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 this plenary executive policymaking in the obama administration will focus on evaluating the nature and success the obama team and its policy ideas from different perspectives from a former cabinet member, from journalists as. we continue our assessment of the presidency of barack obama. i will provide very introductions of our panelists who are joining us this conversation today. they don't really begin to scratch the surface of their bios, as you might imagine. the honorable jacob lue, who

served as a 76th secretary of the treasury, as white house chief of staff as the director of the office of managed mint and budget, actually a position that he had previously held in the second term of the clinton administration and as deputy secretary of state for management and resources i welcome secretary lew. peter baker who is working very hard for us today. i think this is your third check on me 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 j. trump and barack obama for new york times and presidents bill clinton and george w bush for. the washington post. welcome, mr. baker. welcome back, mr. baker. chris whipple is author, political commentator and documentary filmmaker, one of his books, the president's explores the evolution of the

white house chief of staff's responsibilities. in the past 50 years. from nixon to the obama administration's to his most recent book, the fight of his life inside joe biden's white house examines eternal internal power struggles and policy making. in the first two years of the biden presidency. and welcome mr. whipple, they are joined on the stage by rich hayes, the zagreb school of business, and professor james sample from the morris dean school of law. and of course, by bose at this point needs no introduction. so i will now hand it over dr. bose to to begin this afternoon's conversation. thank you. thank you. president posner. and thank you, everyone, for us today. we is very exciting to host this

panel, this plenary discussion. so many distinguished speakers and my distinguished colleagues, we've spent a lot of time over the last day and a half examining president obama's election his media coverage, his communication strategies. we've just had two fantastic sessions this morning foreign policy, u.s. transatlantic relations. we've had scholarly panels on health care policy and foreign policy leadership and military intervention and this is the session now or we to talk a little bit about the decision behind the scenes. it is essential, i think, for those of us in political science and so many colleagues in the audience and presidency studies to understand how white management influences the policy making process and shapes the agenda and policies. and that's what we're looking

forward to discussing today that my colleagues i professor sample from sir hayes and myself we've prepared a series of questions we're very lucky to have an internal administration perspective from secretary 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 a volume with my coauthor, andy rolovich, who i filed a moment and. peter baker was here few years ago for the george bush conference to present the journalistic perspective, kind of what was happening, the how reporters viewed what was happening in the white house and chris whipple who we're delighted to welcome to hofstra and hope to contain you this this partnership to talk about the the research on several of your books particularly but particularly the gatekeepers and the of the chief of staff position that secretary lew had

in managing and directing the policymaking process. so to begin that conversation i'd like to start with a question for secretary lew. secretary lew, you held many positions in the obama white house starting in the state department then office of management, budget chief of staff and then in the second term as treasury secretary would you share us from those experiences? how presidential decision making process you saw it was started and perhaps evolved the two terms of the obama presidency? sure. it's great to here again. i mean, it's great to be on a panel of people. i think i'll consider each other all friends and we'll see if that's the case after an hour and a half talking. yeah i'm you know, one of the things about having had the reins of roles that that i did is you see the process of the

white house from different vantage points. and 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 of view, an agency position, and that get made as they go up with. all different perspectives being reflected so that the president can make an informed judgment. you know, at the state department, which i won't spend a lot of time talking about. yeah, it's something you've i'm sure discussed at length this morning with the national security process they're very formal organized process where stakeholders sit around a table it goes from one level to the next. it gets up to the point of being a meeting with the president and you're pretty sure that you've got full picture at the end it whether it's a perfect decision or not a process it's well-established designed to inform decision with all points of view.

nothing clear is that exists outside of the national security setting. you know, 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. you're pulling all the pieces together, the funding and on on the management. but it's a it's really a reflection of the president how all of the different are presented to for decision in on the domestic side, let me offer a vignette from each chair. if i don't have much time, you want to it to omb that you're that this was perhaps an unusual. year 2011. yeah when i was there because it was a year when there's a grand bargain negotiation with speaker boehner. it was a year when we were facing a potential shutdown or debt limit 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 this my perspective now from omb was for the white house remain coordinated. so the president all the views the president needed while the fewest possible people were in the conversation, which is normal in a domestic issue, that's normal a national security issue, not normal in a domestic issue. that's a hard process to run. and there probably was a little breakage in the white house that there were people who would have liked to have been more involved. but going from a group of five to 10 to 20, it's very hard to have a private conversation in washington. you know, i think the council

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

every point of view was and the information he needed. when i moved to the year, i was chief of staff, so i change seats. it's now my job to run that process to make sure everyone who needs to be 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 they have to understand what each other are doing and not cross the line and into each other's business in an appropriate you know, we did that by having a daily conversation between people who knew each other. so there were no surprises and we kept in the white house, we left politics in the campaign. and i had one of the one of peter's colleagues, probably the most senior reporters in washington tell me at the end he'd never seen a better coordination between campaign and a white house, and there was

no government governing 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. you know, so everyone did their job with full transport agency but appropriate boundaries now governing in that year, i meant that you didn't take your eye off the ball on what you wanted accomplish. so if i look on the domestics side, you know, doca deferred action for children was, probably the major policy initiative that we drove forward that year. it was not a new start. the president had looked at it for the first two years, had been frustrated that he couldn't find a solution, felt a moral need to find solution in a world where congress was not acting and that was a case where he tasked me, the new chief of staff, the white house counsel, cathy rambler, staff from scratch. don't start from the old don't start from the old legal

analysis. start from scratch. and we convened a new process. we brought all the stakeholders then there were some new players, there was a fresh and we came up with what became doca. 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 enough. there were views that should do more. there were views that we should do less. and the president's running reelection. he's traveling. we don't have lots of time for long meetings. him so as chief staff, i thought it was my job to make sure that absolutely every view he would care about got to him and i remember one meeting in the in the chief of staff's office where i said oh this is going to the president. is there any in this room that needs to go to him? because if i don't hear it in this room, don't want to hear it got to him afterwards through a different channel. now i the the privilege of working for a president who cared about process. he didn't want things coming at

him from right and left. i'm not sure that that story work in every white house. not going to fill in the blank with any 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 doc action in the second term. and i think for all the right reasons. we went with the piece that we had the closest to 100% certainty it would be effective and be upheld if it was challenged. and we did the second piece. i wasn't in the white 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 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 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 kind of thoughtful considered way that is the way you make decisions when you have lawyers, your policymakers, your advocate is all the voices represented and you don't leave any stone unturned in terms of the risk and yeah, there was a risk he was going to be seen as having been too timid when. we did the first piece. we didn't know we announced it, whether it would be celebrated or criticized, we really didn't know. and i remember that conversation and. it was one of the most emotional days had in public life. standing there at the rose garden, knowing that we were the lives of we thought was close to 500,000. but it turned to be close to a million young people and all of relatives. so it and i think the process served to get us there going on for too long the summit let me just say one thing about treasure and we can come back

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

and tell the president what you think the right thing, you ought not do the job because you have a perspective that's different. and then someone else has to make the political judgment as to whether or not that's they're comfortable doing that. i don't think we lost a major, you know, disagreement on that. but there were some times when i was back with the assignment, if 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 solution and a white house has to be able to push to agencies and say, okay, this is not the right way to do it. i mean, 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 appropriate when we get to the, you know, kind of 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. and a president is not well-served if.

they only get one perspective, whether it's political or pure policy and there are often disparate voices like who matter, because if you take and you're going to step on a landmine and have it thrown out, you don't very much. thank you, secretary lew rich. so chris, welcome again to joshua. thanks in multiple studies of the executor of branch policymaking, what do you think was most distinctive about the obama white house and why. well let me let me just begin by saying it it's i'm really honored to here at hofstra with all of you and to see jack again to be with with peter. i'm proud father of the park award winner theo and and you know i've just done a book about the biden white house and it's it's often said that ron klain,

joe biden's first chief of staff, could do any job in the white house. he could. he be white house counsel, he could be communicator director. he could do almost anything, jack, on the other hand, did almost every job in the obama white house and did them awfully well. you know, peter peter well knows that bad 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, okay, tell 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, the success our administration pressed idea that they could do away with birthright citizenship, even by executive order, i mean, to a certain extent. i mean, doca, you know, i think hopefully most people in the room would agree is a tremendous policy accomplishment. but what are risks in defi for the administration defining itself when it's okay to engage in policy that is optimally and one might argue constitutionally grounded in bipartisan passage in the legislature and signature by the president that it can into an executive order box. so whether it's constitutionally grounded is ultimately was decided by the courts because

there's ambiguity about this i think it is a very reasonable question how far down this road can go and have kind of predicted bold, sustainable policy, our country. and it's not just didn't start in the obama administration second term of the clinton ministration we did an awful lot with the pen know it was not a concept that was invented. it came out of an increasing partizanship and gridlock in congress. the answer is how do you fix the gridlock congress? not how do stop all government from functioning in the absence of congress that is legislating? you can't all the problems. you can't overstep the bounds either. which is why i think the debate about where the boundaries are we thought it was very important not sure that all administrations take a similar that those boundaries actually matter. we didn't want to cross boundaries we only wanted to do things that we thought were constitutional and legal but if you get into a situation where president i'll throw it against

the wall and maybe it won't go to court, that's pretty dangerous. and i think we're at a time now where we've already seen some experimentation on that that. which, yes, so we've talked about this shift in the way policymaking is was being done under the obama administration to shift more to executive orders is that the most consequential policy shift or policy features of the obama. well jack could probably answer that better than i could, but one of the things that think we haven't touched on and i wonder if jack would agree with this, one of the things really contributed to the success of the obama white house in the first term was, a a really almost flawless and transition aides are i think there's this

misconception that transition runs began upon the election of a new president. successful transitions began a year before and they are about critical in laying the groundwork for four presidential world governing. you know, the the 911 commission found that the the a sort of half baked transition as a result of 2000 election recount too from from the the clinton white house to the bush white house may have contributed to 911 for being unprepared. for 911. the fraught transition. in 2020. obviously the bloodiest transition since the civil war, which i write about in my book, somehow happened in spite of everything and an up and biden's team was really and overcoming

that but the transition to the obama white house from the bush white house was really a model and you all you have to remember is on the morning of the inauguration, josh bolten, the outgoing white house chief of staff and, rahm emanuel, the incoming chief, were the situation room working, hand in glove, trying make sure that there wasn't a terrorist attack on the mall, that that morning we all forget now. but it was a it was a really model transition and i think made a huge in in getting the obama white house off to a running start. yeah. would you agree with that track? yeah, i certainly agree on the quality of the transition from bush administration to the obama administration. and i will say that we modeled our part of the transition out on that. we wanted our instructions from

the president. we wanted. exactly. you wanted it exactly the same but in a relay race, if your handing the baton somebody has to take it yeah. there has to be an interest it and you can have all the briefing materials in the world but if the incoming team doesn't want them they or the meetings it doesn't do any good and i think we saw that in the transition from and it didn't go so well you know and so it crucially important i would just say from the inside terms of the second term, a apart from kind of doing things by executive action, the president took a real interest in laying foundation for the future. he knew he wasn't to get legislation on controversy racial social policy, 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 that the biden administration has been advancing, which if look back at budget proposals that were treated as well, then on arrival in a republican congress, the seeds of a lot of ideas are in there. and i think that wasn't just policy. it was people he was as outgoing of staff. one of my assignments in the transition was look at the people you can kind of stretch to give opportunities so that when there's a democratic administration looking for people with appropriate people, got it in second term don't give people jobs that they can't do. but don't be so worried. someone says they're a little too young for that or. somebody like that has never had the job before and we put some really talented people in really good positions who are in pretty senior roles right now. so he took a very long term view

on what should keep in mind it wasn't just what you could accomplish today. it was what you could do to lay a foundation and of course we had a huge amount of stuff that we did. i mean, i'm not going to foreign examples. clint, you spent the morning on it but you know the sanctions policy we developed in the in in against russia and first ukraine round is the template and it's not just the policy is it a template? the people are the staff that worked on it. so it you know, it's. you you're constantly making decisions for the moment. but one of the things that i think was very special about president obama is he actually kept in mind? what does this mean in terms of the future? okay, peter, any comment on the transition or do i think we'll open for questions in a minute? i think what i'd like to do kind of wrap up with one concluding

question when we study the presidency, we we often think about we discuss the structures and the individual right. and so those of us who study white house organization look kind of a taken for granted is you can't impose a structure that doesn't mesh with a president's personal right so there has to be a way to get the information the president needs in a way that that is works well for the president. what are there? that said or are there is there a lesson each of you might say would be instructive, either as a model or cautionary lesson from the obama presidency for future. as far as white organization in governance, i think the transition that you made, chris, is a very, very good one. and actually the administration just published a volume handoff. steve hadley, 40, was previously classified memos on foreign policy that they prepared for the obama administration and

they've now been declassified with scripts from the bush administration officials on and off what they got right the time and what they'd see differently. there was in a discussion on this this week actually and i thought that was it was an instructive example of kind of the the model transition that you describe. are there other lessons that that you would see? well, i guess i guess i would say that every president in his own way and cannot there's no cookie cutter model, you can you can stick to. but having said that, you know what i found in doing and writing my book on the white house chiefs gatekeepers is that really since h.r. haldeman in the nixon white house, ironically, because haldeman became the poster boy for watergate. but haldeman created a model of white house governance that. every president has strayed from 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 half years. hamilton jordan was a de facto white house chief and completely miscast. and it wasn't until final year of his presidency that he realized he had to have a chief and he found a guy named jack who was superb. it was too late, really, to help carter. i think bill clinton spent all of his time, his cabinet, to the detriment of his white house staff. he really picked them at last minute. he not interested in being disciplined, particularly. and it was only when leon panetta came a year and a half in that the way the 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 that requires that a every

president have a white house chief is empowered to execute his agenda and to do all the things that the jack and and the really great chiefs have done. it's it's not easy to find it's not easy to find great chiefs. they have to have white house experience. they have to have knowledge of capitol hill, deep political savvy managerial acumen, a world class temporal meant and and if they're lucky, a really good long term relationship with the boss. well, there are only a handful of those people, but that would be my model. okay. thank you. i'm not sure i agree with the assessment of the first two years of the clinton administration administration. i think, you know, there were certainly things going on. there also were real accomplished events in terms of economic policy and the model of

economic policymaking from those first two years is very much a part of the landscape. i mean, the nsc didn't exist. the was well, forgive me, i oversimplified, but i guess my my point would so be that when when leon panetta came in as a result of an interview in effect, that was led by hillary and robert reich, all of the all of bill clinton's close advisers, or many of them, you know, leon and 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 the clinton white house around in my view? no, i don't i don't disagree that. and he also continued to be omb in some ways. we had a conference on that here a few years. yes, we did. it. lessons for the future. it's very i think that, you

know. yeah, 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, what their i mean joe biden was in the obama administra he's a different person. there's different way of briefing him. it's a different way of making sure he has what he if your 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 president some president i work for too presidents who could read hundreds of pages a night. not every president can. and that doesn't they can't make good decisions. so i think it's, in my view, the most important is to see what the president needs, design the process. the other thing is it's never if the team doesn't feel that

they're part of it, if the team ultimately has to execute, it has to be out there 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 you have a process, it leaves feeling this was done them. it doesn't usually play 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 but somebody in the white house has to make everybody feel connected to the decision making process. and it was relatively easy, president obama, because he was he was willing to take time and be there. but in the second term, i think 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 that when there's a decision. they're on board is a really bad thing for an administration when

people are going in five different directions and finger pointing and it lead to success, which i wish that every every white house has moments, if not the entire time that they're there when people are complaining that they have been left out of room. right. as secretary lew just said, they try to keep the means relatively small. that means people who are in the room notice and are not always happy. and this is plays itself out. but it depends on the president as, he said as well. i mean, like, you know, some presidents bristle at the constraints of a process, right. president clinton would make a late night calls all the time. people on the hill to friends, whoever. and what his staff told me was they would come in the morning and try to check the call sheet. i forgot. who did he talk to last night? because we got to figure out what the hell he's he comes is. i had this great idea, this wonderful idea. we try this and like, oh, especially when it was -- morris. well, get it. you what thoughtful. put that idea in his head and -- morris in particular after the after from his suite at the

jefferson hotel with his his prostitute friend. anyway the that really upset chris his friend leon panetta because he didn't know about him he didn't know the president was getting regular advice wanting to have a one off conversation with tom harkin 11:00 at night. he was getting regular advice from -- morris that the president united did not tell his own chief of staff about. that's just a prescription for bad feelings. let's just say. obviously, the most recent president was was was famous for much worse, much more dysfunctional white house. i mean, they were his chief of staff took away or sort of monitoring his cell phones calls he called one of his aides and had him go to the apple and buy him another phone. so the white house chief of staff would know who we were talking to now that obama not known for doing that, obama was pretty good about process, i think, you know, again, there are people, i'm sure, who felt that they there was often talk about sort of the the boys club around obama weren't very many

women women didn't get to play golf with them. my colleague mark leibovich wrote a story this suddenly obama invited several women to play golf with him. but, you know, there was this idea that there was a boys club around obama that they that people complained about. but broadly, he respected process. he respected the idea that you had to, you know, deal with your equities, the building. and i do think that st louis knows better than i do. i do. it shrank as it went along because by the end he didn't feel like he needed as big a process as he had. but he did at least respect it and he wasn't an abuser in the same way some of the other presidents were. i think that's that's fair. i actually tried make that point. but but the transition in 2012 to the second term i he's gotten a little bit of a bad reputation the close 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 evidence i didn't let people into the inner circle because i'd been there for so that people thought i started out there. i think there are a lot of people in in the inner circle who came from the outside and, you know, i think it if you look at the people who were influential in the white house, there were lot of women in that circle. i mean, i mentioned kathy rumley a few months ago. she was very serious player in portant policy decisions. valerie was a very she's going be here later today, a very serious player. you know when sylvia burwell was at omb and hhs, a very player. so now nancy-ann deparle and deparle who's here today, you know. so it's yeah, i think it's fair to say that if you play basketball with him, it was not necessary really a question of your gender. i declined the invitation because i said mr. president, you lose all respect for.

james. did you have a question? sure. secretary lew, you mentioned earlier the debt limit crisis experience. the goal here is obviously not to move markets today, but it might be the case that that could be instructive for current purposes. i'm curious about what you learned or what from your multiple vantage points, a debt limit crisis really for the audience? well that's a that's a hard subject to do in 2 minutes. you know i described it yesterday to a bunch of people in washington ten as something between groundhog 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 the united states. nobody really knows the exact boundaries of how bad is but it goes from bad to worse. there's no good on that on that. yeah in 2011, i was at omb, in

2013 i was at treasury back in the 1980s, i was in the speaker's office. so i've 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 eight, where some must pass piece bill is an opportunity to something done. it 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 thing by negotiating an agreement appropriations bills in the spring we thought we were doing the right thing by in the grand bargain negotiation, which was a good faith negotiation and we can have a separate conversation of why it failed. but when it failed, we were at edge of the cliff and. we only barely escaped default by putting together a terrible piece of legislation.

budget control act after it became clear if the budget act was the end of it. this time there may not be a solution. the next because you couldn't do something much worse than the budget control act and have confidence that it would work. so we reached that conclusion. by the time i was at treasury without any real disagreement internally that 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 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 solution and you go off the edge. on the other hand, you know, think it's taken them a while to get to the point where they've made it clear that there has to be a negotiation on fiscal policy separate than that. and in my view, the sooner gets started the better. but we're at a moment now, which

is different than what it was even when i was dealing with it in 11 and 13, having gone through the election for speaker that, 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 and that moment could easily be upon us very soon. and that's. i think we have some time for questions. and so if we have microphones side, we'd like to give priority students. if anyone would like to come up. i know we have several classes in the audience today, including mine and dr. hamill first.

secretary, this is a question for you. i'm actually an alumni of the treasury department worked in the executive secretary's office summer and winter of 2020. so quite a crazy time to be within the and i just wanted to kind of get your sense of was it difficult to be outside of the closed inner circle of the white house just formally being chief of staff you know, now you're across the street in the department. you see something on tv. you're like, i would have given the president the exact opposite advice. and but now you're sort of in a different position. if you could just expand on if you ever had any of those circumstance is and how you dealt with it, what treasury see at least in my day and i think sense has been in a different position than other cabinet agencies because you're in the white house every day, unless you're traveling, you're at morning meetings, you're talking to people. for me, the challenge was going back to the room where i sat, the head of the table sitting deliberately in the corner, keeping my mouth shut.

if wasn't something directly to treasury or of burning necessity that i spoke up 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 room with people you know and you have discipline not to jump in on everything, i think it was well known. i had opinions on almost everything. i saved the things i spoke up on. and if i ever the president's attention to hear what i was concerned about it, i bet i had. in general. it's not just in going from a position like white house chief of staff to to treasure re as a manager, you have to become confident that other people can make decisions differently you and that even if they're different not necessarily bad sometimes you just have to step in and even the fear of somebody saying you're disempowering them

it's little bit like that. you know, if you don't cross line too many times, you can share your views on whatever you need to. and it didn't come that often. you know, and at least in our circle everyone knew each other very well. there were lots of sidebar conversations and and there was, you know, sufficient access to the president that that you didn't really feel shut out. i think other white are a little different sometimes. you know, i've only been in two, but, you know, i, i don't there's probably a single answer. awesome. thank you. hello. my name is melvin walker. i'm a graduate student at hofstra i'm also an army veteran. and a lot of the discussion 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 lew's comment about.

partizan gridlock in open to all the panelists. what would take to repair the partizan paralysis is specifically how can a president build a team or staff or just an administration that can hopefully or effectively navigate this this you need another pair. 30 seconds or less so you give each have a minute, i guess my short answer to that is, i don't know that any president can in and of itself by himself or herself at this point. i mean, we be asking a lot of an individual certainly. i think joe biden came in promising to do that. i that was certainly his intent, his desire i think it's his inclination to be a dealmaker and to reach across the aisle. and he has managed to get some bipartisan votes on some big legislation. but he hasn't healed the partizan wounds in the in the country right now and i don't know that it's to expect a president to be able to do that at the structural divide right

now is so wide and so pronounced that it feels to me beyond that, you know, an individual's capacity to to change it overnight. we are polarized not because of donald trump. trump trump was a manifestation of the polarization that already when he came into office, he, of course, chose to accelerate or exacerbated it. we i my most recent book is called the divider about trump for. that very reason because he profited off of division. that was the politics that chose to pursue. unlike every other i've covered. i mean, every president understands is a divider. you have to be in order to win office part of politics. but every president, other than trump that i've covered believe in the that there was also a greater obligation as united states to be a uniter not, a divider, to use george w bush's phrase, president obama used that phrase, we're not a red america or a blue america where the united of america right now, that's just not invoked. we are in a tribal moment in our country. that didn't mean we're going to always be there. but that is 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 people we tend to agree with the number of states that send somebody to the senate from a different party. the president they vote for has shrunk to almost. it used to be about a third. we do not want see the people that we don't agree with. they polls in the sixties and asked if they were bother you. if your son or daughter married somebody. the other party, about 5% said yes today, about 50%. right. i don't want no republican in my thanksgiving table, don't want no democrat coming for christmas. we do not 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 that we have fragmented ourselves. we can 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 even know that there's somebody else to listen to. we have different facts that when i grew up there were three networks and a couple of

newspapers and wire services and news magazine. we all start from the same facts said today we're, living in fact different factual universes. all this to me seems to be more than a single president can do in more than a single staffing question. and it's probably the work of a generation, i guess i would just say that peter's peter's right and eloquent that no president can change that that reality, that but the fact we are tribal now and that we're polarized. but i think presidents can sometimes defy expectations and i think nobody thought 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 biden able to get

more bipartisan legislation then than most observers would have predicted. and part of that was, joe biden's just persistence and bull headedness, but part it was also being clever about how they did it. i bill anybody remember build back better that went down in but ron klain ultimately realized that what his white house chief staff that there there a way to get at least half not more at least half a loaf and he to joe manchin and chuck schumer said look you guys just do this because he knew manchin could not seen to be giving joe biden a victory. but if it could be joe joe manchin victory, anything was possible. and as a result, we got there. inflation reduction act. so i think you it's still possible to make 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.

well, good evening. welcome and thank you for joining us this evening for what