that the potential for fraud is there.

Ashbrook:  So it may discourage some voters.  It may clean up other aspects of this as your group comes down or not on whether a stricter voter ID is a good thing on balance...

Greene:  Actually we have not.  We're not an advocacy group... We just want to present the issues.  We don't come down on one side or the other. 

Ashbrook:  John Fund, are you worried about America's attitude toward their own vote as we head into the midterms here, towards its "cleanliness"?

Fund:  We see polls, both from Zogby and Rasmussen, that something like 15% of the American people don't believe their vote is counted properly.  Or they think it's cancelled out by someone who shouldn't be voting. That is a level of toxic cynicism which helps explain our lower voter turn-out. And, as the New York Times has recently reported, this especially is a problem in the minority communities because they say, "Look, the man is going to somehow manipulate my vote.  Therefore I don't have to vote." So I think this should bother and concern people across the political spectrum.

Ashbrook:  John Fund, thanks for being with us today. ...

Caller "Robert":  ...There's a couple of things that come to mind and one, of course, is the whole issue of voter suppression and making the vote available for the people who deserve it.  But on the technical issue, it seems to me that there really is not a very complex technical problem for voting machines.  When you go to an ATM, do you ever get the wrong amount of money?  Is the amount of money charged to your account ever wrong when you get your bank statements?  You're trusting the computers and the people who run them to make sure your savings are there. 

Ashbrook:  But we always have an idea of what our saving are and we can go back and check the balance.  If you can't check that -- if you couldn't check in, you might look at it differently!

"Robert":  That's right.  What you need, and computers are very good at this as well, is providing audit trails.  Does it have to be on paper?  I'm not really so sure.  How about open source systems?  How about pieces of the puzzle that are done by different development teams?  For instance, when you fly, there are maybe four or five different companies doing the flight control software because it's so very important...

Ashbrook: ... make it clear that way, electronically... Avi Rubin, how about it?  Open source?  Different teams working on this?  Would there be a way without paper to come around and raise confidence?

Rubin:  Well, I think open source is important in the sense of transparency.  But I believe it's a distraction.  I think we need voting systems that don't require you to trust the software.  Elections are a very, very sensitive, heated area where you're going to get people who are going to claim that there was fraud and that there were problems.  I think that independent electronic verification might be possible in theory.  I think it would take about ten years of research to get to a point where we could have a system that we could trust.  And even then I'm not certain it would be a good idea.  But I also believe that, from the point of view of transparency, audit, and recovery -- which are the most important things -- electronic verification is not a good idea.  I don't want to have voting systems that are susceptible to extended power outages, for example.  I think the simple paper ballot system is so much easier to manage and audit, that moving to independent electronic verification is a bad idea.

Ashbrook:  Sean Greene, with the problems we've heard around electronic voting..., are there moves afoot to really respond to this?  Or is this technology rolling out across the country even as these potential problems are being cited?  Is it what we're getting, even if it's not the best option?

Greene:  It has been rolling out in the past few years.  Certainly states have moved to these machines even though concerns have been voiced for the past three or four or five years from computer scientists...

Ashbrook: ...Why?!  Why do we move ahead if these problems are serious and credible?

Greene:  Well, I think some election officials are staunch defenders of the machines.  In Maryland, for example, the election director thinks the machines work quite well and have advantages that other machines don't have.

Ashbrook: ...Didn't they read about big problems earlier this year in Maryland?

Greene: Yes, they did, in the September primary!

Ashbrook: What were those problems again?

Greene:  A number of problems that Avi could probably speak to as well.  Problems with poll workers not having the cards to start the machines up. Problems with the machines themselves.  Screens freezing.  Therefore delaying opening of the polls for an hour, or two hours.  Then people were turned away and maybe didn't come back to vote.  This is not the first time Maryland had been running an election on these machines. For this to pop up two to four years after they've been running elections on these machines I thought was probably a little surprising to the election officials themselves.

Ashbrook:  Avi Rubin, do you see a move to pick up on these problems and address them.  Or are we moving down a path that you're saying isn't a good one. And if so, why?!

Rubin:  Well, there was an attempt in Maryland.  In the House of Delegates, a bill was introduced that would have moved us to paper ballots with optical scan in Maryland.  I have lot of stake in this.  In addition to my concern with the issue is that I'm an election judge and I work at the polls.  I understand why the elections director and others support these machines in the one sense that it's a lot easier to administer an election where everything is being done by computers than if we had the paper ballots.  My work would have been a lot harder on election day.  That Bill in the House was passed unanimously and our governor came out and said that he would sign it and support it.  Unfortunately, when it went to the Senate, it died in committee and it never came out.  But I've already been contacted by a Delegate asking me to help them proofread and help edit a revised version of this bill that they're going to introduce as soon as the election is over and try to move us to paper.  So there are people who understand the issue.  And then there are people who support the machines I think because it would be embarrassing for them to admit a $106 million mistake in Maryland.

Caller "Eileen": I'm actually going to go down to my registrar today and vote absentee ballot because this has really bothered me so much.  But my question is, why can't we --every American citizen -- vote on our computers?

Ashbrook: You mean sit at home and just mail it in over the internet?  Would that make you feel better, more secure about your vote? "Eileen":  At least I would feel that my computer hadn't been tampered with. 

Ashbrook:  Hard to tamper with everyone's computer.  Avi Rubin, what about it?  A kind of "let's spread it out all over the place so no one can tamper with the whole system."

Rubin:  Well, unfortunately, while I think that would be great for convenience, and I was the first to adopt every kind of internet system in internet shopping and banking as it came up, I think for voting it would be a big mistake.  If you put a Windows machine on the internet, the average amount of time it takes before some virus or worm tries to infect it is 8 seconds.  The internet right now -- especially running Windows machines -- is absolutely insecure.  Everything from spyware that could be on your machine and see how you vote to malicious code that could change your vote.  As much as I am opposed to precinct-based electronic voting, I think the problems of internet-based PC voting are hundreds of times worse and an absolute non-starter.

Ashbrook:  Email here from Colorado Springs.  John says he voted early in Colorado on a Diebold machine... Eleven electronic pages.  Moving back and forth to figure it all out was so much trouble he wishes he hadn't done it.  He wishes he had voted absentee as "Eileen" plans to do...

Caller "George":  I really appreciate the fact that you're dealing with this topic because it's a can of worms!  I've tried to raise it with major journalists, most recently Tom Edsel, and immediately, as John Fund did, you're called a "conspiracy theorist."  We need to get beyond this.  This is our vote.  This is my vote.... They need to be counted honestly, accurately, and verifiably. 

Ashbrook: George, do you think you'll be close enough for horseshoes next Tuesday? 

"George":  No, I don't.  I've read some things that lead me to believe -- and I'd like to have confirmation of this -- that around 39% of the votes will be on electronic touch-screens.  But up to 50% of the most closely watched districts are not going to be able to be recounted. 

Ashbrook:  It's disconcerting. Sean, how about it?  You're talking about fear now that the margin of victory is within the margin of error.  Which is the kind of fear "George" is expressing...  We could have close races all over the place.

Greene:  Yes.  I think we also sometimes call it "within the margin of litigation."  That's what we should call it now.  You're going to have losing candidates who may lose a House race by several hundred votes. If there's any sort of concern over voting machines and their process -- an example in Ohio where I think there are at least one or two competitive House races and there's been a debate going on this past week over voter ID rules where judges have gone back and forth changing those rules.  So that seems ripe for some sort of challenge right after the election if it's close.

Ashbrook:  So, do you expect to have all kinds of litigation after?  Then, if we do, there's no way to recount, so what happens?

Greene:  Well, there are ways to recount. In Ohio, they do have a paper trail.  In states that use electronic voting without a paper trail, basically you'd just be rerunning the computer again...

Ashbrook:  You're not going back to the fundamental source materials.  So how do court challenges get settled in that case?

Greene:  A court challenge could be over a variety of things.  We've see challenges over equal protection -- different machines used in different counties -- is that treating people differently?  But I think there would be probably potential litigation over voter ID rules and absentee ballots.  That's what we've been reading about recently in Ohio.

Ashbrook: Avi Rubin. Last word goes to you here.  You can imagine voters listening to this and it's deeply disconcerting.  At the same time, if you don't vote, there's no way your vote gets counted.  What's your message to American citizens in this time of flux between the old ways of voting and the new?  How should citizens think about this?

Rubin:  Absolutely the wrong way to respond to this is to not vote.  The only way to guarantee that your vote won't be counted is to not go cast it.  I actually recommend that people get more involved in the process like I did.  Become an election judge or a poll worker wherever you are.  As far as the problems with the machines, that's a matter of awareness, and letting your legislators know how you support this.  I've been contacted by federal legislators asking me to review some bills that are being introduced at the national level when 28 states have already adopted legislation requiring voter-verified paper records.  So I think it should be in the form of advocacy.  But  not going to the polls because of this problem is a big mistake.

Ashbrook: The midterms are 8 days away now and if videothevote.org has its way, you might be caught on tape while heading in to cast your vote.  Videothevote is recruiting citizen volunteers to videotape the polls on November 7, to document and make a record of election day.  The Citizen Video Campaign is the inspiration of the Guerrilla News Network co-founder Ian Inaba.  He's also director of the Sundance award-winning documentary, "American Blackout," about alleged African-American voter disenfranchisement in 2000 and 2004.  He joins us now from Berkeley, CA.  ... So what have you got afoot here for voting day next week?

Ian Inaba: In the process of making "American Blackout," I really found that there had been this evolution in citizen journalism around elections.  What happened in Florida in 2000 with all the problems down there, there were only corporate journalists who covered those events.  A lot of individual stories of personal voting rights were not captured.  But as I continued to make the film and then Ohio 2004 happened, we saw this new wave of citizen journalists who actually went to the polls to document the problems particularly in states with African-American and working-class voters as they attempted to vote in 2004.  And so we wanted to further this effort.  This year what we're doing is coordinating with the Election Protection organization who receive a majority of the calls from voters at the polls, and we'll be working with them to then dispatch our volunteer videographers to capture irregularities on film. 

Ashbrook:  So what exactly are you asking videographers to do?  Where do you want them do go?  What do you want them to shoot?  How close can they get to where people are actually voting?  That's private, right?

Inaba:  Yes, it is.  There are some regulations in certain states where you do need to stay 100 feet from the polling location.  Most of our videographers will be dispatched along with lawyers in response to calls into the legal teams at the Election Protection organization.

Ashbrook:  What can you do 100 feet from the polling place?  What can you capture on video that would be valuable during or after the vote?

Inaba: We can capture testimony from people who have had problems, either that they've been turned away from the polls, they've been maybe unfairly challenged at the polls, perhaps that their polling location has changed. A number of different tactics or problems that people have encountered over the past election cycles which have disenfranchised thousands of voters. 

Ashbrook:  So they'll be standing outside shooting all day long?  or waiting for voters to come out with complaints?  Is that the idea?

Inaba: Again, we're going to be primarily stationed within the Election Protection command centers which are being run in about 11 states right now.  We are going to be working closely with them.  As well, we will have some roving videographers who will be periodically checking in on some precincts that are expected to be problematic.

Ashbrook: Are there places where your participants can take the camera right in to the polling place?

Inaba:  In some states, if you do get permission from the election officials, you can go and videotape inside a polling location.  But that's only with permission and we also have very rigorous guidelines that we have the videographers go through during the training process and that they understand all of these stipulations. 

Ashbrook:  Is your point here that you don't trust what you call the corporate media to actually report the news, or that you need something like blanket coverage that only citizen-journalists could conceivable come up with to document what's actually gone on?

Inaba:  I think it's a combination of both.  It's not that we don't trust the corporate media to do it, it's that they're so concerned with calling the winners and losers on election day that they really lose sight of the individual voting experience.  And so we want to really provide more of a blanket coverage, like you were saying, because there is a growing concern, whether it's people concerned about a disenfranchisement issue, or as your previous were, concern about electronic voting machines. There's a lot of problems expected to happen on election day and we just want to make sure that we cover them.

Ashbrook:  So the day after -- or the week after -- the vote, you'll have a pile of videotape.  How might that be used to improve or watchdog the system?

Inaba:  It's actually even better than that!  We're actually designing a system in which we're going to be uploading the videos the same day.  We're going to be broadcasting these images on the web before the races are called.

Ashbrook:  And if people want to participate?  How do they do it?

Inaba:  They can sign up on our website. 

"Bloggers vs Talkers. Are liberal bloggers helping democrats the way conservative talk radio has bolstered republicans?" ... And what's wrong with Air America?

10/20/06: Radio Times (WHYY, Philadelphia)

Host: Marty Moss-Coane

Guests:  MICHAEL HARRISON, editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, and MATTHEW KERBEL a political science professor at Villanova University who wrote the essay Grassroots and Gigahertz: The Power of Weblogs to Drive Media Discourse, Energize Campaigns, and Enhance Civic Engagement.

Radio Times:  Recently Bush met in the Oval Office with some influential conservative talk show hosts.  He reportedly talked with them about war and immigration with the hope that they could send his message to their audience.  Next week, Bush is holding a "summit" with talk radio hosts at the White House, making Cabinet officials available for interviews.  Talk radio has a track record of getting out the conservative vote.  The recent and rapid rise of political blogs -- especially on the left -- has demonstrated that the internet can be a potent force for Democrats, raising money and political discourse.  Today on Radio Times, Talkers vs. Bloggers!  Are bloggers helping the Democrats and liberals the way talk radio has energized conservatives and bolstered the GOP?... Let me introduce our two guests.  Michael Harrison is editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a leading trade publication that covers both talk radio and TV.  He's also president of Talkers' parent company, Focus Communications... Matthew Kerbel is a political science professor at Villanova University.  He wrote and essay titled "Grassroots and Gigahertz: The Power of Weblogs to Drive Media Discourse, Energize Campaigns, and Enhance Civic Engagement."...  Michael Harrison:  Do you still see talk radio as a powerful mouthpiece for conservatives?

Michael Harrison:  Sure.  Why not!  There are a lot of conservative hosts on talk radio and talk radio has a huge listenership across the country.  So yes, it is a powerful mouthpiece for the conservative philosophy and the entire spectrum of ideology that comes under that umbrella. 

RT: And do you credit Rush Limbaugh for creating this venue?

MH:  I credit Rush Limbaugh as being the biggest star in a venue whose time had come.  That would be like saying "Elvis Presley was responsible for rock and roll!"  Rush Limbaugh was as much a manifestation of the conservative movement as it applied to talk radio as he was its catalyst.  As far as giving him credit for being the sole reasons for the rise of conservative talk radio or for the talk radio phenomenon of the '90's and the 2000's, I would say that he was a key component but I wouldn't give him total credit.  There are a lot of people involved, a lot of hosts, a lot of stations, and a lot that's lining up in such a way as to make it the right format at the right time. 

RT:  Why do you think it is "simpatico"? conservative talk show hosts and talk radio?

MH:  Well, first of all, all of talk radio is not conservative.  I want to make that clear.  Radio in general is a niche medium just as people listening to this show are part of the niche that Public Radio might serve or that this station serves.  All of radio is split up into niches and the best way to create a critical mass that is commercially viable is to superserve a niche that feels isolated.  The conservative element of the American electorate in the late '80's and early '90's were grumbling.  Card-carrying conservatives felt that most of the media and most of the culture in the US was not serving their interests, talking to their particular philosophy.  So when people such as Rush Limbaugh on this mass medium that is talk radio began to superserve the conservative philosophy, they rallied around it and formed enough of a critical mass -- not a mass appeal format such as Gray's Anatomy would be on TV or the Super Bowl, but enough for radio to make it a viable form of commercial-generation revenue on the AM dial -- which at that time was in big trouble because music wasn't working there anymore.  It became a commercially viable medium.  It also began to resonate because it was sexy and colorful and interesting personalities with the mainstream press -- who covered it extensively in many ways giving it more importance than the actual numbers would have indicated. 

RT:  That's interesting.  Matthew Kerbel, let me get you in on the conversation.  Blogs, of course, are a much more recent phenomenon.  What do you think describes their emergence?

Matthew Kerbel:  I think you're seeing it emerge before your eyes and it's a really fascinating thing to see because a couple of years ago I would venture that most people didn't even know what the term "blog" meant.  One of the reasons blogs are working is because the technology, for one thing, is starting to spread.  By that I mean access to high-speed internet which you really need in order to blog effectively and in real time.  The technology has to be there first.  It has to be accessible to enough people for there to be a critical mass of people to create the possibility for this phenomenon.  Michael just referred to radio as a "niche medium." Really you can think of the internet in the same way.  Remember there are millions of weblogs, literally.  But only a small handful about politics.  And in that small handful, only a tiny fraction really have a large readership.  So you're talking about a niche as well.  In order for that niche to establish itself, people need to have the technological capability to access it.

RT:  And would you say that when you look at weblogs overall, they have a more liberal bent?

MK:  Well, just like Michael was saying there's conservative talk radio but also non-conservative talk radio, the blogosphere covers the entire political spectrum.  There are certainly conservative weblogs as well.  I think the difference between what we refer to as the right blogosphere and the left blogosphere is that the right blogosphere operates as part of a much more well-established media operation.  Conservatives and Republicans are much better organized in terms of their media presence.  As a result of that, the right blogosphere is more or less a top-down structure in the sense that the message you'd hear or read about on conservative websites are going to mirror what you hear on conservative talk radio and often what you hear from the Administration or the leadership in Congress.  The left of the political spectrum doesn't have access to that type of structure.  So really out of necessity, they've had to create a bottom-up structure.  If you look at the real potential for the internet to mobilize people and get them engaged in politics, having this kind of decentralized, bottom-up structure really plays to the greatest strength of the internet.  That's why, if you want to talk about the effectiveness or potential effectiveness of the left blogosphere, I think it comes through that organizational structure.

RT:  But do you think that because it is a more bottom-up hierarchy or structure that it tends to not necessarily reiterate what the liberals or Democratic Party might say, but also challenges them?

MK:  It does!  I think if you were to look at some of the arguments that go on in the left blogosphere, you'd probably find as much criticism of establishment, mainstream Democrats as you would of Republicans.  I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing.  I think it can be very healthy.  Because if your really look at what some of the most committed bloggers are trying to do, it's really a form of party building.  The message that you get if you spend time in the left blogosphere is that Democrats in Washington need to stand up and need to articulate what they're about and not be afraid of what they stand for.  That's not really an ideological message as much as a pragmatic message.

RT:  I wonder, Michael Harrison, what you make of the fact that Air America has declared bankruptcy.  They're still on the air.  Does that say something about liberal talk radio?

MH:  No!  It says something about the business people that run Air America! 

RT:  A bad business model?

MH:  A bad business model and they haven't done a very good job.  One of the problems facing Air America was the enormous amount of press they got that really not only distorted their importance, raised the bar so high as to expectations, but also distorted the entire discussion about left and right talk radio and the role of commercial radio.  One would get the impression, following the enormous media exposure of this over the past few years, that commercial radio's purpose is to support political parties and get candidates elected.  That somehow commercial radio is in fact part of the political machinery of this country when in fact it is not!  It has a different agenda.  The core agenda of talk radio on the commercial dial is to generate ratings and revenue.  If talking about conservative politics or appealing to conservative listeners is a method of doing that, it will.  But it's purely a business!  The Air America model was as a campaign.  And that doesn't work in the commercial radio field.  As a result, it could not succeed.

RT:  Let me pick up on that.  Because I certainly know the Bush administration sat down with some of the conservative talk show hosts just this past month to talk about the Administration and some of its policies.  I'm assuming they did that because they wanted to get their message out.  But certainly Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Administration have shown up on these talk radio shows to talk about a specific issue or to get a specific message from the Administration...

MH:  Yes, but there's nothing new about this.  One would think there was something scandalous about the way the President met with five influential talk show hosts to get his message out.  This goes on all the time!  This has been going on for years!  The Clinton administration had talk show hosts to the White House -- had over 100 of them when they unveiled their plan for healthcare reform in the US.  There have been talk radio days at the White House.  At Talkers Magazine, we've been involved in helping the White House put them on from a non-partisan perspective.  We helped the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.  We don't care -- we're for free speech and we're for talk show hosts having access to the newsmakers in our country.  But there's always been a cozy relationship in this country between newsmakers and those that cover them, either journalistically or editorially.  The big mistake that the Bush administration made -- as they make a lot of mistakes -- has been to do this in secret!  As if the talk show hosts that were there weren't going to leak it and it weren't eventually going to make its way to a big New York Times article that then created the distorted impression that somehow -- oh my gosh! -- the Bush administration is trying to influence talk radio hosts to spread its message!  Like duh!  What else is new!

RT:  It's interesting you say that because I'm looking at that New York Times article and it says here, "The meeting that was not announced on the President's public schedule..."...

MH:... Which means it was secret!  But the Bush administration has made one mistake after another in terms of its distorted relationship with the concept of secrecy.  And that goes back to what the professor is talking about, about the blogosphere.  The thing that marks a difference between these times and the era that we're coming out of from a media and political standpoint is that there are no more secrets.  You can't have closed door meetings and secret agenda without somebody somewhere knowing about it.  And that's the beauty of whether it's talk radio or the blogosphere or any of the new media -- it's democratized.  The word will get out. And once the word gets out, it's everywhere.

MK:  And I might add, it gets out quickly!

RT:  We're talking about the blogosphere here.  We just had Andrew Sullivan on the show who blogs all the time.  He was telling us after the show that he has to blog every hour.  He has to go back on the internet and add something new to his blog!

MH:  It's a non-stop discussion!  I think, professor, you might find this interesting as obviously you have such a good handle on this:  I think that for the first time since the age of McLuhan began that the message has become the message as opposed to the medium being the message. 

RT:  Before we get our callers in on the conversation -- Michael Kerbel, picking up on something Michael Harrison was saying about the kind of messaging that's going on these days, I wonder if you could speak to that?

MK:  It's absolutely true.  I think you see it in a couple of ways.  For one thing, on the internet there's history, and that history is easily researched in real time.  So to the extent that the left blogosphere has now entered the political debate -- here we are in a political season!  -- you have a lot of eyes watching a lot of statements candidates are making and if somebody says something that a blogger or blog reader sees as being out of line, he can research it and come up with previous comments that are all archived.  In that respect, it's much more difficult than it was back in the quaint days of TV when a candidate could travel around the country and appear on local TV and perhapsshade their message a little here and there so that they can speak directly to the local constituency.  You can't do that so much anymore.  In that regard, the internet makes it much more difficult for candidates to either tell untruths or to shade their messages.  It's really a form of accountability. 

RT:  I'm thinking of the "macaca" comment that got the candidate in Virginia in such hot water.  That was because of the internet, wasn't it?

MK:  It was certainly perpetuated because of the internet.  It started as a statement that was made and recorded on videotape. The gentleman who was the recipient of that comment made by Senator Allen was representing the Webb campaign, following Allen and videotaping his comments.  That's not an uncommon thing to do.  What is unusual and brings the internet into it is that videotape was immediately available for the entire world to see on YouTube.  That's something that we never have seen before. That obviously keeps the story in the news.  It draws the attention of mainstream journalists.  It makes it much more difficult for the Senator to either deny that he said it or to try to recast or recharacterize what he said.

RT:  I want toss this to both of you.  Michael Harrison, do you think it's also true that talk radio, as we generally think of it, and the internet both seem to dislike and distrust the so-called mainstream media.  Both sides look at this mainstream media with a great deal of suspicion and disrespect.

MH:  Certainly the growth of talk radio in the '90's was based on that. One of the main premises for it was that people distrusted big government, big business, and big media.  Unfortunately, from an academic and sociological standpoint, talk radio in the last fifteen years has sort of become part of the mainstream media concurrently with the mainstream media becoming less mainstream.  In other words, we don't have "I Love Lucy" or Milton Berle shows anymore where everybody's watching the same thing every night on Tuesday and Wednesday.  We may have "Gray's Anatomy," but the number and percentage of people watching any one show or any one source of media today is smaller than it was in the old days.  So the mainstream media is becoming less mainstream and the alternative media has become more mainstream.  Talk radio is very corporate.  Consolidation has made talk radio big business where it has more to lose than before when it was grass roots -- lots of mom and pop owners who had their own pride and their own political agenda and their own relationships in the community to deal with.  As a result, talk radio is less suspicious, if you will, and less the ideological enemy of whatever that thing called the mainstream media is. 

RT:  That's interesting.  And I'm thinking, Matthew Kerbel, back in the 2004 presidential race -- or I guess even leading up to that -- there were bloggers that were tracking specific reporters who were writing about Howard Dean.

MK:  (laughing) Oh sure!  And they were fairly vocal in a lot of their comments.  They were say, Hey, you're getting this wrong! You really don't understand!  Why don't you come to Vermont and see what's really going on for yourself!  There was a lot of that.  At that point, in 2004, which strange though it is to say is really ancient history now when it comes to blogging -- back then, journalists were probably as dismissive of bloggers as bloggers were of journalists.  That's changed.  If you look now at the way mainstream journalists regard both bloggers and blogging, we're starting to see a tremendous shift in the importance of the blogosphere as far as it relates to shaping the narrative of the campaign and shaping the narrative of politics.

RT:  Many journalists are now not just reporting for their papers but also blogging!

MK:  That's right.  You see just about every mainstream newspaper or magazine and TV outlet has a blog presence or a web presence. There are individual journalists who blog. The one thing I would want to say to listeners who may or may not be familiar with blogs that it's unusual for mainstream journalists to blog in an internactive way. They'll post their thoughts.  They'll post their comments.  It's much less common for them to allow people to comment back.  One of the things that distinguishes the blogosphere -- and I think distinguished the left blogosphere and is more prevalent on the left than on the right -- is to permit comments and diaries which facilitate a discussion not just between the main blogger and other contributors but between contributors and each other. 

RT:  I wonder about people who maintain an active blog.  Do they have jobs?!  What else do they do in their lives?

MK:  (laughing) Yeah!  That's a good question!  Up until now, unlike talk radio which as Michael was saying is a commercial model, people are still trying to figure out how to support themselves and make a living when they blog.  I do know some bloggers who spend a lot of time typing and they do have to make a living elsewhere.  There is some ad revenue, but it's still very tough to make a living at it...

RT:  Are we also talking about a generational difference?  I don't know what the average age of the talk radio audience is these days, but I bet it's a bit older than the average age of the blogger.

MH:  There's no question.  With talk radio, you just press a button and it's on.  It's very easy.  You still have to go through computer stuff to be involved in blogging.  So it is, from a broad strokes perspective, generational.  Most listeners of what we call news talk radio -- the kind of talk radio you're discussing here -- are over 35 years of age. Many bloggers are younger.  Backtracking for a second -- I think that, in terms of how you make a living, they don't do it for a living.  They do it as a social activity.  They do it as recreation.  If anything, maybe it just interferes with their watching TV, being engaged in sports, going to the movies, hanging out with their friends.  In other words, it's taking up recreational time as opposed to something they're doing for the purpose of being in business. 

RT:  That's an interesting way to frame it as well. 

MK: About the average age of bloggers: while it's true most of the prominent left of center bloggers are going to be younger than the average age of the radio listener, ironically and interestingly, the typical blog user -- the person who would post comments -- is not that young.  I saw a study recently that indicated that among the most utilized left blogs, the average age of the typical blog-user is 40. 

RT:  Interesting.  People are becoming more computer literate.  Many people know how to email.  I guess blogging is a couple of step away from that. 

MH:  Perhaps there's a connection to the fact that younger people today are not as interested in politics and news as they were in my day.  When I was 11, I was fascinated by Nixon vs. Kennedy.  We all followed it.  Today the kids don't watch the news.  They don't news.  So the kinds of bloggers who would be politically connected with the older people, so many young people today are engaged in blog-like activity but they're talking about the food they ate, their boyfriends and girlfriends and their social lives.  They're not necessarily engaged in political or current events activities.

RT:  Michael, it sounds like you and I are about the same age.  But isn't that what they said about us as we were coming up?

MH:  I think it's the opposite.  I think the boomer generation when it was young set the world on its ear by trying to improve the intelligence level of media.  The whole movement from AM top forty radio to FM progressive radio album tracks, political discussion, change the world, peace and love -- all of that was a higher level of poetry, fiction, literature, political interests.  The young people back on college campuses in the '60's were very involved in social and political activities, far more so than today's 20-somethings...

RT:  Let me get Matthew Kerbel to respond -- because you're a political science professor...  Do you agree?

MK:  I don't completely agree.  No.  Because if you were to make the distinction between the millenium and the "y" generation who are college age now, and the "x" generation before them, what we're starting to see now is much more social awareness and much more political activism among the group that's now, at its leading edge, in its early 20's.  And that group, on top of being more socially active and concerned than perhaps their parents were, they're also much more computer literate.  I think when you put those two things together, it creates interesting and intriguing possibilities for the future of blogging in politics.

RT:  I think if we had a draft, there would be even more political activism!  ...The overarching question is whether liberal bloggers are helping Democrats the way the conservative talk radio hosts have bolstered Republicans.

Caller "Paul":  I was wondering... My take on why talk radio seems more inclined towards conservative than liberal tastes is that it seems to me the format of talk radio with people like Rush Limbaugh -- and even TV with Bill O'Reilly -- where you have yelling and shouting... it seems to be more engaged in reaffirming people's emotions than trying to explore ideas or trying to use reason.  Conservatives are tied in with things that are based on emotion like patriotism and faith. Faith and patriotism aren't about rationality.  They're about feeling good.

RT:  Interesting comment. Michael Harrison, do you agree with him that they do play on emotion and that's an effective way for them to speak directly and connect with their listeners?

MH:  Well, they play on a simplistic point of view that's easy to contain within a commercial media context. I wouldn't say it's because conservatives like yelling and screaming and like emotion while liberals are unemotional. I would just simply say the reason it's successful is because they're preaching conservative philosophy to people who want that.  It's serving a niche.  Just to jump off that point but connected... The reason a lot of liberal talk radio has failed is because they're trying to put down conservative talk radio. For example, had Air America gone to the airwaves and addressed liberal interests, addressed liberal politics, articulated a liberal vision of the country, came up with liberal solutions -- as opposed to spending most of its time attacking Rush Limbaugh, attacking Bill O'Reilly, attacking conservative radio, it might have had a chance to start developing an audience, creating its own discourse, its own emotion, its own sensationalism, and its own intellectualism. But it really just became the anti-conservative talk radio under the same umbrella as conservative talk radio.  It would be like going into sports talk radio and saying "let's talk baseball on all the football shows." 

RT:...I wonder whether the fact that they hired -- except for people like Randi Rhodes... but that they've hired more celebrities than people with a track record in talk radio.  Do you think that also hurt them?

MH:  Of course that hurt them.  And that's something that's hurting all of radio.  Because they do that in conservative talk radio too.  As talk radio has become bigger business, more tied into Wall Street, more tied into corporatism, you have less organic growth and more of the "well, we've gotta put a big host on, what are we gonna do!  we don't trust radio people, they're unknowns, Wall Street has never heard of this guy or this woman, let's put a celebrity on..."  So they put celebrities on, not because celebrities have radio skills and are able to perform on the radio but celebrities play well on Wall Street for investors and celebrities also play well for the other kind of investor that Air America has geared itself toward, and that's the wealthy Democrat who feels that if they don't invest money in liberal talk radio, god forbid Rush Limbaugh and his kind are going to take over the world...

RT:  (laughs)  That's very interesting.  I wonder, Matthew Kerbel, if you could talk a little about... I don't know whether emotionality is the right word to use... the kind of discourse you see in blogs, but certainly opinion.  That's what blogs are really all about. 

MK:  There's plenty of emotion in the blogs and plenty of passion.  I think Michael has the right idea but I think he may have the wrong medium.  I'm not so sure that if progressive talk radio were to spend a lot of time putting forth a progressive vision whether that would be interesting enough to maintain listeners.  Remember, what really keeps attached to conservative talk radio is... I'd say a lot of it's over the top but it's very bold, it's the kind of thing that keeps people listening and if you agree with it you nod your head and that's exactly what keeps people coming back.  However, if you look at what weblogs offer, I think it's a perfect venue for both reason and emotion.  And I think that if you spend a little time in the left blogosphere, you'll find both of those things.  You'll see people who endeavor to put together a progressive vision and to organize it -- actually, to engage in party building activities. While at the same time we also see a great deal of emotion and a wide range of posts, some of which are more thoughtful than others, but certainly all very passionate. 

RT:  Do you think, though, that the Democratic Party understands the potential for them, when it comes to weblogs, Matthew? 

MK:  No, I don't.  And I think you could make a case that there's probably animosity and as much conflict between bloggers and the mainstream Democratic organization -- Howard Dean excepted... I think he does understand the weblogs considering the way his campaign was centered on the internet.  But beyond that, I would say that there's a great deal of -- at the very least -- differences of opinion and I would say it's not unfair to characterize it as a kind of power struggle.  It'll be interesting to see what happens in November and to see what effect bloggers have had on the outcome of the election, whether mainstream Democrats look differently at bloggers after that.

RT:  I wonder, Matthew, which angers bloggers more, the name Hillary Clinton or Dick Cheney?

MK:  Very close call, isn't it!

RT:  (laughing) Exactly! ...

Caller "Darryl":  I'm just commenting about why I listen to talk radio and it's that I don't believe everything they say on talk radio and especially the conservatives, but it just seems like the folks on the more liberal NBC, ABC, and the news, and all that, you don't get the full story.  When you listen to both sides, then I think I'm smart enough that I can pick out makes sense and what doesn't make sense.  You get both sides of the story and then I can choose for myself and go from there.  My values tend to side more with a more conservative thoughts.  I know that Rush and Bill O'Reilly and those folks are entertainers and so you pick out what's important and go from there.  That tends to be good.  Plus I find them to be very entertaining.

RT:  Interesting that you raise that.  It sounds like you listen to Rush and O'Reilly and the other talk show hosts that we know about?

Darryl:  Yes, I do.  Again, I don't take 'em for every word they say is true.  And I know that they're entertainers.  But I think that they do sometimes make some very good points and I hear both sides from them.  Like Bill O'Reilly, I think he's very honest about both sides and I know he is painted sometimes as on the more conservative side.  Just the other day he was indicating that he votes for a lot of Democrats!  And I don't think you hear that from the other side.  When you hear from very liberal Democratic folks, they always say... it appears to me, anyway, and I always try to be very honest about this... you only hear the one side.  You seldom hear them say they're going to look at both sides.  I'm a very moderate person and I want to hear both sides of the story. You don't hear that from the Democratic side. 

RT:  I appreciate your call.  Michael Harrison, you talked about the point that... he sees people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly as entertainers.

MH:  They are!  They are entertainers!  That's what they are!  That doesn't mean that they don't have power and it doesn't mean they don't speak truths and it doesn't meant that they're not an important component in political discourse.  But let's face it -- novels are entertainment, movies are entertainment, music is entertainment, comedy is entertainment -- all of these.  Satire.  All of these forms of the arts have a role in the conveyance of ideas and influencing people.  Jay Leno is an entertainer.  You don't think that his monologue every night has an influence on the American consciousness.  So because somebody is an entertainer and that's their primary mission, because something is "art" and not necessarily "real" doesn't mean it hasn't got an application in terms of shaping opinion.

MK:  It was interesting to hear Darryl say that his perspective on ABC and NBC is that they tend to be more liberal, because if you look in the left blogosphere, you'll find just the opposite impression, which is that the mainstream networks are much more interested in touting the Administration's line than offering an alternative.  So I think what you have here is a case, and I think you will find it with many people, that what we hear on talk radio or what we see or contribute to a weblog reflects as much where we're coming from as we're taking from what we see in the mainstream. 

RT:  I wanted to pick up on something you said earlier.  You seem to be saying that one of the successes of conservative talk radio is that they talk about their issues and they're speaking to their audience.  But certainly when Bill Clinton was president, that was a perfect foil for them.  They did so much trashing of the Clinton administration and the policies.

MH:  There's no question in my mind that commercial talk radio would be much better off from the standpoint of a business -- again, when I hear people talk about the influence of talk radio, I sometimes smile that there's a certain ignorance or naivete attached to that because talk radio doesn't care if it's politically influential, it only cares about making money and having ratings.  The political influence is a secondary situation.  It's a by-product.  Talk radio is growing and growing and making more money and being very successful, and really it doesn't matter who gets elected.  That being said, commercial talk radio would be better off as a business if the Democrats regained control of the White House and regained control of Congress because then the conservatives can play to the thing that works best in talk radio, and that is a disenfranchised audience -- outsiders, people who are against the establishment, people who feel they have no other place to go.  Right now, conservative talk radio -- since Bush took over and the conservatives took over all the branches of government -- they've had to play the role of protecting this poor embattled government from a larger power called "popular culture" and "liberal media" that wants to tear down this little spark of goodness and reality that the government represents.  Making it look almost as though the government is a victim here as opposed to the ones who wield the power!

RT:  That's interesting, because there are some pretty high-powered critics and defectors from the Republican Party.  These would be conservatives who have a problem with the Bush administration.  I wonder, Matthew Kerbel, if you could speak to that...

MK:  I think it's an interesting point.  You are starting to see some strong divisions now within the conservative movement and it will be interesting to see the way that plays out on talk radio.  It's starting to look a little bit -- on the right -- like it usually looks on the left! 

RT:  Do you think the weblogs also grew up -- and I've read that there's one created every second -- that they also grew up because you have Republicans in power?

MK:  Yes.  By the way, there may be one created every second, but that doesn't mean it's going to be influential...

RT:  ...or how many die, right?

MK:  Exactly so.  Yes, I do.  I think that it was a marriage of technology and moment.  It's been growing.  So absolutely -- I do think so.  In fact I think the interesting question for left-of-center weblogs is what would happen if, in fact, Democrats do take over?  What happens then? One of the things that really keeps the energy going in the left blogosphere is tremendously intense feelings about the Bush administration.  What happens when the Bush administration is over, and what happens if, in fact, the weblogs' movement on the left is, in fact successful?  How do they maintain that passion and that energy? 

RT:   Do you think that passion and energy will go away?  Or would you then begin to see conservative weblogs really rising up and finding an audience?

MK:  No.  I think what you'd see is more of what Michael is talking about, where you'd find a bigger audience on talk radio.  I think it's a better venue for the right in part because of the way the conservative side of the blogosphere still tends to be organized top-down as part of a much bigger media operation.  I don't see that changing even if there's a shift in power.  But I do think the challenge for the left would be to be able to harness a lot of the energy that right now is being driven by -- in some places -- almost desperate sense that something needs to be done to change the direction of the country.  If they're successful -- if that were to happen -- then you're in the position of needing to govern.  And, as Michael said, that's an entirely different problem and it requires an entirely different type of commitment.

RT:  Let's go to Andrew. Caller "Andrew":  I was wondering what your guests might have thought of this.  Blogs and talk radio seem to deal predominately in editorialization.  I'm a blogger.  I read a lot of blogs.  And I listen to a lot of talk radio.  And I do so more for entertainment than for anything else.  I was wondering what your guests might think the long term effect of so much opinion and editorialization being available to so many people and how popular it's become, what the effect of that might be on the actual news. 

RT:  That's a great question.  Matthew Kerbel, what do you think?

MK:  Well, you know, we live in a highly partisan age.  The characteristics of talk radio and bloggers -- they're similar.  They're both very partisan.  You don't look at a blog or listen to Rush Limbaugh and expect to hear a bipartisan or objective approach to anything.  I think it tends to feed off of this combative political culture and I do think it tends to perpetuate it. 

RT:  You think it will kill impartiality?

MK:  I don't know.  I think we should look at impartiality in perspective. If you go back to the 19th century, partisanship was the standard for reporting.  So, in a sense, you could say the idea of balance and objectivity is almost a 20th century artifact...

MH:  I think this is the way it's always been and I think this is the way it will always be.  I don't think anything has changed!  I think that a study of history indicates there has always been partisanship.  There have been ages of yellow journalism.  And to bring it to a point, I think we should teach children in school to be very, very wary of anything that claims to be the truth and claims to be objective.  There are just different levels of objectivity between the objective and the subjective.  I believe the worst thing that could happen to our democracy would be for people not to be educated as to how to use the media in picking and choosing, as a caller earlier said, and then making up their own mind. 

MK:  I agree one hundred percent!

RT:  Michael, let me put something to you.  I was reading about -- I could be wrong about this -- that there's some talk about developing an African-American talk radio network?  I know that Tom Joyner's morning show, of course, is a very popular program.  But I was reading that Al Sharpton might be getting a program.  What can you tell us about that?

MH:  Al Sharpton has a program.  Tom Joyner has a program.  There are African-American-oriented talk networks... I like to use the word "syndicators" as opposed to "networks."  Network is an old-fashioned term that really doesn't apply in today's radio scene.  These are really syndication companies that put out a variety of programs.  They call themselves networks.  So the fact of the matter is, the development of an African-American talk radio network has no meaning because there already are African-American talk radio show out there and the question really is, will there be more of them or less of them?  I suspect there will be more of them because I suspect there will be more of all kinds of specialized talk radio shows as the years go by. 

Caller "John":  My question is about your point about the number of blogs that are out there.  Because the blogosphere is such a fractured universe, do your guests think that, from the parties' standpoint, they'll ever be able to use that because they do like to put out such a direct and a consistent message?

MK:  I didn't quite follow that, John.  Do I believe they'll be useful as party mechanisms?

John:  My point is that the parties seem to want to put out a consistent message such as the Republicans' "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" in response to Kerry's claims of being a combat veteran.  They were successful in defeating that because they were so consistent.  But because the blogosphere is so fractured, will the parties see that as an effective tool in campaigning and is there something that could happen that might make them able to use that better?

MK:  It's a great question.  It's a delicate balance because in order for blogs to be an effective campaign mechanism, there has to be enough decentralization to permit them to function the way they function best, which is to empower people at the margins ... to make decisions.  Of course, when you do that, you're going to sacrifice having a coordinated message.  So I don't think that blogs simply serve the purpose of electing a candidate.  I don't think that they're simply going to take over as a primaray tool of campaigning.  But I do think they can become an important part of campaigning in the sense that we're already seeing now in the left blogosphere.  At first often successful efforts at organization, at candidate recruitment, at fundraising, at mobilization of voters -- these are the things bloggers are very good at doing.  I think the campaign that's able to find and strike the right balance between coordinated control and relaxing the control enough to allow bloggers to do what they do best -- I think those campaigns can be very, very successful.

Caller "Caroline":  I'm calling about a comment that was made earlier about younger voters not being as interested in what's going on in politics today.  My question is whether either of your guests thinks that might have something to do with a disintegration of community in our country and maybe why some of the blogs are so popular, especially among younger people, is that it offers them that chance to really reconnect and find people who have the same interests as they have.

RT:  Good question. 

MH:  I just think the educational system was more serious when I was growing up than it is today.  I think schools were better. I think there was more emphasis on education, and there was more emphasis on literacy.  I think the decline of literacy -- the fact that people have trouble reading and writing -- is what's standing in the way of young people being interested in politics.  Now, the professor said that he doesn't agree with me.  So it's still an arguable point that young people today aren't as into the news as they were, say, twenty or thirty years ago.  But I still believe that's the case. And I think it's because of the decline of literacy in the American educational system.

RT:  Michael, do you think satellite radio is going to change talk radio?  We certainly have had callers from around the country today.

MH:  I think satellite radio is going to expand talk radio as will streaming radio and podcasting.

On Point: What if the Democrats win a majority in the House and Senate?

10/16/06: Thomas Mann (Brookings), conservative and former Republican member of Congress Vin Weber, Jack Beatty (Atlantic Monthly), and callers to the show ran through the Constitutional expectations of "the people's House" in history.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion.

How the House got as bad as it is, and what's needed to change it

Vin Weber:  ...I might go further back into history... and point out that a lot of this was started by the arrogance of the Democrats at the end of their 40 years' dominance of the House.  That's when I was there and it's still pretty vivid in my mind.  But I don't say that to excuse anything that's happened.   We Republicans took over the Congress in 1994 pledging to clean up all sort of things that we thought had gone awry under the Democrats' arrogant and heavy-handed leadership.  It's hard for me to look at what's happened to the House of Representatives in particular -- and the Senate to a much lesser extent, I believe -- and say that I'm happy about it.  I'm not happy about it.  I think it's reflected in the fact that the Congress's ratings with the public have dipped to all-time lows and Republicans are battling for their lives in this fall's election. 

Tom Ashbrook:  So here you are, a Republican, saying that.  Speak to that public:  should they then be going to the polls to bring about a House cleaning?  Are you saying "turn out the majority" or is there any other way to clean this up, if it's that bad? 

Vin Weber: I think we're going through a traumatizing election right now for the Republicans and if they get... whatever status they come back in, I think you'll see a very big change in the way House Republicans operate.  I've talked a lot of the second-tier Republican leaders in the Congress and there are a lot of good people...

Tom Ashbrook:  Why should that be true if it's not true before an election...?

Vin Weber:   Because elections are the way we clean things up in Washington!  I mean, that's the way democracy works!  It would be nice if everybody always did the right thing all the time..

Will Republicans change?  Will Democrats do any better?

Tom Ashbrook: But even with a majority, you think they'll act differently?

Vin Weber:  Oh yes.  I think they've had a near-death experience and I think there'll be substantial changes in attitude.  The message from their own Republican voters back in their districts... Republicans are at least as angry as their Democrat friends and neighbors are about the Foley scandal, about political corruption.  As Jack Beatty mentioned, we've had four Republican members of Congress resign in disgrace and we've covered the waterfront!  We've had financial scandals, we have political scandals, and we have sex scandals! ... The Republicans are angry about this as they're angry particularly about the spending and ear-marking and lack of control of the budget process.  So I think one way or the other, there's going to be a big change.  My only partisan argument would be to say, I don't hear anything much coming out of the Democrats and I don't observe much from the Democrats, many of whom, as Tom will tell you, are good personal friends of mine, that leads me to believe they will change much if they become the majority.

Tom Mann:  The Republicans have begun to change a little bit just as George Bush's popularity has sunk and as signs of an electoral drubbing become more and more apparent.  Nonetheless, it seems to me under these circumstances where the Congress has been operating so badly -- it's been so dysfunctional, where the public is so unhappy and angry -- if under those circumstances with the narrow majorities we have you can't change majority party control, then I think all kinds of questions would be asked about the rigidity of our democratic systems.  So I think a necessary though far from sufficient condition for changing Congress is to throw the current majority out for a while and put in the other team and then hold them to the standards they now give voice to.  Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have put out a plan in which they talk about adhering to regular order, they talk about bipartisan administration of the House...

A caller from Nashville points to the elephant in the room

Joe from Nashville:  You've already touched on one of my main issues which of course is gerrymandering which has brought us candidates who are way more ideological than their constituents because the primaries become the races.

Tom Ashbrook:.. Because they have to appeal to the base and not worry once they've got it.

Joe: Exactly.  But there are solutions.  It's not all doom and gloom.  I'm a computer person.  My biggest concern right now is getting through the elections in November with the unverifiable electronic voting machines.  I work with a group here in Nashville.  We've already found unauthorized software on a Diebold central tabulator in Shelby County -- which is Memphis.  That's a real problem because that's where the votes are tabulated. 

Tom Ashbrook:  Unauthorized software on a central tabulator!  That sounds lousy!

Joe:  Absolutely!  And we have a lawsuit pending on that right now.  Once we get through this November election, I have no idea what's going to happen.  Regardless of the polls, the voting machines control everything. 80% of Americans will vote on electronic machines in November.  And then public campaign financing.  It's very simple:  candidates are spending four days a week at fund-raisers.  They're beholden to the largest donors.  Every piece of legislation that's coming out of Washington is written by a special interest group at this point.

Tom Ashbrook:  You've put some big ones on the table there.  ...Tom Mann?...  Campaign financing?  There was a lot of talk about it a few years ago.  Our caller, Joe, says, if you don't change that then people are roundabout buying legislation.  And sometimes not so roundabout.  Does it have to be fixed to fix Congress?

Tom Mann: Yes, it does. As Joe suggested also, we've got other problems in the electoral system with gerrymandering and with our voting machines and their administration.  Money in politics is a real problem and it's become so dominant on Capitol Hill.  You know, a vast majority of members of Congress face no real opposition. The action this time is about 60 or at most 70 Congressional districts.  The rest are safe.  And yet incumbents from both parties are expected to raise big bucks.  They need it if they want to compete for committee chairmanships and party leadership positions.  They need it because it's suspected that the safe incumbents will send money to the handful of competitive seats.  That means everyone is in the business of trying to raise money constantly...

If the system is infected with money and skewed voting machines, will the democratic self-corrective mechanism work anymore?

Tom Ashbrook:  Jack Beatty: the word that Thomas Mann used is "rigidity."  That's the one that worries me.  If you trust the American people to watch and change when change is required, even when things go bad you feel there's a self-righting dynamic here.  But things get to rigid -- between money and... unauthorized software in counting the votes -- that kind of rigidity pushes back against the natural exercise of democracy.

Jack Beatty:  That's right.  And I think that's one of the propositions being tested this November.  Does that self-corrective mechanism work?  Or have all these things -- money, the machines, gerrymandering -- have all these things put Congress beyond the public will?  What you're describing is an oligarchy.  This is a form of rule we've seen throughout history where parties serve themselves and serve the special interests.  By various means, they insulate themselves from public check.

Tom Ashbrook:  I can imagine a lot of Republicans who aren't rich saying, Wait a minute!  I'm not part of an oligarchy and I vote for Republicans!  Who are you to tell me it's an oligarchy?  It's my party in charge.  So what!

Jack Beatty:  There is that.  But I think a lot of this isn't conservative at all. Our two senators up here [in New Hampshire] are pretty conservative and they took a stand on the energy bill that said we don't think the government should give subsidies to profit-making businesses...  And I thought, that makes sense to me!  That was their position on the Medicare drug bill as well.  That's not conservative.  That's all campaign/corporate finance aimed.  It's not carrying out a conservative ideology.  It's an oligarchy serving itself and hoping to wink and throw some "values" gorilla-dust in the voters' eyes and get through the next election.

Could we lose our republic?

Tom Mann:  ... I think America, which has long prided itself as the beacon of democracy, the model for constitutional governance around the world, has a lot of explaining to do about every aspect of its democracy and governance.  There is much cause for concern.  But I want to say this:  We, as Americans, have a wonderful tendency which is to not absolve ourselves of short-comings, to engage in self-criticism, to say "oh my god, this is a mess!  let's clean it up!"  Throughout our history we've faced challenges like this and the first step in dealing with it is to acknowledge what's wrong and to get the argument clear and accurate and then set about doing something about it.  That's what this is all about.  ...That's why there's so much concern around...  On a positive note... I want to say I think our system still has enough flexibility in it that an angry, surly public can rise up and throw the rascals out.  And by rascals I'm thinking less of individual members than I am of the team in charge.  Because our government has been dominated by a party and not just individual incumbents.  I think that's the first step to beginning to get some change.  And then put the fear of god in the new team in power.  And then hope some entrepreneurial politicals running for president sense the problems of our political system and begin to make different kinds of appeals for a different kind of politics that will begin to diminish somewhat the ideological polarization and the tribal politics that have characterized our politics in recent years.  And begin to straighten things out.   That's my hope.  Frankly, it's my belief.

Tom Ashbrook:  15 seats required to change control of the House, 6 in the Senate.  What are you foreseeing, Tom?  I believe I've heard you say as much as a 30 seat change?  Do you see a wave out there against the GOP?

Tom Mann:  Oh, I do.  I've seen this wave throughout most of this year.  If you had focused on the big macro picture, the indicators of public dissatisfaction with the current team in power and the conditions in the country and with Iraq and everything else -- you'd know that we are approaching something akin to a 1994, a 1974, election.  And now with the Iraq once again at the forefront of public attention and the horrible carnage and lack of progress there, and the Foley scandal having put attention on the way in which the Congressional leadership looks first to cover themselves politically instead of being a custodian of their institution, I think it's crystallized the two big issues in this campaign, namely the war in Iraq and corruption and dysfunction of Congress and the presidency working together.  I think now my long-term forecast of 20-30 seats pickup for the Dems in the House may look a little modest.  It could even go above 30 seats.  We're now seeing it show up in the individual races and in the Senate where the really only potentially 8 Republican seats at risk and 1 Democratic seat... I think it's likely to tip all of those races in the same direction and produce a narrow Democratic majority there as well.  I think we're going to see a big change in Washington but the key thing, though, is once the voters have managed -- in spite of the uncompetitive structure of our elections -- to produce a change, how will that affect the way Congress is run and the way in which the president and the Congress deal with on another.  We've got hold the new team to high standards, keep their feet to the fire.

Tom Ashbrook:   If there's a new team, Jack Beatty, the GOP says "we've got the machine out there, we're not giving up on this thing..."    You've heard Bush Senior say "It would be awful if the Democrats got these committees."  Do you see the wave coming, Jack? 

Jack Beatty:  When you look at the indicators, even the historical ones, you have to think there is a wave.  ...In the four Congressional elections since the Civil War, that have taken place in wartime, the war party has lost an average of 35 seats in the House and 6 seats in the Senate -- which would just do it for the Democrats.  That's just right through history, from 1862 to 1918 to 1942 to 1966.  So that tells you this is one of the ways Americans register their displeasure with the conduct of war...

Containing violence: who the terrorists are and how to deal with them

9/14/06: NPR: Interviewer:  Diane Rehm

Guest:  Louise Richardson, Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, senior lecturer in government at Harvard, and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School.  Author of a new book, "What Terrorists Want:  Understanding the enemy, containing the threat" A terrorism expert examines the motivations of militant groups across the world and how to contain their violence.

Diane Rehm: ...I'm fascinated with your background and how and why your perspective on terrorism differs so much from that of other so-called "terrorist experts." 

Louise Richardson:  I think it's mainly because of my background.  I grew up in rural Ireland in an environment that was very sympathetic to republicanism -- which is to say the ideology of the IRA.  At school everyday we said prayers before a crucifix and a picture of the seven men who were executed in 1916 for their role in the 1916 rising.  They were our equivalent of the founding fathers, if you will.  So the history I learned and the truth that I grew up believing was that Britain was the enemy, Britain was responsible for all our problems, and the history of Anglo-Irish relations was one of the Irish being made victims by superior British force. Then when events exploded in Northern Ireland, we saw this as a simply continuation of British atrocities against Ireland.  I lived on the edge of the area where the Irish language was the medium, so I grew up speaking both languages.  I watched as people I knew joined the IRA. I was certainly completely sympathetic with their cause because I saw it as a continuation of British injustice against Ireland.  Then I went to college -- Trinity College, in Dublin.  Trinity was then a Protestant university.  So most of my professors were English.  They taught me an entirely different version of exactly the same events!  And so I was fascinated by how two sets of people could have completely different interpretations of the same events.  Meanwhile, friends of mine joined the IRA -- people who were very like me in a great many ways.  I opted not to join, though I did attend meetings and whatnot. Because I felt at that point the meetings were unjustified.  Confusion had set in as a result of what I was learning in college. Had I had the opportunity to join a few years earlier, I would certainly have done so.  But then when I came to America to get a PhD, and started reading the literature on terrorism and saw terrorists depicted as one-dimensional bad guys, as monsters, as psychopaths, I felt this was not consistent with the people I know who joined terrorist groups.  These were idealists.  These were people who were fighting for a cause they believed in and that they considered just.  That they were willing to sacrifice themselves for this cause.  They were people who in other aspects of their lives were good teachers, upstanding members of the community, caring parents.  So I felt it was much more complicated than the simplistic terms in which it's often characterized.

DR: ...As you learned that there were two completely different versions of what was happening in your own world as you were growing up, some would say that there are fundamental differences between Islamic terrorists and the IRA.  Would you say they are different? Would you say they are one and the same, or that they share fundamental ideologies?

LR:  Well, of course every organization is different.  Both share the tactic of terrorism.  Terrorism has to be seen as a tactic that's used by many different groups to pursue many different objectives in many parts of the world.  Of course, there are differences between the very political goals of the IRA and the much more grandiose goals of Al Qaeda.  I think, in fact, that you can think of all terrorist groups around the world as differing on two key components -- one being the nature of the goals they seek, whether they're political or temporal, or whether they're completely grandiose like the social revolutionary movements in the '70's which wanted to destroy capitalism.  Or groups today that want to destroy secular law and replace it with religious law. The second component is the relationship to the community:  whether they're small and isolated fro the community, or whether they have a large base of support.  So yes, there are differences but I think important comparisons can be made and real lessons can be derived from the experiences of other countries.

DR:  What about tactics?  Seeing, as we do now, the multiplication of suicide bombers -- one tends to lead to another.

LR:  Well, again you have what we call a contagion effect:  when a tactic becomes popular, other groups adopt it.  You saw this in the '70's with highjacking.  First there were one or two highjackings, and then another group saw how effective it was so other groups started doing it.  Similarly with kidnapping.  Today the tactic of choice is suicide attacks.  It's easy to see why it's popular, certainly from an organizational point of view. It's very cost effective.  When the leaders of these organizations talk about it, they talk in very cost-effective terms.  It's very inexpensive, you lost one or two of your operative -- or in the case of September 11th, 19 operatives and you kill almost 3,000 of the other.  It's also the ultimate smart bomb that Israel has experienced so many times.  Because if a suicide bomber is dispatched against one target and for some reason the target isn't available or has been made inaccessible, they simply turn around go to people standing at a bus stop or something.  So, suicide terrorism is a very effective tactic.  It tends to... it's psychological impact is so great that it has become more and more popular...

DR:  You define terrorism as deliberately and violently targetting civilians for political purposes.  But you say that there are seven crucial characteristics.  What are they?

LR:  Well, first is simply that it's political.  If it's not political, then it's a crime. Or if the objective isn't political, it's a crime.  Secondly, it's violent, so if it doesn't involve violence or the threat of violence, I don't think it should be called "terrorism."  Third:  the point of terrorism is to communicate a message.  It's not violence for the sake of it.  And it's not violence even for the sake of defeating the enemy because terrorists are invariably quite weak, much weaker than their adversary.  It's violence to communicate a political message.  Fourth, it's symbolic.  Because terrorists tend to be weak, they tend to choose symbolic targets in order to enhance the impact of their act. Fifthly -- and this is a very controversial point on which reasonable people differ -- I think terrorism needs to be seen as the action of sub-state groups.

DR:  What does that mean?

LR:  Not governments.  So I find it simply confounds things to label governments "terrorists."  We have international law and we can hold governments accountable.  But it seems to me that we should focus our use of the word terrorism on sub-state groups rather than governments. Sixth, if I'm counting right!, the audience of the terrorist and the victim is not the same.  So they don't care whether they kill you or me.  The point is that they're trying to get at a broad audience.  And the final and most important is this deliberate targetting of non-combatants.  Not as an unintended side-effect, but as a deliberate purpose.  What all of this means is that it's the means that they use, and not the ends that they seek, that should determine whether or not we label a group a "terrorist group." And if you look at our policies -- and indeed the ineffectiveness of international institutions over the past few decades on this subject, it had been precisely because nobody is willing to label a group a "terrorist group"  if they agree with the goals they seek.  Seems to me, unless and until we're willing to label group whose goals we consider legitimate a "terrorist group" if they deliberately target non-combatants, then we're not going to make progress.

DR:  You have actually been able to study these groups.  Does that mean you've been able to be a part of these groups, to gain their trust, to hear their points of view?

LR:  That was a lot easier in the past than it has been since September 11.  But certainly prior to September 11, yes. I did have contacts with members of terrorist groups.  In fact, along with some friends, some colleagues, we organized some conferences in which we brought together members of terrorist groups -- what we politely called -- because even terrorists don't like to be labelled "terrorist" -- with academics together, obviously in private locations where we held discussions.  One of the subjects that's always interested me, for example, is how terrorist groups decide to escalate to a new level of violence.  Why do they decide to take up, for example, suicide operations?  or to kill large numbers of people?  So, for example, I gave a paper at one of these gatherings, on this subject.  And the #2 of a significant terrorist group commented -- just like we conducted it as if it were an academic conference.  These people believe that what they're doing is legitimate.  They were perfectly happy to talk about it and to conduct this academic discussion, if you will.

DR: ...Here's an email from Ellie.  Would you call the revolutionaries of the American freedom movement terrorists?  Has the government co-sponsored terrorist acts in other countries to destabilize the duly elected government?  Would you consider what America is doing in Iraq a terrorist act, or if not, at least being a co-sponsor of terrorism?

LR: ...Three big questions there.  Briefly, the focus of the early revolutionaries was not killing British civilians but was attacking the British military presence in this country.  So no, I don't think they would qualify as terrorists. They were guerrillas.  Has our government and other governments sponsored terrorist groups? Yes, I think the evidence on that is fairly clear.  We have in fact sponsored some groups.  I guess the one that has attained most attention is, for example, the Contras in Nicaragua where our government considered them the founding fathers -- the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers," in the words of President Reagan -- and that's because we believed in their objective which was to overthrow the Sandinista regime.  Whereas our European allies considered them freedom fighters.  In a situation like that I think what you do is look and see:  does the group deliberately target noncombatants and if they do, we should label them terrorist groups.  On your third point in Iraq, no, I don't find it helpful to label the behavior of our government "terrorism."  As I said, I think we have a whole panoply of international law to which we can hold our government and other governments accountable.  So it's not helpful to label it terrorism.  I do think that governments have, on occasion, committed acts that are the moral equivalent of terrorism.  But that's actually a separate issue.  So no, I would not label our acts in Iraq terrorism.

DR:  Do you take issue with the actions of the US government following 9/11?

LR:  Very much so!  I think when the history of this period is written, we will be seen to have committed two major mistakes and to have missed two major opportunities.  Briefly, the two mistakes are first and foremost declaring a war on terrorism and terrorism is a tactic. It makes no more sense to declare war on terrorism than any other tactic.  Second was to conflate the war -- our enmity with Saddam Hussein -- with our enmity with Osama bin Laden.  Reasonable people differ on the rights and wrongs of the war in Iraq, but from a counter-terrorism point of view, I think it was a calamitous mistake.  Two missed opportunities were the opportunity to mobilize the international community. If you rememember, this time five years ago, the world was united behind us to a degree that was unprecedented.  This was an attack on humanity, not on us. We had the opportunity to lead a transnational campaign against a transnational enemy.  We didn't take it.  Finally -- the opportunity to educate the American public was missed... to the realities of terrorism, to the psychological components, to the fact that it's an effort to spread fear and to exaggerate the threat that's posed.  And to educate the public to the realities of our power in the world and how it's perceived elsewhere.

DR:  Terrorists have been called "evil," "crazy," "completely amoral," "fascistic.."  What is your view?

LR:  Well, I don't find these labels helpful and I don't find them accurate either.  I don't think terrorists who are amoral.  I have never met a terrorist or read the words of a terrorist who didn't believe their actions were justified.  They go to great lengths to justify their actions both in internal documents and externally.  All of bin Laden's fatwas, for example, are an effort to justify their violence.  Every time they make a statement -- like one of the leaders of the [inaudible]... the 30-year-old leader of the London bombers, for example.  He tried to justify this in terms of western actions in Iraq.  So no, I don't think they're crazy.  Their organizations are very rationally exploiting weakness and deploying it to enormous effect.  When you talk to the trainers of recruits, they all -- across the board: this is true of the IRA, Hamas -- they all say "We're not interested in psychologically unsound people.  We will not accept them as volunteers.  We're not interested in psychopaths..."

DR: And yet, people who become suicide bombers are said to be totally irrational.  What is it that convinces them to take on this kind of warfare?

LR:  Three things.  In the book, I call them -- at the risk of oversimplifying! -- "the 3 R's."  Revenge, renown, and reaction.  First and foremost they want revenge.  You look at these videos that people make on the eve of what they call their martyrdom operations.  They're suffused with the language of revenge for atrocities either committed against themselves or more often their families.  It's more often, again, the community with which they identify.  Secondly, they want renown.  They want glory.  They feel they've been humiliated -- at an Israeli checkpoint or one way or another -- and they want to address this humiliation by being significant.  And their trainers, of course, guarantee them significance. They broadcast these videos. They write songs about them.  They have posters about them.  They commemorate them.  This is as true in Sri Lanka as it is in Gaza.  So if you're a young Palestinian and you can't play football like [inaudible] or you don't look like Brittany Spears and you want to be a superstar, well, you can do it very easily by being a martyr.  And finally, they want to provoke a reaction.  They're very weak and the way they demonstrate that they exist is by provoking a response from the other side.  So they're deliberately trying to do that.

DR: Why did 9/11 occur?

LR:  I think this was an extraordinary stroke by a brilliant leader of an organization.  I think bin Laden felt that after the defeat by the Mujahadeen of the Soviet Union, they could now take on the US.  He and his followers blamed the US for propping up what they believed to be secular, corrupt regimes in the Middle East.  People like the House of Saud -- which is not secular -- or Mubarak in Egypt and so on.  They blamed us.  They wanted to provoke us.  They wanted to demonstrate that they were a force.  I'm sure they undertook this with only the vaguest hope that they could ever actually pull it off.  But everything broke their way.  They were able to get recruits for this by proselytizing them, by persuading them that the US was the cause of all their ills.  And of course it occurred because we weren't watching them closely.

DR: In the introduction to your book, you say a government official visited you in early August of 2001 to ask about a terrorist group using an airplane as a bomb.  Canyou tell us who that was?

LR:  No.  I don't want to identify him because I haven't asked his permission to do that.  It was somebody in the State Department who studied terrorism and whose job it was to monitor -- or to stay in touch with -- terrorist experts. 

DR:  What did you say?

LR:  Well, I was wrong.  I said yes, I think they will do this.  This is a tactic that's very much in the air.  They've talked about it, they've tried it and they will use it, but I then said I anticipated they'd fly two airplanes into two American embassies in different parts of the world on the same day and thereby drive every American embassy into an underground bunker.  What a symbolic effect that would be...  Afterwards I've kicked myself a thousand times for not thinking -- of course...!  Having tried to hit the World Trade Center once, why didn't it occur to me that they would do so again?  But it didn't.

DR:  The idea that people were talking with you in such close proximity to exactly when it happened would suggest that there were people in our government concerned about exactly what was coming.

LR: Yes, I think that's true. This is certainly evidence that people were thinking about it. 

DR: But how much influence do you think the terrorism studies community has had on the thinking of the American government in terms of how it would operate or react or... what it would do?

LR:  I think it's evidence that the terrorism studies community has had no influence whatever on policy. It's the policy that has been pursued because I think the terrorism studies community would have advised a very different series of responses based on the experiences of other governments and how they have countered terrorist attacks.  By this I mean the academics -- the obscure academics like myself who throughout the '80's and '90's were studying terrorism.  Obviously, post-September 11, there's been an infusion of lots of new intellect and new blood into this whole field.

DR:  New blood into the field.  Believing there's another way.  What does another way mean?

LR:  I think the other way is to perceive this conflict as a political conflict, not a military one.  To look at the failure of other governments, whether it's Russia in Chechnya, Israel against the Palestinians, Peruvian government against the Shining Path, Britain against the IRA -- other governments who were militarily infinitely stronger than their adversaries but unable to translate that strength into victory.  So there's evidence that the military is too blunt an instrument to be relied on solely to counteract terrorism.  I think what we need to do is separate out the actual perpetrators of violence, use coercive measures in a very focused way to pursue them.  Our basic appeal should be a political one to the broader communities that produced these terrorists.  Because the most effective way of repudiating terrorists is precisely when the communities do that, the communities that produce them.  If they remain small and isolated, there's a limit to the damage they can do to us.  If they retain mass base support, then we are really facing a huge problem.

DR:  Do you see that base of support as expanding even as we speak?

LR:  Unfortunately, yes.  I think because of the war in Iraq, because our actions appear to be more consistent with the motives our adversaries attribute to us, than with the principles we espouse or the rhetoric we articulate.  And indeed we absolutely are winning recruits for them.  We losing the battle of ideas.

DR:  Here's an email from Jeff who says, I never hear it spoken that immediately after 9/11 Al Qaeda mentioned two very specific things that cause its actions:  American forces in the holy land of the arab peninsula and cooperation with the Saudi Government, and American support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.  The Bush administration has never seen fit to take these complaints seriously.  Why would that be so bad?

LR: I think Jeff is absolutely right on that.  On the first point, in fact I mentioned in the book raising this again with the fact that bin Laden was making such heyday out of the fact that we had deployed our troops in Saudi Arabia.  He was using this to mobilize support against us and when I suggested to a senior member of the government that, in fact, if we'd learned that was the case and this was what was garnering support for them, would we not reconsider the wisdom of that policy?  The reponse was that "we will never let terrorism influence our policy."  I argued at the time that we could have placed these troops on an aircraft carrier.  It would have cost us $2 billion.  It would have secured the interests we were trying to protect there.  And it wouldn't have alienated large numbers of people.  But we never thought about the impact of our policies on the ground.

DR: Caller from Detroit, MI:

Michael: I wanted to know what your guest thinks about the redefining of terrorism from a tactic to an ideology, at least in common usage, and how she thinks that will affect the way the general public views future groups who may be legitimately resisting an oppressive regime?

LR: Thank you, Michael.  As I say, I think it makes no sense to redefine terrorism as an ideology because terrorism is employed by a whole range of people representing very different ideologies.  Again, my notion is that if you confine your interpretation -- your label -- of terrorism to people who deliberately target civilians, then even those who are resisting oppressive regimes, if they deliberately target civilians in their effort to do so, deserve the label "terrorists." 

DR: Here's another email Dan in Chestertown, MD, who says "Please ask if the IRA ever strapped bombs on their own children and sent them to explode themselves in the midst of a civilian population?"

LR:  No, the IRA never committed suicide operations.  They did have a different tactic.  As you may remember, members of the IRA starved themselves to death in 1981 in an effort to secure political prisoner status.  But they never did employ suicide operations.

DR:  Sadar in Raleigh, NC, you're on the air.

Sadar: Thank you very much.  We are looking at a very serious global problem and therefore we need to go to the root cause of the problem.  Unless we understand the problem, we will never be able to solve it.  There are two words that have been mentioned -- "psychological component."  In that psychological component all human beings have a problem in common:  we are influenced by the culture in which we live.  We are influenced by the propaganda of the place and the politicians.  As a result of that, we have divided this whole world in to various religions, gods, colors.  Division exists at all levels.  It is out of that the justification for violence is a given.  When you use the words "justification for violence," it's based on our beliefs, ideas, opinions, conclusions...

LR:  Thank you, Sadar.  I agree with you, but only to a limited extent.  Yes, of course culture influences our beliefs.  The problem with the kind of explanation you're suggesting and with all large-scale explanations is that there are very few actual terrorists. You can't give a macro-explanation for a micro-phenomenon.

DR: John in Highland Heights, KY.

John:  I'd like to say a couple of things.  One is that everything Louise Richardson has said is absolutely right, in my opinion correct.  But I'd like to stress that America is not actually at war.  All America has done is send an army overseas just as the British used to do in the 19th century.  So if America was really at war, it would know the difference!

LR:  Thank you for your very generous comments and I have to say I agree with you entirely!  We have declared a war and there has been, I feel, an effort on the part of the Administration to use that declaration of war to mobilize the population and in doing so have completely exaggerated the threat we face.  Fear is far more widespread than I think it needs to be.  But you're right.  I don't think the American public has actually felt that it's at war because it's just the families and the people in the armed services who are feeling this.

DR:  Michael in Cleveland, OH.

Michael:  The Bush administration, predictably, has vowed never to talk to the terrorists.  I grew up in Belfast at the height of the conflict with the IRA.  I remember Margaret Thatcher making similar proclamations, that we should never talk to the IRA.  But no progress was ever made in that conflagration until subsequent British governments went ahead and began to talk and negotiate with the IRA.  Does your guest feel that's the tactic that ought to be employed with the latest batch of terrorists?

LR:  Thank you, Michael.  In a word -- yes.  Now, the counterpoint is that these groups are completely unlike the IRA.  They are so irredentist that there's no point.  But this is such a vital issue that it seems to me it needs to be established rather than simply asserted whether or not there are no issues in which one might be able to engage these groups. My hunch is that the likes of bin Laden and al Zawahiri are too irredentist.  But I suspect there are many people who support him who are really primarily concerned about very specific political issues like the Israeli-Palestinian issue, like Kashmir, like Chechnya, and so on.  We need to find that out and, if possible, do what Britain so effectively did against the IRA -- use the negotiations to get inside information about the group and exploit the potential factions within the group to their own advantage. It's an extraordinarily unpopular suggestion.  But I think it's too important not, at least, to pursue all options.

DR: What would be the first step you would take now? 

LR:  The first step I would take now is to declare the war on terror over.  Simply to say, "We've decided this wasn't the right approach."  Or we can try to declare victory if we like.  It would be implausible. It would obviously be easier to do this if we had something -- like if we managed to kill bin Laden and that would be the perfectly opportunity to say, The war is over.  And then move on to a very different approach and focus on intelligence -- to use our intelligence forces to do the kind of thing Michael has just suggested.  Margaret Thatcher never sat down personally with Jerry Adams.  Instead, it was the intelligence services who made these initial contacts.  We need to invest much more heavily in intelligence. It seems to me that if young Americans like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla can join Al Qaeda, then we should have our intelligence operatives in all these groups.  We saw the advantages of this approach in London a few weeks ago when it was an intelligence mole who revealed this threat.  I think we need to recast our goal completely and instead of "eliminating terror," we simply say we want to contain the threat from terrorism.  I think we have to focus our policies on the political approach in which we engage others in solving this problem with us -- other governments and also the moderate Muslim community.  I'm afraid we have to extricate ourselves from Iraq, ideally in a way that does not look like a defeat for us.  And this is going to be enormously difficult.  I don't mean to be pollyana-ish...

DR: I should say!

LR:  And I don't have any easy recommendations for extricating ourselves from Iraq.  But I think it's imperative that we do so. 

DR:  You know, you mentioned the threat that was foiled in Great Britain.  What happened there is that our threat level was raised!  Our consciousness was raised about the possibility of yet another attack here in this country.  Do you believe there will be another attack in this country?

LR:  I think the likelihood of a major attack on the scale of 9/11 is very, very low.  The likelihood of a low-tech attack happening is quite high.  The kind of attack we saw in London or Madrid or in Bali.  But I would say that, as tragic as every death from terrorism is, compared to the deaths we suffer from... take drunk drivers.  Six times as many people are killed by drunk drivers every year as were killed on September 11.  And nobody is suggesting that we abolish alcohol or that we have mandatory alcohol testing on our freeways.  We have to keep this threat in perspective.  Yes, it is possible that somebody will blow up a McDonalds or a train.  But does that mean that we have to... Well, on the particular day that the plot was revealed in London, I was flying from Aspen, Colorado, to Denver.  There was an elderly couple ahead of me and the elderly gentleman's deodorant was seized and the elderly lady's lipstick... and I thought, What a preposterous response!  What is the likelihood that an elderly couple flying from Aspen to Denver are hiding explosives in their personal effects!  And yet we are so fearful and this was used as an opportunity, again, to exaggerate the threat and generate the fear which is, I think, clouding our ability to pursue a rational response.

DR:  But the Administration would say that the threat is real.  That the elderly couple could be disguising liquid explosives or something in that lipstick tube that could blow open a whole plane.  I'm sure you heard the other day that a passenger on a flight, in mid-flight, was trying to open one of the exits and had to be overcome by marshals and other passengers.  You see what I mean!

LR:  But I don't think we ought to be designing... There is a real threat.  I don't mean to suggest that there isn't.  But the notion that an elderly couple is going to take down a plane with a dozen people on it between Aspen and Denver just because some young Muslims in England were planning to do so is to me preposterous.

DR:  So, do you believe that the kinds of screenings being done at airports are helping or creating more anxiety?

LR: Actually, I think they're actually helping to the extent that they're reducing anxiety.  I think they're prophylactic. They make people feel better.  To some extent they're making terrorists who might be planning, making them plan much more carefully.  They probably assume that the screenings are much more effective than they actually are.  We have to understand that terrorists operate under conditions of enormous uncertainty and they have a much keener idea of our defenses than we have.  I should also point out that I flew from India to Boston last week and went through three electronic and three physical screenings, none of which discovered the Swiss army knife that was inadvertently in my backpack.

DR:  Inadvertently? Or...

LR: No it was completely inadvertent!

DR:  Back to the phones -- to Cape May, NJ.

Drew:  I have a question about terror which Ms. Richardson is probably the best one to answer.  In the rest of the world, a lot of the terrorist attacks are, like you said, low tech.  They blow up bombs in small places.  After 9/11, with all the terrorist cells that are supposed to be around, how come they stopped?  And how come in America, where we can't stop Afghanistan's heroin from coming into the country, we can stop every terrorist with a can of gasoline?

LR:  That's the $6 million question and I don't have a good answer for you.  I don't think we know why there hasn't been another attack.  I can speculate on reasons.  I think we have hardened a lot of targets.  We have introduced screening.  I also think it's probably not as hard as terrorists think it is to attack us.  It certainly suggests that we don't have large numbers of cells in this country operating.  There's been a fear that there are many cells here.  The fact that there haven't been any attacks suggests that the fear may be greatly exaggerated.  It could also be that if there are some people in this country that they're waiting to try and pull off a spectacular attack and have not been able to do so.  I honestly don't know... I don't think any of us quite knows that.

DR:  What do you believe that we, as ordinary citizens, can do in this effort to neutralize the idea that we're in a "war on terror"?

LR:  It seems to me that one of the best defenses against terror is an educated public, a public that doesn't throw itself into a frenzy of fear every time there's a hint of a threat.  There's something to be learned from the British experience there.  The British public became over the thirty year campaign of the IRA in which there were bombs in London, in Birmingham and other civilian areas, sometimes to devastating effect.  A resilient public, it seems to be, should be essential as a weapon in our arsenal.  I think we as a public should also resist simple solutions. Terrorism is a complicated problem.  I think we should be deeply suspicious of people who case it in simple terms. We ought to educate ourselves.  I also think we ought to insist that our government live by the principles in which we believe -- that our governments were elected to defend, were founded to defend.

DR:  But you know, it occurred to me when you were talking about being involved with speaking to various terrorists groups, answering questions, and so on, that under the proposed legislation in regard to military tribunals you could have been brought up on charges. 

LR:  That would have been unwise!  We all have an interest in learning as much as we can about these groups and most of these groups are very willing to talk to you so long as they're convinced that their security isn't threatened.  Because they believe in the legitimacy of their cause...

DR: How did you infiltrate?

LR:  It wasn't a piece of infiltrating.  I never pretended to be anything other than I was, which is an academic interested in learning more about them.

DR:  But how did you get to them?

LR:  By contacts.  When one studies these movements, one knows who they are...

DR:  A caller in San Diego, CA -- John...

John:  When September 11 happened the US government compensated the victims' families and I remember that all the family members had to sign a consent that they wouldn't get involved in litigation against the government.  In light of what your guest is saying leads me to conclude that the US government if not directly involved at least provoked the terrorists to attack and bring that mayhem to New York.  Could this be something that the government was anticipating would be happening and there would be in the future litigation against the government's policies..?

LR:  Actually, that goes a lot further than I would be prepared to go.  I must say, I don't hold this government or the previous government responsible for September 11.  Responsibility lies squarely, it seems to me, with Al Qaeda.

DR: And finally, to Salt Lake City, UT -- Brad.

Brad:  First, I remember watching an old episode of "MASH" in which Hawkeye and BJ have this kind of back and forth where Hawkeye played a practical joke on BJ and and spends the entire episode trying to defend himself against BJ's retaliation which includes... him frantically emptying a shampoo bottle... Anyway, the show ends with Hawkeye curled up in fetal position on his cot surrounded by barbed wire and hysterically laughing at BJ, saying, "You didn't get me!"  Of course, the irony was that BJ didn't actually have to pull off a practical joke in order to ruin Hawkeye's life.  I think when you talk about what the terrorists want, I think part of what they want is to create the illusion of power, and when we overreact, when you try to explain that Osama bin Laden is Adolf Hitler or worse..., when you talk about the stakes being higher than they ever were in the whole history of the human race, you're giving the terrorists exactly what they want.  You are reinforcing the illusion that they are the most powerful people in the world.

LR:  The "MASH" allusion is wonderful!  But I entirely agree.  That is precisely my point as to why we can never win a war on terrorism because they're trying to provoke us into a war, they want to be at war with us.  By declaring war on them, we elevate their stature and we have no idea what victory in this war would ever look like.

DR:  What kind of reaction have you received to your suggestion that the US engage in talks with with al Zawahiri?

LR:  I'm an obscure academic so I don't elicit much reaction!  It's interesting that when I have spoken about this in Europe, the suggestion is taken very, very seriously.  Here it seems to be dismissed...

DR:  Is there any reason to be optimistic that American strategy will change?

LR:  There's reason to be optimistic but I don't foresee the current administration making many changes.  I think they are very frustrated by their inability to translate their strength into victory.  But there is some optimistic evidence out there.  I would point briefly to Indonesia and the success in influencing opinions through the generosity of our post-tsunami assistance.  That's having a huge influence on Indonesian public opinion...