>> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's sto. sunday, booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including spark life. >> the greatest town on earth is a place you call home. at spark light it is our home too and right now we are all facing our greatest challenge. that's why spark light is working round-the-clock to keep you connected. we are doing our part so it is easier to do yours. >> spark light along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. ..all right. good afternoon and my name, susan poser. i'm the president of hofstra university, and i welcome you once again to hofstra and this very interesting presidential conference >> to this very interesting presidential conference.

this afternoons plenary executive branch policymaking in the obama administration will focus on evaluating the nature and success of the obama team and its policies from different perspectives from a former cabinet member and from journalists. as we continue our assessment of the presidency of barack obama. i will provide very brief introductions of our panelists for joining us in this conversation today. they don't really even begin to scratch the surface of their bios, as you might imagine. the honorable jacob lew who served as the 76 secretary of the treasury, as white house chief of staff, as director of the office of management and budget, actually a position that he had previously help in the second term of the clinton administration, and as deputy secretary of state for management and resources. welcome, sector loop. peter baker was working very hard for us today, i think this

is just -- is the chief white house correspondent for the "new york times" responsible for reporting on the biden presidency right now. he previously wrote about president donald trump and barack obama for the "new york times" and presidentsto bill clinton and george w. bush for the "washington post." welcome back, mr. baker. chris whipple is an author, political commentator and documentary filmmaker. one of his books, the president gatekeepers, explores the evolution of the white house chief of staff responsibilities in the past 50 years of nixon to the obama administration. his most recent book, the fight of his life come inside joe biden's whitee house, examines internal power struggles in policymaking in the first two years of the biden presidency. and welcome, mr. whipple. they are joined on the stage by professor richard hayes from the

school of business, and professor james sample from the morse dean school of law. and, of course, by meena bose who at this point needs no introduction. so i will now handed over to doctor bos to begin this afternoons conversation. thank you. [applause] thank you, president poser and think you're going for joining us today. we, it's very exciting to host this panel come this plenary discussion with some a distinguished speakers in my distinguished colleagues. we spent a lot of time over the last day and a half examining president obama's election, his media coverage, his communication strategy. we have just to make fantastic sessions this morning on foreign

policy, u.s.-transatlantic relations. with a scholarly panels on health care policy and foreign policy leadership and military intervention. and this is the session now where we get to talk little bit about the decision-making behind the scene. it is essential i think for those of us in political science and so my colleagues in audience and presidency studies to understand how white house management influences the policymaking process and shapes the agent and policies. that's what we're looking for to discussing today. my colleagues and i professor sample, professor hayes and myself we have prepared a series of questions. we're very lucky to have an intro administration perspective from secretary secrets returning to hofstra after a few years. he suppress and 10% statement concessionaire and office management and budget to produce a volume with my co-author who i saw a moment ago, andy.

peter baker was here a few years ago for the george w. bush conference to present the journalistic perspective on what was happening, how reporters a feud was happening in the white house. and chris whipple who delighted to welcomed to hofstra and hope to continue this partnership to talk about the research on several of your books, particularly the gatekeepers and the role of the chief of staff positions that secretary lew had in managing and directing the policymaking process. so to begin that conversation i would like to start with a question for secretary lew. secretary lew, you help me positions in the obama white house, starting in the state department, then office of management and budget, chief of staff and then in the second term as treasury secretary. would you share with us from

those experiences how the presidential decision-making process as you saw it was started and perhaps evolved through the two terms of the obama presidency? >> sure. it's great to be here again, meena. it's great to be on the panel of people who i think -- if that's the case after an hour and half talking. one of the things about having had the range of roles they did is use the process of the white house through different vantage points. there are different stakeholders in the process, even though everyone reports up to the president directly or indirectly, it's quite intentional that you come into the process with a point of view, an agency position, and that decisions get made as a come up with all different perspectives being reflected so

the president to make an informed judgment. at the state department which i won't spend a lot of time talking about, it's something you have i'm sure discussed at length this morning with a national security process is a very formal organized process where stakeholder sit around a table, they go from one level to the next. it gets up to the point of being with a meeting with president and you're pretty sure that you've got the full picture at the end of it. whether it's aot perfect decisin or not, the process is well established and designed to inform a decision with all points of view. nothing is clear is that exists outside of national security setting. since the clinton administration we've had a national economic council. we've seen more or less role with that as the coordinator. you've always had omb as a center pulling all the pieces together on the funding and on management. but it's really a reflection of

the president how all of the different interests are presented for decision on the domestic side. let me maybe offer a vignette from each chair. i don't know how much time you want me to take. at omb the year that this was perhaps an unusual year, 2011, when i was there because it was a year when there was a grand bargain negotiations with speaker boehner. it was a year when we were facing a potential shutdown or debt limit crisis, and the entirety of my time at omb in that chapter was around those issues. the engagement between the white house, the president and congress was at the most sensitive level. it was a very small circle of people directly involved. the challenge, and this is my perspective now from omb, was for the white house to remain

coordinated so the president ha all the views the president needed while the fewest possible people were in the conversation, which is not normal and a domestic issue. it's normal and a national security issue. it's not normal in a domestic issue. that's a hard process to run, and the probably was a little breakage in the white house that there were people who would've liked to have been more involved, but going from a group of five to ten to 20, it's very hard too have a private conversation in washington. i think the consultation was effective. it gave the president what the president needed to make progress in move forward here but it probably was a little bit of a difficult process, perspective of people who were not in the small circle. as omb director i was that much in the small circle. but it's a challenge and you have trade-offs. you want to have everyone's view but you can have anyone know the president is having a secret

meeting. so as omb directors your job is to reach out and collect information. presidents i have multiple wayso get information. doesn't have to be that somebody on thean white house staff says there's a meeting and i'm writing a memo. so you have to turn to the people who areea working on it d count on them to reach out and get all the points of view. that requires trust amongst the parties. i think if you were to talk to the people who were in the room and not in a room at that time, you would get somewhat different stories about how well it was done. but i think the president was well sort. i think thehe president knew wih as much to 100% to 100%h every point of view was and the information he needed. to move to the year i was chief of staff. so i changed seats. now my job to run the process to make sure everyone needs to be in the room is in the room. but it's also an election year, and in an election year there's a whole additional dimension to it, which is there's a campaign

apparatus that is not going to be running the government, and the government has to be run if they have to understand what each other but are doing ant cross the line and get into each other's business in an appropriate way. we did that by having a daily conversation between people who knew each other so the were no surprises, and we kept governing in the white house. we left politics in the campaign. and i had one of peter's colleagues, probably the most senior reporters in washington come at the end, he had never seen a better coordination between a campaign and the white house, and there was no government decision that was made by the campaign, and i think it's fair to say i don't think the white house suggested where the president needed to be to win state x, y or z. so ritalin did their job with full transparency but appropriate boundaries -- so everyone did -- governing myth you didn't take your eye off of

all what you wanted to accomplish. so if i look on the domestic side, daca, deferred action for children, , was probably the mar policy initiative that we go forward that year. it was not a new start. the president had looked at it for the first two years, have been frustrated he couldn't find a solution, felt a moral need to find a solution in in a worle congress was not acting. that was a case where he cast me, the new chief of staff, the white house counsel, kathy rambler, start from scratch, don't start from the old memos, don't start from the old legal analysis. start from scratch. and we convened a new process. we bought all the stakeholders in. there were some new players. there was a fresh look and we came up with what became daca. it was not without its controversy. it was a question of whether or not what we did was going to be effective. it was a question of whether we went far enough. there were views that we should do more. there were views that we should

do less. and th' president is running for reelection, he's traveling, we don't have lotsso of time for lg meetings with him. as chief of staff i i thoughts my job to make sure that absolutely every view he would care about got to it. i remember one meeting in the chief of staff office where i said this is going to the president, is there any view in this room thate needs to go to an? because if i don't hear it in the field i don't want to hear it got to them afterwards to a different channel. now i had the privilege of working for a president who cared about process. hem didn't want is coming at hm from right and left. i'm not sure that that story would work in every white house. not going to fill in the blank with any specifics. but it was a very important day that edwin have the views represented, and that it served the needs of the president to make the decision with that knowledge. there was a hard decision as to whether or notot to take what

became the second daca action in the secondig term, and effing fr all the right reason we went with the peace that we have the closest 100% certainty it would be effective and be upheld it was challenge, and we did the second piece, i wasn't in the white house atte the time, in te second term, and it ultimately did not withstand the legal challenge. the first piece is still there. i think after ten plus years it's going to be there, you know, it's going to be there. and making a decision like that, if the president was just influenced by doing the most you think you could do, he might have ended up doing less because it might'ves been all connected, it might've gone to the courts, it might've been overturned. it was done in the kind of thoughtful and considerate way that is a way you make decisions when you have your lawyers, , yr policymakers, your advocates, all the voices represented. and you don't leave any stone unturned in terms of the risk and yeah, there was a risk that he was going to be seen as

having been too timid when we did the first piece. we didn't know when we announced it whether it would be celebrated orkn criticized. we really didn't know. i remember having that conversation, and it was left of the most emotional days i have had in public life, standing there at the rose garden gnome that we were changing the lives of we0, thought it was close to 500,000. it turned out to be close to a million people and allf the relatives. i think the process served to get us there. t i'm going on for too long but let me just say one thing about treasury, come back when it's my turn again. you know, treasury is a a very different seat than the white house but it's very close to the white house and you are very closely tied to the white house. you know, it was very important that as a former omb director and as a former chief of staff, i didn't stay in a role i looked

like i was doing my old jobs. i remember we were very self-conscious about how to organize and make it clear. i had a new portfolio and ad to argue the treasury view, and it wasn't managing omb or the white house anymore. there were points of time where there was friction between what treasury thought was right thing people in the white house might've thought was the right thing. and and i can tellta you as ay secretary, if it evert gets to the point where you can't walk into the oval office until the present what you think is the right thing, you ought not to do the job because you have a perspective that is different. and then some else hasol to maka political judgment as to whether or not that they are comfortable doing that. i don't think we lost a major, you know, disagreement on that but there were sometimes when i was back with the assignment, if

you are not comfortable with what we want to do, come up with a way to solve the problem you can't in government just criticize the have to have a solution here and i white house has to be able to put back -- pushback agencies and say okay this is not the right way to do it. i could give your case in point but it really don't want to go on at length. and if think that's appropriate. when we get to the kind of what did you learn from it, there's been a common theme and what i said which is all the voices have to be heard and represented. and the president is not well served if they only get one perspective, whether it's political or pure policy analysis. and there are often disparate voices like lawyers who matter because if you take action and you're going to step on a landmine and have it thrown out, you don't accomplish very much. >> thank you, secretary lew. rich? >> kris kobach him again to

hofstra. >> thanks. >> in your multiple studies of the executive branchr policymaking, what do you think was most distinctive about the obama white house and why? >> well, let me just begin by saying i'm really honored to be here at hofstra with all of you and to see jack again, to be with peter. i'm proud father of the polk award winner videomaker, and you know, i've just done a book about the bidenit white house ad it's often said that ron klain, joe biden's first chief of staff, could do any job in the white house. he could be white house counsel, he could be communications director. he could do almost anything. jack on the other it did almost every job in the obama white house, and did them awfully well. things can happen when a white house of staff decides

to become treasury secretary. back in the reagan era. james baker, the third after four years, is white house of staff was so desperate to get out that he swapped jobs with don regan. the treasury secretary and what was without a doubt the worst job swap in american history. it's it's no coincidence that the iran-contra scandal erupted shortly thereafter. it never would have happened on jim baker's watch. i guess to answer your about the obama white house what one of the things i would say wearing my hat as author of the gatekeepers is that every president learns sometime the hard way that you cannot effectively without empowering. white house chief of staff is first among equals. and also to tell you what you don't want to hear, barack obama was a student of history unlike some other presidents we've had

recently. and and obama understood the importance of chief of staff. and one of my favorite stories concerns, the time that obama was campaigning a month, the election, he was in reno, nevada he called a secret meeting of staffers. they included david axelrod, valerie jarrett and all of bill clinton's, almost all of bill clinton's former white house chiefs, erskine, john podesta, panetta was on the phone. so is bill daley. anyway, the point of this, the it was secret was because obama want to be accused of measuring the drapes in the oval office before he was elected. but he knew how important it was to figure out who his white house chief would be unlike some other. and he and so erskine bowles,

who was on this phone call call marvelously and i'd kind of unforgettably the first thing he said was listen leave your chicago friends at home they will only cause you grief. well everybody on the call was from chicago practically david axelrod, valerie jarrett bill daley and all the rest he did not take that advice. needless to say he appointed rahm emanuel who was i think a good at the time for the for the first part of the obama but my point is is is once again that presidents often learn the hard way that you have to empower a white house chief obama understood this i think from the beginning and that was one of

the one of the reasons i think including his is good choices of chiefs of staff over the year period. i think one of the one of the big reasons for his success. thank you peter. everyone is being welcomed back. so i'd just like to say we've missed you since this morning. secret mary lou spoke about buttoned up, very disciplined small circles in the administration. that can be great running a government. it's not necessarily always to journalists getting access. and so i'm curious about the the challenges of covering the obama administration were and what the opportunities were. yeah i'm against small meetings unless one unless i'm one of the people in the meeting is my friend and brings a tape recorder or thank you very much it is not true. i'm planning to spend the rest of the semester here, but i am glad to be here again for this wonderful panel. and thank you, mena, for

including me and president prosor for sponsoring this whole thing. i would just say, by the way, what you heard jack lew say a few minutes ago, i'll get to your question. you him describe an year process in which a chief of staff runs government or helps run the government and a campaign runs the campaign that's happening right now with jeff zients. jeff, tonight, the new chief of staff taking over for ron klain, who chris whipple just talked about and they actually call it the jack lew model. so i don't know if that's, you know, maybe there's a plaque on door or something, but the jack lew model chief of staff deals with the world basically because there's a whole lot to deal with the chief of staff as it without having to worry about a campaign and know about the campaign people deal with the politics of it, but it's you know, it's it's from a journalist point of view covering the obama administration. look there are always people the room i mean, there are always enough people in the room and the people that they talk to, people who are the room that we

heard a lot of what happened doesn't mean we heard everything and what i what i discovered in doing books after, covering the day to day every white house is i think that the reporters who who are in the press room and are doing the daily reporting, i'd we get about 25% of it. that's my guess 25 30% of what's really going on in the white house at any given time. we're going to get in the paper and it's only afterwards through forums like this that the projects like mena runs through archives, eventually become available through memoirs, oral histories. we really start to learn a whole lot more. by the way, as a reporter that's very frustrating to learn how much we didn't know at the time. i say that one thing we learn and this is true about the obama white house as much as everything else is, that when a white house tells you no, that's not happening, not only is it happening, it's happening so much more than you thought, i know the secretary of health is not fighting with the secretary of agriculture. oh, my god. they hate each other. and you will discover the fact

that they literally, you know, went mano a mano and you know, gymnasium sometimes or something like that. i mean, they were the things that get out to the press by the time they got to the press have been. usually so softened that you don't really get the full extent of and we're only picking up the trails of whatever is happening. it's it's you but at times you do get a pretty decent opportunity to follow things as they happen. the best example i think of is we talked about this morning at foreign policy, the afghanistan review into thousandnine and part because president obama ran such an extensive review of this point of 1011 meeting something like that. chris remember jack maybe remembers it like a hundred. it felt like 100. exactly. it was for the professors and the students here. it will feel very familiar because it was a very much of an academic almost process. he was not going to sit and have one meeting and say, okay, let's

do it. he wanted to go through everything single possible permutation and then try it again and get to tell the intelligence agencies to go back and give him another report. this and another report. and i'm going to forget the number, but i think they produce something like 50 products or something like that just during that one review. so it was intense, it was meticulous, it was thorough, it was exhaustive. and it may and it was sort of a model or case study in some ways, the way i think president obama liked to do business. he liked to to really think things through to the point where sometimes the staff wish he would just go ahead and make a decision, but he you can never accuse him of not having spent time really reviewing things before they and because tends to drag on there were opportunities for reporters to get to your question to pick on things so we would pick up on things during that review. okay. you know, let's we we picked up that biden for instance was not for a surge in afghanistan that came out at the time we picked up on the the concern that the military the generals were going

to roll the president were trying to put pressure on him at least. was the concern inside the white house whether or not? i wouldn't agree with that characterization, but that was the concern inside the white house. so we did pick up on a lot of those things at the time. but it's hard as a journalist because obviously they want to be able to have a confidential. i understand that if i were in their position, i would too. but is my it's my job not to let that happen. and it's to find out as much as we can and to be aware. aware. one thing i've learned in covering five presidents, to be aware how much we don't know and to be careful in what report that we don't overstate. we know. okay. thank you. i think maybe we can open this up now to some questions for the whole panel and, see how they respond. so i'll start with one kind of following up on what each of you said, what some of you each spoken about, how the obama house functioned, and what different it from predecessors and implicitly from successors, what are some of the lessons

that see both internally then observing the white house in practice from president obama's first term to the second. were there learning curves with decision and management that were that provide lessons for that maybe are instructive future presidents whoever would to begin. i'm happy to kind of offer an observation or two from the inside and i'm not sure if it will ring true or not with people who who are observing. what peter just described in terms of the presidents intense approach meetings, it lessened over the second term. and i think 2012 when we got into a routine of operating, he was traveling so much was part of that he became more comfortable relying on fewer people in the room who knowing that all the views of everyone

was reflected in what he heard and then. it was more selective. when you had the big table and the long meeting and the meeting and the third meeting, it didn't mean we didn't have any. the other thing and may just be inherent to first and second terms, you know, there's a there was a at least year i was chief of staff. there was a degree of of you don't make any mistakes. this is not a year. want to take an action and have it kind of blow up not that things became devil may care in the second term you don't have same immediate if you can something a little bit more you know on a scale of 1 to 10 if your comfort level is at risk level of of five if it's a four or a four and a half, you might do it in a second term. you might not do it in a in a first term. it's not like you go all the way to doing anything and i think there's also at least in an

administration like ours where there was an awful lot of continuity, know each other very in the changes you know because of how well people know each other. a lot of. administrations come in and they have never been in government. there are people who are learning basically how the system works by the of a second term with people who started out with above average experience and gained a great deal. you know and i would have the same thing in the clinton administration. the second term operates in a different way, and you tend to see people promoted who, in the first term, you may be looking for people had elected office in, a cabinet position or in the most senior white house staff position. in the second term, you tend to see a focus on who's proven they can get things done, not either is right or wrong. you need some mix. both, but time is so short in the second term, you're conscious from the of the second

term that the hourglass is down and you just use the time as much as you can. secretary lew, just a quick follow up. would say that the risk taking that can happen a second term. is that perhaps part of the reason why doca and dapa or separated doca was june of 2012. and i think dapa. was 2015. yeah, it be part of it. i mean, i know that in 2012 there was a very strong view that you didn't want to count on pieces being separated and litigated separately you wanted to have it be a different action so that you weren't putting jeopardy the piece that that was most central strongest. i'm not that the case for the second was decided properly i'm not saying that there was a mistake but the history so far support to the way the decision

was made in the first term on pure policy grounds. right. okay. thank you. yeah. let me let me just also, i wanted to pick up on something that peter said, which is that having just on book on the biden white house can tell you that i won't say i have newfound respect, but even more respect for what peter and all the other white house reporters on a daily basis, because to to you know, my two books probably covered cumulatively 100 years of history. this last book cover two and it was much more difficult. and one of the reasons for that is, you know, it's like designing an airplane in mid-flight. you're getting hit by covid variant from one side, an invasion, ukraine from the other. and you're just hoping you can land the plane safely as far as picking up on what what jack was saying about second term being very different.

there are real cycles to the presidency and and i think that there was tremec needless urgency. it's easy to forget now that when barack came into office, it was you know, he was facing tremendous a tremendous crisis, you know, on the verge of a worldwide depression. credit frozen, two wars and stalemate. he had to get legislation passed in a which is why one reason why i think rahm emanuel was the right chief at the time. he was the guy who took the hill and they had to get lot of stuff passed. it just in a second term. and i also the the polar position of the of the country and on capitol hill became worse and worse as time went and to the point where in the second term i think denis mcdonough had

to really perfected the art of governing by executive order. it was impossible to do anything on the hill in any bipartisan way. so at least that's the way it appeared. me yeah, yeah, i would add, by the way. yeah, first of all, by the way, chris, by the way proved me wrong about being able to report in real time because his new book about biden actually is very well-reported much on the inside very much as things we would have loved to had in the daily newspaper. so thank you for embarrassing us. we but i think but but to add your point, what we have seen here and the difference between the first term and the second term may also be divided between the first two years and the final six years. is the difference being legislate policy and, executive policy, right in the first two years with with with congress entirely in democratic even at one point a 60 vote majority in the senate. imagine that today we haven't seen anything like that in quite

while despite this president is dealing with, you know, a 5050 senate and then a 5149 senate or i'm not sure how you count it when some are out with you know and shingles and aren't really democrats and may not really want to be democrats or what have you. so the count isn't all that easy. they a 60 vote supermajority at one point. they got a lot done in those first two years because of that, including the big health care overhaul, which is not an easy thing to get through. and then the last six years is, as chris said, you know, increasingly gave up on because it was republican house, there wasn't much mood to to join hands on on a whole lot. and they decided push the boundaries as far as they could. executive power and doctors, a great example. that is an example. by the way, we're president obama says i don't have the power to do this. before he decided he did have the power to do and the courts ultimately did back him up and said he did have the power to. but even president thought, wait a second, we don't really can't go that far without congress weighing in on something like this until lawyers cleverly

found a way to say they could. this is not a this is now become the normal thing in washington this is now the new norm in which both know now both parties. and this started with bush as well, especially national security. really, really pushing further and further what they thought they could do without congress on board, because they were frustrated, because it's not like the jim baker era where you at least could some common ground perhaps with the other party in congress on things they given up in some ways on on that and it's understandable why because you know, you got to bang your head against the wall and not get anywhere not getting done. so you turn to the and say, okaytell me what i can do what are my options? and and you get slap sometimes as they did on the on the second term version of doca when they tried to expand it to the to the parents and you now a situation where each party will find a sympathetic judge in a sympathetic court to national policy to undo whatever it is that the president office through executive policy. right and this is true of

democrats and republicans. if you're a democrat, you go find a judge in the ninth circuit in california to say what trump did should be stopped like that. if you're a republican, you do what we just saw in texas other day. you go to a single judge in texas, know, you know, is going to be sympathetic to you and and get abortion policy change just like that. and it's that's a real challenge forward. it really started to become apparent in the obama administration is even more so today where governing becomes this you know the rubber band where one day a president the fiat signing of a document changes policy the next day, of course, there's no back, no and there's not a compromise is not the product of a consensus of some sort of a fight that then develops into a to a common ground. it's a it's a snapping back and forth. and the reason why presidents haven't liked to use executive as much in the past, because the next one comes along and then undoes it. you know, if you're a president,

you'd much rather have a law passed in congress because that over is much harder than than coming into office next say okay everything my last president did i now reverse and so this is this is changing our way of policymaking in a very profound way. yeah if i could just add, there, it's become part of every transition to come up with the list of first day actions in when there's a change of party to reverse the executive actions of the prior administration and the rubber band or pendulum effect is not great for democracy. it's not it's very much the moment majoritarian kind of policymaking, but it not as is not necessarily lasting. the reason i chose dacca as an example in part is because i think it was very important policy, but it turned out to be something that there was enduring public support for, and it made it impossible to go back and truly reverse. but i don't think everything fits that model. but imagine how hard it is. right? and you would, i think, agree

with this, how hard it was. it hurt thousand or however many doca recipients who have been told they could stay in the country to worry. yes, because the next person comes along. could get so much. yeah. 100%. plans how to buy a house. how do you make raise a family how do you and it is a suboptimal by far way to make policy but in the situation that peter i think correctly described in terms of the partizan paralysis in the last six years of the obama administration and now it is the world of the present. i mean, we could have a different discussion on what it would take to restore bipartisan. and people would probably leave the room saying you're talking about history not the i hope we're talking i hope. jane i think so. to pick up on those points, i mean >> james, i think you have something to say. >> to pick up on those points, i mean,ou the successor administration press the idea that they could do away with birthright citizenship, even by an executive order. i mean, to a certain extent daca

i think hopefully most w peoplen room would agree iscy a tremends policy accomplishment. what are the risks in defining, the administration defining for itself when it's okay to engage in policy that is optimally in one might argue constitutionally grounded in bipartisan passage in the legislature andnd signate by theec president, that it can fit into an executive order box? >> so whether it's constitutionally grounded was boldly decided by the courts because there's ambiguity about this. i think it is a very reasonable question how far down this road you go and have predictable, sustainable policy in our country. it's not just, didn't start in the obama administration. second term of the clinton administration we did an awful lot with the pin. it was not a concept that was invented. it came out of an increasing

partisanship gridlock in congress. the answer isck how detects the gridlock in congress, not how to stop all government from functioning? in the absence of a congress that is legislating you can't ignore all the problems. you can't overstep the bounds either which is why the debate about where the boundaries are we thought it was important, not sure all administration take a similar view that those boundaries actually matter. we didn't want to cross the boundaries. wewe really wanted to do thingse thought were constitutional and legal. but if yout get into situation where a president sayss awful against the wall and maybe it won't go to court, that's pretty dangerous. i think were at the time now where we've only seen some experimentation on that. >> rich? >> we talked about this shift in the way policymaking is being done under theto obama administration, a shift to more

executive orders. is that the most consequential policy shift or policy features of the obama administration? >> well, jack could probably answer that better than i could, but one of the things that i think we haven't touched on and i wonder if jack would agree with this, one of the things that really contributed to the success of the obama white house in the first term was a really almost flawless transition period and transitions are i think there's this popular misconception that transitions begin upon the election of a w president. successful transitions begin a year before, and they are absolutely critical in laying thegr groundwork for presidentil government. the 9/11 commission found that the sort of half-baked transition as a result of the

2000 election recount from the clinton white house to the bush white house may have contributed to 9/11 for being unprepared for 9/11. the front transition -- fraught transition in 2020 obvious he the the bloodiest transition since the civil war, which i write about in my book, somehow happens in spite of everything, and biden is a team was really superb in overcoming that. but the transition to the obama white house from the bush white house was really a model. all you have to remember is that on the morning of the inauguration, josh bolten, the outgoing white house chief of staff and rahm emanuel, the incoming chief, were in the situation room working handn in

glove trying to make sure that the wasn't a terrorist attack on the mall that morning. we all forget that now but it was a really model transition, and i think made a huge difference in getting the obama white house off to a running start. >> you agree with that? >> i certainly agree on the quality of the transition from the bush administration to the obama administration. and i will say that we modeled are part of the transition out onte that. our instructions from the president, he wanted exactly the same. the relay raceme if you're handg the baton, you have to take it. there has to be an interest and you can have all the briefing materials in thenc world, but if the incoming team doesn't want them, or the meetings, doesn't do any good. i do think we saw that in the transition from, and it didn't go so well.

so it's crucially important. i would just say from the inside in terms of the second term, apart from kind of doing things by executive action, the president took a real interest in laying a foundation for the future. he knew he wasn't goingng to get legislation on controversial social policy through congress. but he was determined that the budget proposals he put forward, the policy proposals he put forward should start to socialize ideas that we would want to advance so that somebody else coming to them would be able to say, as was proposed in the obama administration. and it wasn't an academic exercise, and there's a lot of things the bidenen administratin has been advancing which if you look back at budget proposal that were treated as well dead on arrival in the republican congress, the seeds of a lot of the ideas are in there. i think it wasn't just policy. it wase people. he was as outgoing chief of

staff, one of my assignments in the transition was looked at the people you can kind of stretch to give opportunities to so that when there's a democratic administration looking for people with appropriate experience, people got in the second term. don't get people jobs that theyj can't do, but don't be so worried that someone says they're a little young for that or somebody like that is never have the job before. we put some really talented people in really good position who are in pretty senior roles right now. he took a very long term view on what you should keep in mind. wasn't just what you could accomplish today. it was what you could do to lay a foundation. of course we had a huge amount of stuff that we did. i'm not going to foreign policy examples because you spents the morning on it, but the sanctions policy we developed against russia, the first ukraine round, is the template and it's not

just policy template. the people are the staff that work on it. it's -- you know, you are constantly making decisions for thehe moment one of the things i think was very special about president obama is actually kept in mind what does this mean in terms of the future. >> any comment on the transition? i think will open questions in a minute. i'd like to wrap up with one concluding question, really study the presidency. we often think about, we discuss the structures and the individual, right? so those who study white house organization kind of take for granted, you can't impose a structure that doesn't mesh with a president personality come right? there has to be wayt to get the information the president needs in a way that works well for the president. that said, is there a lesson

that each of you might say would be instructive, either as a model or cautionary lesson from the obama presidency for future administrations as far as white house organization governance? i think the transition point you made, chris, was a very good one. and actually the bush administration has published a volume handoff, steve hadley previously classified memos on foreign policy that they prepared for the obama administration if they have now been declassified postscript from the bush administration officials on ten of what the come right at the time and what they see differently. there was a discussion on this earlier this week actually and i thought that was an instructive example of kind of the model transition that you describe. are there other lessons that you would see? >> i i guess i would say that every president governs in his own way and you cannot, there's

no cookie-cutter model you can stick to. having said that, what i found inmy doing, in writing my book n the white house chiefs, the gatekeepers, is that really since h.r. haldeman in the nixon white house, ironically because haldeman became the poster boy for watergate, but haldeman creator a model of white house governance that every president has strayed from at his peril. jimmy carter thought he could govern w the white house withoua white house chief of staff. he didn't have one for two and a half years. hamilton jordan was a de facto white house chief and completely miscast people wasn't until the final year of his presidency that he realized he had to have cheap and without a name called jack watts into a super. it wasas too late really to help

carter. i think bill clinton spent all of his time picking his cabinet to the detriment of his white house staff.he he really picked them at the last minute. he was not interested in being disciplined particularly, and it was only when leon panetta came in a year and a half in that the clinton white house just turned around on a dime. so i think that there are some models. there is a modelhi of white houe governance that requires that every president at the white house chief who is empowered to execute his agenda and to do all the things that jack and the really great chiefs have done. it's not easy to find comps not easy to find great chiefs. they have to have white house experience generally. they have to have knowledge of capitol hill, deep political

savvy, managerial acumen, a world-class temperament, and, and if they are lucky a really good long-term relationship with the boss. well, there are only a handful of those peoplee around but that would be my model. >> i'm not sure i agree with the assessment of the first two years of the clinton administration. i think, you know, there were certainly bumpy things going on but there also were real accomplishments in terms of economic policy and a model of economic policymaking from those first two years is very much a part of the landscape. the nac didn't exist. >> forgive me, i oversimplified but i guess my point would be so that when leon panetta came in as result of an intervention and effect that was led by hillary clinton and robert reisch and all of bill clinton's

close advisers, or many t of th, leon and omb director like a jack did want to be chief of staff extended basically taken them to camp david and locking in in a cabinin it's really great o do. what we needed he really turned the clinton white house around, in my view. >> i don't disagree with that and heto also continued to be ob director in some ways. we had a conference on that here a few years ago. >> yes, we did. >> lessons for the future. the point about the basic structure from the nixon years enduring i think is very true. but every president is different in terms of what their temperament is, i mean, joe biden was in obama administration. he's a different person. there's a a different way of raising him.

it's a different way of making sure he has what he needs. if you are chief of staff you have to be just focused on what does the president need? and you can't be locked to a structure that doesn't serve the president. you have to make sure the president, i work for two president who could reap hundreds of pages of night. not every president can, and that doesn't mean they can't make a decision. so i think in my view the most important thing is to see what the president needs, design the process. the othert' thing is it's never good if the team doesn't feel that they're part of it. if the team ultimately has to execute, it has to be after in public. it has to be on the hill. the cabinet has to be doing that. the white house staff has to be doing that. if youwa have a process that leaves people feeling this was done to them, it doesn't usually play out well. and when you have a president who isn't going to spend the time necessarily with everyone,

it puts a lot of the burden on the chief of staff to do that. but somebody in the white house has to make everybody feel connected to the decision-making process. and it was relatively easy with president obama because he was, he was willing to take time and be there. that in a second term i think dennis probably have to do more in a mediation that even during the election year. and it has to be in a way that everyone feels that when there's a decision they are on board. it's really bad thing for an administration and people are going in five different directions and finger-pointing, and it doesn't lead to success. >> which at the white house has moments if not the entire time that they are there when people are complaining that theyla have been leftt out of the room, right? as secretary lew just said they try to keep relatively small site means people are not always notice or happy.

this plays itself out. heends on theme president as said as well. some presidents bristle at the constraints of a process, right? so president clinton would make late-night calls all the time to people on the hill, two friends, whoever. his staff told me to become in the morning to try to check the call sheet. i forgot, who did he talk to last night but we have to figure, i have discredited, this wonderful idea. like, -- >> actually it was dick morris. >> i forget it was but who put that idea inhe his head? dick morris in particular after spitted from his suite at the jefferson hotel. >> right, with his prostitute friend. that really upset chris's friend leon panetta because he did know about it. he did know the president was getting regular advice, wanting to have one off conversation with tom harkin at 11 o'clock at night. he was getting regular advice- f dick morris at the president of the united states did not tell us of chief of staff about.

that's just a prescription for bad feelings, let's just say. obviously the most recent president was famous for much worse come much more dysfunctional white house. i mean, the history, his staff took away or started monitoring his cell phone calls. he called one of his aides and had them go to the apple store and by him another phone. so the white house chief of staff would know who he was talking to. that, , obama was not known for doing. that obama was pretty good about process. again are people unsure who felt there was often talk about sort of the boys club around obama were not very many women, the womenle didn't get to play golf with them. when my colleague mark wrote a story about this suddenly obama invited several women to play golf with him. that was as i did that there was a boys club around obama the people complained about. but broadly speaking the respective process. he respected the idea you had to deal with fewer your equie the building. and didid you think, i do thinkt

shrank as it went along because by the end he didn't feel like he needed as big a process as he had what he did at least respected and he wasn't an abuser in the same with some of the of the president's were. >> i think that's fair. actually try to make the point about the transition in 2012 to the second term. i think he's got a little bit of a bad reputation for the closed circle. i mean, i was quite publicly a supporter of hillary clinton in the primary. i had deep roots in the clinton administration by the end of the obama administration i became evident i didn't let people into the inner circle because i'd been up for so long that people thought ile started out there. i think there were a lot of people in the inner circle who came from the outside. i think if you look at the people who were influential in the white house, there were a lot of women in that circle. i mentioned kathyhy a few months ago. she was a very serious player in

important policy decisions. valerie was a very, she's going to be here later today, a very serious player. when sylvia burwell was in omb and hhs, a very serious player. >> nancy. >> who is here today. i think it's fair to say that if you didn't play basketball with them it was not necessarily a question of your gender. i declined the invitation because i said, mr. president, you will lose all respect for .me. [laughing] >> james, dided you have a question? >> secretary lew, you mentioned earlier the debt limit crisis experience and the goal here is obviously not to move markets today, but it might be the case that could be instructed for current purposes. i am curious about whatbo you learned are what am from your multiple vantage points, a debt limit crisis really means for the audience?

>> well, that's a hard subject to do in two minutes. you know, i described it yesterday to bunch of people in washington as something between agroundhog day and ptsd. it's just a terrifying concept to think you're on the edge of the cliff where if you miscalculate, you could cause the default of theni united states. nobody really knows the exact boundaries of how bad it is, but it goesoo from bad to worse. there's no good on that scale. in 2011 i a was at omb. in 2013 i was at treasury back in the 1980s i was in the speakers house. i've actually worked on the debt limit for most of the key vantage point. something changed in 2011. in 2011 and went from being a moment to negotiate where some must have peace of built n opportunity to get something

done. a change because there was a group that has now grown that actually is willing to contemplate default. and in 2011 we thought we were doing the right thing by negotiating an agreement on appropriation bills inn the spring. we thought we were doing the right thing by engaging a grand bargain negotiation was a good-faith negotiation and we could have separate conversation about why it failed, but when it failed we were at the edge of the cliff. we only barely escaped default byte putting together a terrible piece of legislation, the budget control act. after that it became clear, is a budget control act was the end of time, there may not be a solution the next time because you couldn't do something much worse than the budget control act, and have confidence that it would work. .. over an existential crisis lie the debt limit. and it came out quite naturally

at that time because we'd all been at the edge of the cliff, i think where we are today, it's taken some time for the administration to communicate it. why we won't negotiate on the debt limit is, the almost essential position because you can't be in a place where there's no solutio >> you can't be in a place where there's no solution and you go off the edge. on the other hand there has to be a negotiation on policy and in my opinion the sooner the better. we're in a moment now different than what it was even when i was dealing with 11 and 13. having gone through the election for speaker that we saw, we know the fragility of the leadership turns on five votes and it's a terrible moment when you have to choose between your future as the speaker and the future of the

country. and that moment could easily be upon us very soon. and that's terrifying. >> i think we have some time for questions and so, if we have microphones on the side we'd like to give priority to students if anyone would like to come up. i know we have several classes in the audience today, including mine. >> secretary lew, this is a question for you, i'm alumni in the department, and worked in office in summer and winter of 2020. crazy to be in the department. i want to get your sense was it difficult to be outside of the closed circle of the white house, formerly chief of staff and now you're across the

street in the treasury department and you see something on tv and i would have given the president an opposite advice and you're in a different position. can you expand, how you had the circumstances and how you dealt with it? >> well, treasury, at least in my day and i think since, has been in a different position than other cabinet agencies because you're in the white house every day unless you're travelling, you're at morning meetings, you're talking to people. for me, the challenge was going back to the room where i sat at the head of the table, sitting deliberately in the corner, keeping my mouth shut if it wasn't something directly related to treasury or of burning necessity that i spoke up. because it's just not a good thing to go to a pre-big new job and look like you're trying to hold onto the old job. but again, if you're sitting in a room with people you know and you have the discipline not to jump in on everything, and i think it was pretty well-known i had opinions on almost

everything, i saved the things i spoke up on and if i ever needed the president's attention to hear what i was concerned about or thought about, i had it. in general, it's not just in going from a position like white house chief of staff to treasury, as a manager, you have to become confident that other people can make decisions differently than you, but if even they're differently, not necessarily bad. sometimes you have to step in and even if the fear of somebody saying, you're disempowering them it's a little like that. if you don't cross the line too many times, you can share your views on whatever you need to and it didn't come up that often, you know, and at least in our circle, everyone knew each other very well. there were lots of side bar conversations and there was, you know, sufficient access to the president that you didn't

really feel shut out. i think other white houses are a little different sometimes you know? i've only been in two, but i don't think that there's probably a single answer. >> thank you. >> hello, my name is melvin walker, a graduate student at hofstra and also an army veteran. a lot of the discussion that we had reminded me a lot of leadership and the importance of team building, and in that vein, i was wondering, this is regarding secretary lew's comment about partisan gridlock and open to all the panelists. what would it take to repair the partisan paralysis, specifically, how can a president build a team or staff or just an administration that can hopefully or effectively navigate this? >> (laughter) >> you need another panel.

>> 30 seconds or less. >> my short answer to that i don't know that any president can in and of himself or herself at this point we may be asking a lot to do that. i think joe biden came in promising that his intent and desire to be a deal maker and managed to get bipartisan votes on big legislation, but hasn't healed the partisan wounds in the country and i don't know that it's realistic to expect a president to do that. the structural divide right now is so wide and pronounced that it feels to me beyond, you know, an individual's capacity to change it overnight. we are polarized not because of donald trump. donald trump was a manifestation of the polarization that existed when he came into office and he chose to accelerate it or exacerbate it. my most recent book is called

the divider for that very reason because he profited off a division that was the politics that he chose to pursue unlike every other president that i covered. every other president, to win for politics, but there was a greater obligation for the president of the united states to be a uniter, not a divider, to use george w. bush's phrase. and president obama, we're not a blue america, a red america, we're the united states. and that's always going to be there. the place we find ourselves, we don't want to listen to the other side. we are geographically living further and further apart, mostly more and more of the people we tend to agree with, the number of states that send somebody to the senate from a different party than the president they vote for has shrunk to almost none, used to be about a third. we do not want to see the people that we don't agree with. they took polls in the '60s,

would it bother you if your son or daughter married someone from the other party. and now it's about 50%. i do not want a republican at my thanksgiving table. and we drift to other parts of the internet. thank god for remarkable proliferation of information, a wonderful thing but we've fragmented ourselves and go to places in news or the internet or social media where we only hear from the people we agree with, right, and we don't listen to anybody else or know that there's somebody else to listen to. we have a different fact set when i grew up three networks and couple newspapers and we started from the fact set. today we're living in different factual universes and seems to be more than a single president can do in a single staffing question, and it's probably the work of a generation. >> i guess i would just say that peter's right in an eloquent on that.

no president can change that reality, that the fact that we are tribal now and that we're polarized, but i think that presidents can sometimes defy expectations and i think nobody thought that joe biden would be able to pass bipartisan legislation in january of 2021. and i think he did succeed in really defying those expectations and it took a lot of persistence, a lot of just stubbornness, but, you know, at the two-year mark i think that biden was able to get more bipartisan legislation passed than most predicted, and part of joe biden's persistence and bullheadedness and also being clever how they did it. i mean, anybody remember build back better? well, that went down in flames, but ron klein ultimately realized his white house chief

of staff, that there was a way to get at least half or not more -- at least half a loaf and he went to joe manchin and chuck schumer and said, look you guys just do this. he knew manchin could not be seen to be giving joe biden a victory, if it was joe manchin's victory, anything was possible and we get the inflation reduction act and i think it's possible to make some progress. >> i don't fundamentally disagree with anything that was just said, but i actually think looking at the white house for that change is fundamentally upsidedown. you have to look at ourselves in the mirror and who -- it's people voting that create the dynamic we're talking about. and i'm a little more optimistic than peter because i think swing voters, independents, are going both ways, and the difference in the

outcome of the election this last cycle from what was expected was because of that. it was, you know, areas that voted for democrats, areas that voted for republicans, going back and forth. we're going to need more people to vote. if we had more people voting our politics would be different. >> thank you very much. >> i think we have -- we're out of time, and i see an alum there, if you could stand, welcome back. if it could be a quick question, we'll do. >> i graduated in 2009. my question is for secretary lew and it's something you brought up briefly during your remarks was about the ukraine sanctions policy. you've written since you left office and i think even when you were still in office about the risk of overuse of sanctions. so i wanted to get your sense

what the sanctions policy looks like post full scale invasion and the use of other components of the administration such as the bureau of industry and security at the commerce department and capture at the justice department how enforcement has changed since were you in office versus now. >> sure. you know, the sanctions policy in 2013, 2014, 2015 was, you know, it was a continuation, but in some ways an advance on what we'd done in the past. it was taking to a new level of sophistication the ability to target sanctions and to accelerate gradually, if you needed to, to bring more pressure to bare to try and achieve your goal of changing the policy, without having massive unintended consequences. it was informed by a need to have unity with our european

allies and could remember the world was coming out of the great financial crisis recession at the time, not to throw the world economy into a tailspin. i actually thought it was important to write something and i did, while i was in my last year at treasury, gave remarks that became a pretty widely discussed document of principles to inform that because we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and i thought it was partially with our obligation to leave behind a template for anyone who thought it made sense to understand what that rationale was. >> i think the current administration is using the principles outlined there extremely effectively and a much more aggressive russia, a much more rapid escalation of the attack on ukraine sovereignty and a much more willing european partner to go

farther faster. and it's a subject for another discussion why those principles are important, but i think they've actually proceeded extremely effectively including using tools outside of the treasury department. i continue to worry that if sanctions are used too widely without the kind of careful consideration that i've written about and that i've just described, the backlash becomes-- we don't trust the united states. we don't want to do business with the united states. are we a good partner? first of all, sanctions won't work if we don't have partners because it's just not really possible to stop the leakage on a lot of things if you don't have partners and it's a dilemma. because if you want to be as tough as you can possibly be at the moment. that's always pressure to do more, but it might not work and it might lessen your ability to use those tools in the future. i give the biden administration a lot of credit for being very

tough, but being very principled how they've done it and i don't think they've crossed any of the lines that would really weaken the ability of the united states to use sanctions in the future. there are other circumstances that could arise that might test that and i think it's important to keep the cautionary considerations in mind. and i know that when we decided in the obama administration, there was an active debate at the sit room table as to where to draw the line. and it was not in any way because there was disagreement about how bad it was for russia to have invaded, you know, eastern ukraine through people who aren't wearing russian uniforms at the time. it was because we had real, you know, principled views about how to be most effective at that moment. moments are different depending on the facts. >> thank you. please join me in tanking our panelists.

>> (applause) >> i work here in a special place that commemorates the importance of the university. and the role that she has played and continues to play in identifying eatonville as a destination. this street, east kennedy boulevard, originally was a part of the road called the old apotka highway. during the time zora, her parents brought her to eatonville, and this was the old highway, the link between northeast orange county,

maitland and the road itself is a historic roadway. now, we're in a space that looks a lot different than modern eatonville and eatonville of the day and harkens back to what we call old florida and we're standing in a place where zora hurston is known to have done some of her writing. at some point she came back and forth to eatonville and at times when she did stay here, we called this tuxedo junction. it's actually located right on the shore, so to speak, of the lake. it's a place, as i say, that she is known to have done some of her writing.

>> now we're at the matilda mosey house museum and we're here because matilda mosley, known as tilley, was zora hurston's best friend as a child. matilda, it's a social gathering place for family and friends on the porch and here we're positioned or positioned in the porch. what you see here is-- it really represents zora as a folklorist and the writer of "their eyes are watching god" and a folklorist and anthropologist, in this photograph she's actually collecting folklore materials and this home, i think,

represents a kind of tying of the bow because you have a family, a founding family, you have the connection between the childhood friendships that zora hurston and tilley had and maintained throughout adulthood so you have that social interaction combined with the establishment of the town as an incorporated municipality, the first african-american incorporated municipality in the united states and zora establishes eatonville as a literary destination for leaders around the globe. ♪♪ >> week nights at 9:00 eastern, c-span's encore

presentation of our 10-part series books that shaped america. c-span partnered with the library of congress and a key piece of literature that had profound impact. tonight we'll feature zora hurston's novel "their eyes are watching god" set in central and southern florida during the jim crow era. the professor of history and author, watch c-span's encore presentation of books that shaped america, week nights 9 eastern at c-span or go to c-span, books that shaped america and learn more about each book featured. ♪♪ >> american history tv saturdays on c-span2, exploring the people and events that tell the american story. at 5:45 p.m. eastern a look at the life and evolving legacy of

robert oppenheimer father of the atomic bomb hosted by wesleyan university, sponsored by kai burr, reporter jada young and at 9:30 p.m. eastern on the presidency, a discussion about the lifelong friendship of gerald ford and jimmy carter who were rivals during the 1976 presidential campaign, but found common cause in the decades after they left the white house. exploring the american story. watch american history tv saturdays on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org/history. ♪♪ >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction