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c-span2 as a public service. >> all right, good afternoon. my name is susan poser and the president of hostile university and i welcome you once again to hofstra and 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 formerro 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 who are 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 the director of the office of management and budget, actually a position that he had prepa's a help in the second term of the clinton administration, and as deputy secretary of state for management and resources. welcome, secretary lew. >> peter baker was working very. hard for us today, i think this is your third, is a chief white house correspondent for the "new york times" responsible for reporting on the biden presidency right now. he prepa's he wrote about president donald trump and barack obama for the "new york times" and presidents know clinton and george w. bush for the "washington post." welcome, mr. baker. welcome back, mr. baker. chris whipple is an author, political commentator and documentary filmmaker. one of his books, the presidency gatekeepers, explores the evolution of the white house chief of staff responsibility in the past 50 years from nixon to

the obama administration. his most recent book, a fight of his life come inside joe biden's white house, examines internal power struggles and policymaking in the first two years of the biden presidency. welcome, mr. whipple. they are joined on the stage by professor richard hayes from the school of business, andmp professor james sample from the school of law and, of course, by meena bose who at this point needs no introduction. so i will now headed over to dr. bose to begin this afternoons conversation. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, u president poser. thank you, everyone for joining us today. we have, it's very exciting to

host this panel, this plenary discussion with so we distinguished speakers and my distinguished colleagues. we have spent a lot of time over the last day and a half examining president obama's election, his media coverage, his communication strategy, here we've we just had to make fantastic sessions of this morning on foreign policy, u.s.-transatlantic relations, scholarly panels on health care policy and foreign policy leadership and military intervention. and this is the session now we get to talk a little bit about the decision-making behind the scenes. it is essential i think for in political science come so many colleagues in the audience and presidency studies to understand how white house managemente influences the policymaking process and shapes the agenda and policies. that's what were looking forward to discussing today. my colleagues and i, professor

sample, professor hayes and myself, we've prepared a series of questions. we're very lucky to have an internal administration perspective from secretary lew who's returning to hofstra after a few years where he participated in a session here on the office of management and budget that produced the volume with my co-author and andy w a moment ago. and 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 viewed was happening in the white house. and chris whipple who we arere delighted to welcome to hofstra and hope to continue this partnership to talk about the research on several of your books, but particularly the gatekeepers and the role of the chief of staff positions that secretary lew had a managing and

directing the policymaking process. so to begin the conversation i would likee to start with a question for secretary lew. secretary lew, you held many positions in the obama white house, starting in the state department, the 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 into the two terms of the obama presidency? >> sure. it's great to be here again, meena, it's great to be on a panel of people who are think all consider each of all french trip we'll see if that's the case after an hour and a half of talking. one of the things aboute having hads the range of roles that i did is you see the process of the white house from different vantage points. and our different stakeholders

inpr the process. even though everyone reports up to the president directly or indirectly, it's quite ocintentional that you come into the process with a view, an agency position, and that decisions get made as they go up with all different perspectives being reflected so that the president can make an informed judgment. at the state department, which i won't spend a lot of time talking about, it's something you i'm sure discussed at length this morning with the national pretty process is a very formalized organist process were stay close to rent a someone level to the next big he gets up to the point of being a meeting with the president. you arere pretty sure that you'e got the whole picture at the end of it, whether it's a perfect decision 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.s we have seen more or less role with that as the coordinator. you've always had omb as a center holding all the pieces together on the funding and on the 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 baby offer a vignette for each chair. i don't how much time you want me to take. at omb the you that this was perhaps an unusual year, 2011, when i was in there because it was a year when there was a grand bargain negotiation with speaker boehner. .. and entirety of my time at omb in that in that

chapter was around those issues. the engagement between 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 t >> people direct ally involved. the challenge -- this is my perspective now frome omb, was for the white houses to remain coordinated so the president had all the a view the president needed while the fewest possible people were in the conversation. which is not normal in a domestic issue. that's normal in a national securityno issue. it's not normal in a domestic issue. that's a hard process to run x. there probably was a little breakage in the white house that there were people who would is have liked to have been more involved. but going from a a group of pa to 10 to 20 -- of 5 to 10 to 20, it's hard to have a conversation in washington. it gave the president what the president needed to make progress and move forward, but

it probably was a little bit of a difficult process from the if perspective of people who were not in the small circle. as omb director, i was very much in the small circle. but that's -- it's a challenge. and you have a trade-off. you want to have everyone's view, but you can't have everyone know the president's having a secret meeting. and so is as omb director, your job to reach out and collect information. presidents have multiple ways of getting information. doesn't have to be that minute on the white house staff says there's a meeting and i'm writing a memo. you have to turn to the people who are working on it and count on them to reach out and get all the points of view. that a requires trust amongst the parties. i think if you were to talk to the people who were in the room and not in the room at that time, you would get somewhat differenter stories about how wl it was done, but i think the president was well served. i think the president knew with as much to 100% as he could what every point of view was and the information hee he needed. i'm going to move to the year i

was chief of staff because i changed seats. it's now my job to run that process and make sure everyone who 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 is not going to be running the government, and the government has to be run -- they have to understand what each other are doing and not cross the line and get into each other's business in an inappropriate way. and we did that by having a daily conversation between people who knew each other so there was no surprises. and we kept governing in the white house. we left politics in the campaign. and i had one of, one of peter's colleagues, probably the most senior reporters in washington tellin me at the end he'd never seen aet better coordination between a campaign and a white house. and there was no government, governing decision that was made by the campaign, and i think

it's fairk to say i don't think the white house suggested where the president needed to be to win state x, y or orz. so everyone did their job with full transparency but appropriate boundaries. governing ine that year meant that you'd take your eye off the ball from what you wanted to accomplish. on the domestic side, dhaka, deferred action for children -- daca, was probablyia the major policy decision we drove forward that or year. it was not a new start. the president had looked at it for the first two years, had been frustrated he couldn't find a solution. felt the moral need to find a solution in a world where congress was not acting x. that was a case where he tasked me, the new chief of staff, the white house counsel, kathy rumler, start from scratch. don't start from the old memos, don't start from the old legal analysis, start from scratch. and we con screened a new process. -- convened a new

process. we brought all the stakeholders in. learn some new flairs -- players, and we came up with the new dak -- daca. there was a question of whether we went far enough. there were vows that we should do more, that we should do less. and the president's running for re-election, he's traveling, he doesn't have lots of time for long meetings with him. so as chief of staff, i thought it was my job to make sure that absolutely every view he would care about got to him. and i remember when meeting in the chief of staff's meeting where i said is this is going to the president, is there any view in this room that needs do go to him in because if i don't hear it in this room, i don't want to hear it got to him aftera wards through a different channel. i had the privilege of working for a president who cared about a process. he didn't want things coming from right if left. i'm not sure that that story would workit in every white house --

[laughter] not tol fill in the blank with any specifics, but it was very important, a, that everyone be -- have their views represented and, b, that it served the needs of the president to make the decision with that knowledge. there was a hard decision as to whether or not to take what became the second action in the second term. and i think for all the right reasons ween went with the piece that we had the closest to 100% certainty it would be effective and upheld if it was challenged. and we did the second piece -- i wasn't in the white house at the time in the second term, and it ultimately did not withstand the legal challenge. the first piece is still there. and i think after a 10 plus years, it's going to be there, you know, it's going to be there. andd making a decision like tha, if the president was just influenced by doing the most you think you can do, he might have ended up doing less because it might have been all connected,

it might have gone to the courts, and it might have been overturned. it was done in the thoughtful, considered way in the way you make decisions when you have your lawyers, your policymakers or your add slow advocates all represented and you don't leave any stone unturned in terms of the risk. yeah, there was a risk that we hadn't been too timid when we did the first piece. we didn't know when we announced it whether it would be celebrated orr criticized. i remember having that conversation, and it was one of the most emotional days i've had in public life standing there at the rose garden knowing that we were changing the lives of -- we thought it was close to 500,000, but it turned out to be close to a million young people and all of their relatives. so, and i think the process served to get us there. i've gone on too long, but let me just say until it's my turn again, treasury is a very

different seat than the white house, but it's very close to the white house, and you're very closely tied to the white house. and, you know, it was very important, you know, that the as a former omb director and as a former chief of staff the i didn't stay in a role where i looked like i was doing can my old jobs. and ii remember, you know, we were very self-copps about how to organize and make it clear. i had a new portfolio, and i had to argue the treasury view, and i wasn't managing omb or the white house anymore. and, you know, there were points of time where there was friction between what treasury thought was thed right thing and what, you know, the people in the thoughtuse might have was the right thing. and i can tell you as a treasury secretary if it ever gets to the pointin where you can't walk ino the oval office and tell the president what you think is the right thing, you ought not to do the job because you have a

perspective that's different. and then someone else has to make the political judgment as to whether orr not they're comfortable doing that. i don't think we lost a major disagreement on that, but there wereer sometimes when i sent bak the assignment if you're not comfortable with what we want to do, come up with a way to solve the problem. you can't in government just criticize. you have to have a a solution. the white house has to push back and say, okay, this is not the right way to do it. i could give you a case in point, but i really don't want to go on at length. and i think that's appropriate. when we get some of, you know, what do you learn from it, there's been a common theme in what i've said which is all the voices have to be heard and represented. the president is not well served if they only get one perspective whether it's political or pure

policy analysis. there are often disparate voice es because if you take actions, you're going to stand op a land mine and get it thrown the out, you don't accomplish very much. thank you, secretary le well, w.w. rich? >> chris, welcome again to hofstra. >> thanks. >> in your multiple studies of the executive branch policy making, what do you think was most distinctive about the obama white w house and why? >> 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. proud father of the polk award winner, thee owe baker -- theo baker. and i've just done a book about the biden white house, and it's often said that ron klain, joe biden's first chief of staff, could do any job9 mt. white

house. he could be white house come, he can be communications -- white house come, he could be communications director, almost anything. jack with, on the other hand, did almost every job in the obama white house finish. [laughter] and did them awfullily well. you know, peter well knows that bad things can happen when a white house chief of staff decides to become treasury secretary. back in the reagan era james a. baker iii after four years this white house chief of taffe was so desperate to get out that he swapped jobs with don regan, the treasury secretary in what was without a doubt the worst job swap in american history. 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 question about h -- as author of the gate

keepers is that every president learns sometimes the hard way that you cannot govern effectively without empowering a white house chief of staff as first among equals and also to tell you what you don't want to hear. barack obama was a student of history up like some other presidents we've -- unlike some other presidents we've had recently. and obama understood the performance of a chief of staff. and one of my favorite stories concerns the time that obama was campaigning in reno, nevada. hehe called a secret meeting of staffers. theyvi included david axlerod, valerie jarrett and all of bill clinton's, almost all of bill clinton's former white house chiefs. erskine bowles, john podesta, leon panetta was on the phone,

so was bill daley. anyway, the point of this, the reason it was secret was because obama didn't want to be accused of measuring the drapes in the oval office before he was elected. but heho knew how important it s to figureor out who his white house chief would be. unlike some other presidents. and he -- and so is erskine bowles, who was on this phone call, marvelous arely and kind of unforget by, the first thing he said was, listen, leave your chicago friends at home. they will only cause you grief. well, everybody on the phone was from chicago practically. david axlerod, valerie jarrett, bill daley and all the res. he did not take that advice, needless to say. he appointed rahm emmanuel who was, i think, a good choice at

the time for the first part of the obama presidency. but my point here 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 good choices of chiefs of staff over the 8-year period, i think one of the big reasons for his success. >> thankss you. peter, everyone is being welcomed back, so i'd just like to say we've missed you since this morning. [laughter] secretary l everything w spoke about the -- lew spoke about the buttoned-up, very disciplined, small circles in the administration. that can be great for running a government. it's notur necessarily always conducive to journalists getting access. is i'm curious about what the

challenges of covering the obama administration were and what the opportunities were. >> yeah, i'm against small meetings. [laughter] unless one of the people in the meeting is my friend. friend with a tape recorder. [laughter] well, thank you very much. it is not to spend the rest of the semester here, but i am glad to be here again for this wonderful panel. and thank you, meena, for including me and representative poser for sponsoring this whole thing.in i would just say, by the way, what you heard jack lew say a few minutes ago, you heard him describe an election year processs in which the chief of staff runs the government or helps run the government and a campaign runs the campaign. that's what's happening right now with jeff xience. the -- jeff siengs. they actually callll it the jack lew model. i don't know if that's, maybe there's a plaque on the door or something, but the jack lee model is chief of staff -- jack lew model is chief of taffe deals with the world, basically,

because there's a whole lot to deal with as chief of staff, and they'll letf the campaign people deal with the politics of it. from a journalist point of view, covering the obama administration, look, there are always people in the room. there are always enough people in theou room, and the people tt talk to the people in the room that we heard a lot of what happened. it doesn't mean we heard everything. what i i discovered in doing bos after covering t the day-to-dayf every white house is i think that the reporters who are in the press room and are doing the daily reporting, i'd say 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, through archives, through memoirs, through oral histories that you really start to learn a whole lot more. and, by the way, as a reporter, that's very frustrating to learn

how much we didn't know at the time. [laughter] i will say that the one thing we learned and this is true about the obama white house as much as a anyone ifit else, when the whe house i tells you not -- no, that's not happening, not only is it happening, it's happening so much more than you thought. [laughter] no, the secretary of health is not fighting with the secretary of agriculture. oh, my god, they hate each other. and you'll discover after the fact that they went man know e man know in a a gym neighborhoods yum sometime -- gymnasium sometime. the things that this that get out to the press have been usually so softened that you don't really get the full extent. we're only o picking opportunity vapor trails of whatever's happening inside. it's but at a times you do get a pretty decent opportunity. the best example i think is something we talked about in foreign policy with the afghanistan review in 2009 in

part is because president obama ran such an extensive review of this. maybe jack remembers -- >> only like a hundred. >> exact ally. for the professors and students here, it would be very much familiar because it was very much an academic process. he was not there going to have one ming and i say is, okay, let's do it. he s wants every single possible permutation and thenai try it again and take the intelligence agencies to go back and give another or the about this, and i'm going to forget the number, but i think they produced something l like 50 products or manager like that just during that one review. so it was intense, it was meticulous, it was thorough, it was exhaustive, and it was sort of a a model, case study of some of the ways i think president obama liked to do business. he liked to really thing the thinks -- think things through to the point where staff sometimes wished he would just make a decision, but you could never accuse him of not having

spent time. because that drags on, there were opportunities for reporters to get to your question to ping onhi things. we would pick up on things duringu that review. let's see, 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 concern that the generals were going to roll, trying to put pressure on him. at least therere was a concern insidee the white house that he wouldn't agree with that characterization. so we did pick up on a lot of those things at the time. but it's hard as a journalist because,al obviously, they wanto be able to have a confidential process. i understand that.e if i were in their position, i would too, but it's my job not to let that happen, to find out as much as we can. and to be aware, one thing i've learned covering five presidents, w to learn how muche don't know and to not overstate what we don't. >> thank you. i think maybe we can open this up now to some questions for the

whole panel and see how they respond. i'll start with one, kind of following up on what've of you have said. -- eve of you have said is. you've spoken about how the white house functions and what differentiated it implicitly from his successor. what are some of the lessons you've seen both internally and then observing the white house in practice from michelle obama's -- president obama's first term tore the second? were this learning curve with decision making and management that were, that provide lessons for, that maybe are struckive for future presidents? whoever would like to begin. >> >> i'm happy to kind of offer an observation or two from the inside. i'm not sure if it will ring true w with people or not who ae observing it. what peter just described in terms of the president's intense approach to meetings, it

lessened over the second term. and i actually think 2012 when we got into a routine of operating when he was traveling so much was part of that. he became more comfortable with fewer e people in the room knowing all the views, and then it was more selective when you had the big table and the long meeting expect second meeting and the third meeting. it didn't mean we didn't have any. the ore thing, and this just may bent inherent to first and secod terms, you know, there was at least the year i was chief of staff there was a degree of don't make any mistakes. this isn't the year you want to take an action and have it kind of blow up. not that we became devil may care in the second term. you don't have that same

immediate econ intention. you can try something a little bit more, you know, on a scale of 11-10 if your -- 11-10 if --11-0 --. if it's a a 4, 4.5, you might do it in a second eternal. it's not like the way you -- the you go all the way to doing anything. and i think in an administration if like yours, there was an awful a lot of continuity. people know each other very well. a lot of administrations come in and they, they've never been in government. they're people who are learning basically how the system works. by the end of a second is term with people who started out with above average experience and gained a great deal, i would have said the same thing in the chiptop administration. clinton administration. you tend to see people promoted

what in the first term you may be looking for people who had elected office in the cabinet position or 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 that either is right or wrong. you need some mix of both. but time is so short. in the second term you're copps from the beginning of the -- conscious from the beginning of the second term that the hour glass is running down, and you just use the time as much as you can. >> secretary. lew, just a quick follow up. would you say hat the risk taking that can happen in second term, h is that perhaps part of the reason why daca and da pa were separated? june of 2012 and i think dapa was 20215 is? >> it may be part of it. 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 at jeopardy the piece that was most central and strongest. i'm not sure that the case for the second was decideed appropriately. i'm not saying it was a mistake. but the history so far supports the way the decision was made in the first term for policy grabs. >> t okay, thank you. >> i wanted to pick up on something that peter said which having just done a book on the biden white house, i can tell you that i won't say i have newfound respect, but each more respect for what peter and the other white house reporters do on a daily basis. because to my first two books probably covered cumulatively a hundred years of history. this last book covered 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 a covid variant from one side, an invasion of ukraine from the other, and you're just hoping you can land the plane safely. picking all on what jack was saying, there are real cycles to the presidency. and i think that there was tremendous urgency. it's easy to forget now when barack obama came into office, it was, you know, he was facing tremendous, tremendous crisis. , you know, on the verge of a worldwide. depression, credit frozen, two wars in stalemate. he had to get legislation passed in a hurry which is why, one reason why i think rahm emmanuel

was the right guy, they took the hill. it just changes in the second term. and and i think also the polarization of the country and capitol hill became worse and worse as time went on and to the point are where in the second term i think dennis mcdonough had to perfect the art of governing by executive order. it was almost impossible to do anything on the hill. in any bipartisan way. so at least that's the way it appears to me. >> i would add a, by the way, first of all, by the way, chris, by the way, proves me wrong about being able to report in realtime. the new book about biden is very well reported, very much on the inside, very much has things that we would do in the daily newspaper. so thank you for if end r embarrassingus us. [laughter] but i think to add to your point, what we have seen here,

the difference between the first second terms, may also be divided within the first two years and the final six years is the difference between two legislating policy and executive policy, right? in the first two years with the congress entirely in democratic hands, even at one point a 60-vote majority in the senate, manage that a today, we haven't seen that in quite a while, this president is dealing with, you know, a 50-50 senate and a 51-49 senate or i'm not sure how you count it when some are out with concussions and shingles and aren't really democrats and may not want to be democrats and what have you, the count isn't allal that easy. they had a of -- 60-vote supermajority, and theye got a hot done including the health care overhaul which is not an easy thing to get through. and then the last six years, as chris said, you know, increasingly gave up on congress because it was a republican house and there wasn't much move to join hands on a whole lot.

and they decided to push the boundaries as far as they could onon executive power. and daca's a great example. by the way, president obama said i don't have the power to do this before he decided he did have the power to do this, and the courts ultimately did back him up and even president obama said, wait a second, we can't go that far without congress weighing in on something like this until the lawyers cleverly found a way to say they could. this has now become the normal thing in washington. this is now the new norm. in which presidents now of both parties, and thiss started with bush as a well especially on national security, really, really pushing further and further whatur they thought they could do without congress coming onboard. because they were frustrated, because it's not like the jim baker area where you could find somees common ground perhaps wih the orr party on thing, they've just given up in some ways on things. it's understand bl why because you could bang your head against a wall and say, okay, tell me what i can do, what are my

options, and you just laugh sometimes as they did on the second termse version of daca wn theytr tried to expand it to the participants. and now you have -- the participants. and now you have -- the parents. each party will find a sympathetic judge in a sympathetic court to create national policy to undo whatever that is president's office did through executive policy. and this is trued of democrats and republicans. if you're a democrat, you go find a judge in the ninth circuit of california to say what trump did should be stopped nationally, like that. if you're a republican, you do what we saw in texas the other day, you go to a single judge you know the going to be sympathetic to you and get abortion policy changed just like that. that's a real challenge going forward.it it really started to become apparent in the obama administration, even more so today where imomping becomes this, youou know, rubber band where one with day a president through fiat, signing of a document changes policy and the

next days say, huh-uh, no way. it's not a compromise, not the product, a consensus of a fight that then develops into common ground. it's a a snapping back and fort. and the reason why presidents haven't liked these executive powers in m the past is because the next one comes along and undoes it, you know? if you're a president, you'd much rather have a law passed by congress because turning that over is much harder than saying, okay, everything the last president did i now reverse. so this is exaipging -- changing our way of policy making in a profound way. >> yeah, if i can just add, it's become part of every transition to come up with a list of first day actn as when there's a chane of party to reverse the executive actions of the prior administration. the rubber band or pendulum effect. it's not great for democracy. it's very much of the moment

policy p making. and the reason i chose dak that -- daca, in part, it's very important policy. but there was mix support for it, and it made it impossible to truly reverse. >> imagine how hard it is to see 800,000 or however many recipients whotr were told they could stay in the country to worry. >> yeah. 100%. >> how do you buy a house, how do you raise a family -- >> and it is a suboptimal, by far, way to make policy, but in the situation that i think peter correctly described in terms of the partisan principal if us -- paralysis in the last six years of the obama administration and now, it is the world of the present. we could have a different discussion on what it would take

to restory bipartisan -- >> i hope not. >> so to is pick up on those points, the successor administration, the idea that they could to away with birthright citizenship even via executive order, to a surgeon extent daca, you know, i think hopefully most people in the room would agree is a tremendous policy accomplishment. but what are the risk riskings in the administration defining for itself what's okay to engage in policy that is optimally and one might argue constitutional ally grounded in bipartisan passage in the legislature and signature by the president into anec executive order policy? >> so ultimately, it was decided by the courts because there's ambiguity about this. i think it is a very reasonable

question how far down this road you can go in predictable, sustainable policy in our country. and it's not during the obama administration. second term of the clinton administration we did an awful lot with the pen. you know, it was not a concept that was enevented. it came out of -- invented. it came out of increasing partisan gridlock in congress. the answer is how you fix the gridlock in congress, not how do you stop all government from functioning. in the absence of a congress that is legislating, you can't ignore if all the a problems. youwh can't overstep the bounds either. we thought the debate was very important. i'm nototad sure all add administrations take a similar view that those boundaries actually matter. we didn't want to cross the boundary. we only wanted to do things that we thought were constitutional and legal. but if you get into a situation where the president says i'll throw it against the wall and maybe it won't go to court, that's pretty dangerous.

i think we're at a time now where we've already seen some experimentation on that. >> so we've talked about this shift in the way policy making was being done under the obama administration to shift more to executivetive orders. is that the most consequential policy shift or policy features of the obama administration? >> well, jack with, it probably -- could probably that better than the i could. but one of the things that i think wement haven't touched on and i wonder if jack would agree with this, one of the things that a really contributed to the success in the first term was a really almost flawless transition. and transitions are, i think, or there's this popular misconception that transitions begin upon the election of a new

president. successful transitions begin a year before, and they are absolutely critical in laying the ground work for presidential governing. you know, the 9/11 commission found that the sort of half-baked transition as a t result of the 2000 election recount to, from the clinton white house to the bush white house may have contributed to 9/11. for being unprepared for 9/11. the fraught transition in 2020, obviously, the blood ariest -- bloodiest transition since the civil war which i write about in my book somehow happened in spite of everything. and biden's team was really superb in overcoming that. buthe the transition to the obaa white house from the bush white

house was really a model. and, you know, all you have to remember is that on the morning of the inauguration, josh bolton, the outgoing white house chief of staff and rahm emmanuel, the incoming chief, were in the situation room working hand in glove trying to make sure that there wasn't a terrorist attack on the mall that morning. we all forget that now, but it was a really model transition. and i a think made a huge difference in getting the obama white house off to a running tart. finish. >> doo you agree with that, jac? >> i certainly agree on the quality of the transition from the bush administration to the obama administration. and i will say that we modeled our part of the transition out on that. west wanted -- our instructions from the -- >> he wanted exactly -- >> he wanted exactly the same.

but in a relay race if you're handing the baton, somebody this is has toer take it. >> yeah. there the has to be an interest. and you can have all the briefing materials in the world, but if the incoming team doesn't want o them, or the meeting, it doesn't do any good. and i think we saw that with the transition from -- and it didn't go so well. so it's crucially important. i would just say from the inside in temples of the second term -- 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 knewun he wasn't going to get legislation on controversial social policy through congress, but he was determined9 that the budgetmi proposals he put forwa, the policy proposals he put forward should start to socialize ideas that we would want to advance so that somebody elsein coming to them would be able to say as was proposed in theob obama administration -- ad it wasn't an academic exercise. and there's a lot of things that

thee biden administration has been advancing which if you look back atck budget proposals that were treated as, well, dead on arrival in a republican congress, the seeds of a lot of the ideas are in there. and i think that wasn't just policy, it was people. he was, as outgoing chief of staff, oneff of my assignments n the transition was hook at the people you can kind -- look at the people you can kind of stretch to give opportunities to so that when there's a democratic administration if looking for people with appropriate experience, people got it in the secon' term. don't give people jobs that they do, but don't be so worried w if someone said they'e a little young for that or if someone like that never had the job before. and we put some really talented peopleho in really good positios who are in pretty senior roles right now. so i -- he took a very long-term view on, you know, what you should keep in might have. -- mind.

it wasn't just what you could accomplish if 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 i know you spent the morning on it. but the sanctions policy we developed in, against russia in the first ukraine round is a template, and it's not just the policies of i the template, the people are the staff that worked on it. so, you know, it's -- you're constantly making decisions for the moment. but one of the reasons i think was very special about president obama was he actually kept in mind what does this mean in terms of the future. >> peter, any comment on the transition period? well, o i think we'll open for questions in a minute. i thinki what i'd like to do is kind of wrap up this one concluding question. when we study the presidency e, we often think about, we discuss

the structures and the individual, all right? so the white house organization kind of taken for granted is you can't impose a structure that doesn't mesh with s a presidents personality, right? so in has to be a way to get the information the president needs in at way that is, works well percent president. are there -- that said, are there,s is there a lesson that even of you might -- each of you might say would be instructive either as a model or cautionary lesson from the obama presidency for future administerings as far as white house organization and governance? if i think the transition point that a yousi made, chris, is a very good one. and, actually, the bush administration just published a volumeha handoff. 40 previously classified memos on foreign policy that they prepared for the obama administration. they've now been declassified with postscripts from the bush administration officials on kind of what they got right at the

time andim what they see differently. i was in a a discussion earlier this week, actually, and i thought that was an instructive example of kind of the model transition that you described. are there other lessons? >> 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. but having said that, you know, what i found in doing, in writing with my book on the white house chiefs, the gatekeepers, is that really since h.r. haldeman in the nixon whiteca house -- ironically because he became the poster boy for watergate -- but haldeman if created a model that every president has strayed from the at his peril. jimmy carter thought he could govern the white house without a white house chief of staff. he didn't have one for two and a

half years. hamilton jordan was the de facto white house chief and complete wily missed that. it wasn't until the final year of his presidency that he realized he had to have a chief, and he found a guy named jack watson who was superb. it was too late really to help carter or. i think bill clinton spent all of his time picking his cabinet trto the detriment of his white house staff. 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. i think -- so i think that, you know, there are some models. there is a model of white house governance that requires that every president have a white house chief who's empowered to

execute his agenda and to do all things that jack and the really great chiefs have done. it'sno not easy to find, it's nt easy to find great chiefs. they have to have white house experience generally. they have of to have knowledge hill, deep political savvy, managerial act a you men, a world class temper temperament and -- [laughter] if their lucky -- they're lucky, a really good long-term relationship with the boss. there are only a handful of those people around, but that would be my model. >> thank you. >> i'm not sure i free with the assessment of the first two years of the clinton administration. [laughter] i think, you know, there were certainly bumpy things going on, butn. there also were real accomplishments in terms of economic policy and the model of economic policy makingol from those first two years is very

much a part of the landscape, and the nec didn't exist. >> forgive mentioner i oversimplified. but i guess my point would be that when leon pa net if that came in as the result of an intervention, in fact, it was led by hillary clinton and robert require andnd all of bill clinton's close advisers or many of them, you know, leon -- can an omb director like jack didn't want to be chief of staff. they had to basically take him to camp david and lock him in a cabin until he agreed to do it. but when he did, he really turned the clinton white house around, in my view. >> no, i don't disagree with that. and he also ain continued to be omb director in some ways. [laughter] we had a conference on that here a few years ago. >> yes, we did. >> lessons for the future. it's very -- i think that, you know, the point about the basic

structure9 from the nixon years and during, i think, is very true. but every president is different can in terms of what their temperament is, what their -- i mean, joe biden was in the obama administration. he's a different person. there's a deferent way of briefing him, it's a different way of making sure he has what a he needs. if you're 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 period of time. you have too make sure the president -- some president -- i worked for two t presidents who could read hundreds of pages a night. not every president can. and that doesn't mean they can't make a decision. so i think it's, in my view, the most important thing is to see what the president needs. the other thing is it's never good if the team dun feel that they're a part of it. the team ultimately has to execute. it has to be out there in

public, the cabinet has to be out there, the white house staff has to be doingng that. if you have a process that leaves people feeling this was done to them, it doesn't usually play out well. and and when you have a president who isn't going to spend the time -- who isn't going to spend the time with everyone, it puts a lot of the burden on the chief of staff to do that. but somebody in the white house hass to make everybody feel connected to the decision making process. and it was relatively easy with president obama because he was willing to take time and be there. but in thehe second term, i thik dennis had to do more intermediation than i did even during the election year. and it has to be in a way that everyone feels that when there's a decision, they're onboard. it's a really bad thing for an administration when people are going in five different directions and fingerer pointing. -- finger pointing. that'll lead to success.

>> every white house has moments, and people are complaining that they have been left out of the room, right? as secretary lew just said, they try to keep the meetings relatively small. that means people who aren't in the room notice. and this plays itself out. itan depends on the president. some presidents bristle at the constraints off a process, righ? so president clinton would make late night calls all the time to people on the hill, to friends, whoever, and what his staff told me is they would come in in the morning, check the call street, who did he talk to? i had this great idea, i had this wonderful idea -- [laughter] >> dickci morris. >> oh, my god. who put that idea in his head? and dick morris in particular after the -- >> from a suite at the jefferson hotel. >> right. with his prostitute friend. [laughter] anyway, that really upset chris'

friend leon panetta because he didn't know about it. he didn't know the president was getting regular advice. one thing to have a one-off conversation with tom harkin at night. he was getting regular advice are from dick morris that he did not tell his staff about. that's justre prescription for d feelings,t let's just say. the recent president was famous for ae much more disfunction il white house. when his chief of staff took away or started monitoring his cell phone calls, he called one of his aides and had him go to the apple store and buy him another phone. so the white house chief of staff wouldn't know who he was talking to. now, that, obama was not nope for doing. -- known for doing it. obama was pretty good about process, ik, think. again, there are people, i'm sure, who felt if there was often talk about sort of the boys' club around obama, weren't very many women, the women didn't get to play golf with whim. -- with him.

my colleague wrote a story about this, suddenly obama invited several women to play golf with with him. there was this idea that this wasth a boys' club but, broadly speaking, he respected process. he respectedou the idea that you had to, you know, deal with your equities inside the building. and i do think that secretary lew knows this better that i do, it shrank as it went along because by the end he doesn't feel like he needed as big a process as he had, but he did respect it, and he wasn't an abuser of it in the same way some other' presidents were. >> i think that's fair. i actually tried to make that point about the transition in 2012 to the second term. i think he's gotten a little bit of ad bad reputation for the closeded 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,ra i became evidt he didn't let people into the

inner circlee because i'd been there for so long, i think there were a lot of people in the inner circle who came from the outside. and, youyo know, i think if you look at the people who were end nine, in the white house, there were a lot of women if in that circle. i mean, i mentioned kathy rumler a few months ago. she was a very serious player in important policy decisions. val by -- valerie was a very serious player. when sylvia burwell was at omb and and hhs, a very serious player. >> [inaudible]nd >> nancy anne who's here today. so it's, i think it's fair to say that if you didn't play basketball with him, it was not necessarily a question of your gender. i declined the invitation because with i i said, mr. president, you'll lose all respect for me. [laughter] >> did youve have a question? >> sure. secretaryar 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 that could be destructive for current purposes. i'm curious about what you learned or what -- from your multiple vantage points the debt limit crisis really means for the audience. >> well,ing that's a hard subject to do in two millions. [laughter] two minutes. you know, i described it yesterday to a bunch of people in washington as something between groundhog day and ptsd. it's justts a forfying concept - terrifying concept to think you're on the edge of a cliff where if you miscalculate, you could cause the default of the united states. nobody really knows the exact boundaries of how bad it is. but it goes from bad to worse. there's no good out of that, on that scale. in 2011 i was at omb, in 2013 i was at a treasury. back in the 1980s i was in the

speaker's office. so aye actually worked on the debt limit from most of the key vantage points. something changed in 2011. in 2011 it went from being a moment to negotiate where some must-pass piece of bill is an opportunity to get something done. it changed because there was a group that has now grown that actually is willing to contemplate default. and, you know, in 2011 we thought we were doing the right thing by negotiating an agreement on appropriations bills in the spring, we thought we were doing the right thing by engaging in a good faith negotiation and have a separate consideration about why it fade. but when out failed, we were at the edge of a cliff. and we only barely escaped putting together a terrible piece of legislation, the budget control act. after that it became clear if

budget control of it was the end of it this time, there might be a conclusion the next time. so we reached the conclusion by the time iim was at a treasury without any real disagreement internally that you can't negotiate over an existential crisis like the debt limit. and it came out quite naturally at that time because we'd all been at the edge of a cliff. where we are today, it's taken some time for the administration to communicate why we won't negotiate on the debt limit is almost an essential position because you can't be in a place where no solution because you go off the edge. on the other hand, you know, i think it's taken them a while for them to get to the point where they made it clear there needs to be negotiation on fiscal policy -- and in new view, the sooner the better -- but we're at a moment now which is different than it was even when i was dealing with it in

'11 and '13. having gone through the election for speaker that the we saw, we know the fragility of 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. finishco 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 are there,wood like to give some opportunity to students. i know we have several classes in the audience today including mind. mind if. mine. finish if -- >> secretary lew, this is a question forn you. i'm actually an alumni of the treasury department. i work in the executive

secretary's office summer and winter of 2020, so quite a crazy time to be within the department. if i just wanted to kind of get your sense of was it difficult to be outside of the close inner circle of the white house just formerly being chief of staff, now you're acrass cross the street in the treasury department? you see anything on smf -- something on tv, and you're in a different position, if you could just expand on if you ever had any of those circumstances and how you dealt with it. >> 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 houser day unless you're traveling -- white house every day. you're at morning meetings, you're talk to people. for t me, the challenge was goig back to the room where i sat at thebe head of the table sitting deliberately in the m corner keeping my mouth shut if it wasn't something directly related to treasury or a burping

necessity that i spoke up -- burning necessity. because it's just not a good thing to go to a pretty big, new job and look like you're trying to hold on to the old job. but again, if you're sitting in a roomro with people you know ad you have the discipline not to jump in on everything, i think it was pretty well known i had opinions on almostering. 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, 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 and even if they're different, it's not necessarily bad. sometimes you just have to step in and even if the fear of somebody saying you're just empowering them, it's a little bit like that. if you don'tan cross the line to many times, you can share your

views on whatever you need to. and it didn't come up that up, you know? at least in our circle, everyone knewot a little bit. -- knew eah orr very well. there were lots of sidebar 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 ate --yo a little different sometimes. i've only been in two, but i don't think there's probably a single answer. >> thank you. >>am hello. my name is melvin walker, i'm a graduate student at hofstra. i'm also an army veteran. a lot of the constitution that you, 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 lou's -- secretary lew's comment about partisan gridlock, and it's open to all

the panelists. what would it take to repair the partisan paralysis? specifically, how can a president build a senior staff or just an administration that can hopefully or effectively navigate this? [laughter] >> 30 seconds orless. >> you can each have a minute. >> i guess my if short answer to that is i don't know that any president can. in and of itself, by himself or herself at this point. we may be asking a lot of an individual. certainly, i think joe biden came in promising to do that, i think that was certainly his intent, his desire. i think it's his typically nation toan reach across the aisle. he has managed to get some wisconsin partisan votes -- bipartisan votes, but he hasn't healed the country, and i don't know that it's realistic to expect aid president to be ableo do that. the structural divide right now is so wide and so 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 already existed whence he came into office. he then, ofur course, chose to accelerate it or exacerbate it. we -- my most recent book is called the divider about trump for that main reason, because he profited off a division that was the politic politics he hose to pursue. every president is a divider, you have to be in order to win office, but every president other than trump that i've covered believed there was also ar greater obligation to be a uniter, not a divider. certainly, president obama used that a phrase, we're not a red america or blue america, we're the unite of america. right now that's just not in vogue. we are in a tribal moment in our country. doesn't mean we're goingoi the always be there, but that is the place we find ourselves. we don't want to listen to the other side. we are geographicically living

further and further apart. mostly more and more people we tend to agree with the number of states that send somebody to the senate from a different party has shrunk almost none, it used to a be about a third. we do not want to see the people that we don't agree with. they took polls in the 60s and askedte would it bother you if your son or bauer daughter married someone from the ore party, then it was 5%, now it's about 50%. we do not want to talk to each other. we drift to different parts of the internet. thank god for the remarkable, you know, proliferation of information, that's a wonderful thing, but it also means we have fragmented ourselves. we can two to places in news or the internet or social media where we only hear from the if people we agree with, right? if we don't listen to anybody else. we have a different fact set. when e grew up, there were three networks and a couple newspapers and wire services. we all started from the same fact set.

all this, to me, seemed to be more than a single president can do, more than a single staff thing question. and it's probably the work of a generation. ..of i think you did succeed and define those expectations and it took a lot of persistence, governor but the two-year mark and more legislation and part of

that was joe biden's with it being, how they did it. and ultimately realized white house chief of t staff there waa way to get at least half if not more, at least half a loaf and he went to joe manchin and chuck schumer and said look, you do this because he knew he could not be seen given a victory but if it could be joe manchin victory, anything was possible and as a result we got inflation reduction act. progress. yeah, i i don't fundamentally disagree with anything that that was said, but i actually think looking at the white house for that change, fundamentally

upside down, you to look at ourselves in the mirror and who it's people voting that creates the the the dynamic we're talking about. and i'm a little more optimistic than because i think swing voters independents are going ways and the difference in the outcome of the elections this last cycle from what was expected was because of that, it you know, areas that have voted for, democrats areas voted, republicans going and forth. i think we're going to need more people to vote if we had more people voting. our politics be different. thank you very much. i think we have we out of time. i think see an alum standing there. so i think if we could sam, if i could. but it's good to see you. welcome back, if it can be a very quick question, we'll do it. sure. so name is sam rubin called.

i graduated 2009. my question for secretary lew and it's up to something you brought up briefly during your remarks was about the ukraine sanctions policy you've written since you left office. i think even when you were still in office about the risk of overuse of sanctions. so i wanted to get your sense of what the sanctions policy looks like posted full scale invasion and the use other components of the administration such as the bureau of industry and security, the commerce department and task force collected capture at the justice department and how enforcement has changed. you were in office versus now. sure. and you know, the sanctions policy in in 2013, 2014, 2015 was you know was a continuation. but in some ways an advance on we had done in the past it was taking to a new of sophistication the ability to

target sanctions and to excel rate gradually. if you needed to, to bring more pressure bear to try and achieve your goal of changing the policy without having massive unintended. it was informed by a need to have unity with our european allies and remember the world was coming out of the great financial crisis recession at the time not throw the world economy into tailspin. i actually thought it was important to write something and i did while i was in my last year, treasury gave remarks became a pretty widely discussed document of principles inform that because we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. i thought partially it was our to leave behind a template for anyone who thought that made sense to what that rationale was.

i think the current administration used the principles that were outlined there extremely effectively, but in very different circumstances, a much more aggressive russia, a much more rapid escalate version of the attack on sovereignty and a much willing european to go farther, faster. and it's a subject for another discussion. why those principles important but i think they've actually perceived it extremely effectively including using tools outside of the treasury i do continue worry that if sanctions used to widely without the kind of careful consideration in that i've written about in that i just the backlash it 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 just not really to stop the leakage in a lot of things if you don't have partners and.

it's a dilemma because if you want be tough as tough as you can possibly at the moment that's always 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 in how they've it. and i don't think they've crossed any of the lines that would really weaken the ability of the united states to sanctions the future. there are other circumstance 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 decide this in the obama there was an active debate at the sitroom 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 eastern ukraine through people who were wearing russian uniforms at the time.

it was because we had real principled views about how to be most effective at that moment. moments are different depending on the facts. thank you. please me in thanking our panelists for very instructive. thank. if you enjoy american history tv, sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on our screen to receive weekly schedule of upcoming programs like russia's in history, presidency and more. find out american history tv newsletter today and watch american history tv every saturday or anytime online at c-span.org/history. ♪♪ american history tv saturday on

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